On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 10:55:14AM +0100, Peter Bengtsson wrote:
For dev and desktop I personally prefer Mandrake, but what I like becomes irrelevant when it's time to set up a serious server for production use.
I'm compelled to put in my two cents for Debian GNU/Linux now: - performance should be identical to any other Linux distribution on the same hardware. - configurability should also be identical, or exceeding other distributions. There's no overarching GUI configurator, but a combination between good policy on how packages are organized and tools never overriding your own settings without substantial warnings and chances to back out is nice. - not sure what you mean by "ease of use" and "lack of hacks". Most all common tasks (adding/deleting users, etc. ) already have scripts to handle them. Debian doesn't do much GUI integration, so this may count against your ease of use. On the other hand, I can administer a Debian server with a modem-enabled Palm. - RDBMS integration is there: packages already built for the usual Unix SQL servers. - Backup should be comparable to any other Unix. There's tar, dump, cpio, and afio for low-level tools (don't just use cat /dev/hdwhatever, please). There's tob, taper, afbackup, amanda and others for high-level tools. You can of course always pay for BRU, Veritas, or whatever normally runs on Linux. - ZEO should be a non-issue, as well. If you can get it running anywhere, you shouldn't have any extra difficulties. Downsides include the historically slow release cycle (Zope went from 2.1.6 to 2.5.1 during the last Debian stable release), which can be somewhat mitigated by building your own packages, or doing what lots of people do: building it from source in /usr/local. One could always install something other than the "stable" release of Debian on a server, but I'd not recommend it for the inexperienced (it'll be similar to running some other Linux distribution's normal releases). Debian's stable releases are very, very stable, and if your server hardware is supported, they're about trivially maintainable. -- Mike Renfro / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research, 931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu