Linux distributions for Zope Servers
The morning email brought a final announcement from RedHat announcing (again) that they will no longer be supplying a Linux distribution (they will be shipping their "Enterprise Edition" which has a longer release cycle and a much higher price tag). RH9 will be the last of the breed. I'm not excited about converting to the RH Enterprise distribution and so am beginning to shop around for a different, a possibly better, distribution--something stable, well integrated, complete, and with a rational release cycle, stable SMP support, and support for AMD Athlon and AMD-64 processors. There are a number of candidate--Suse, Mandrake, Debian, etc. Anyone care to document their experiences, good and bad? One of the nicest features of the RedHat system was/is the RedHat network which makes it possible to upgrade off the net quickly and easily. While it's not really a requirement, I would miss it if an equivalent service were not available.
On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 01:04, Dennis Allison wrote:
One of the nicest features of the RedHat system was/is the RedHat network which makes it possible to upgrade off the net quickly and easily. While it's not really a requirement, I would miss it if an equivalent service were not available.
Fedora (Severn at least, and presumably on to the final 10 release) still has this capability. It has been enhanced so you can now use apt and/or yum repositories to deal with updates. But I have no idea who will foot the bill for paying for the security updates to be applied to a central repository in a timely and consistent manner. Debian seems to do well with this. All in all, I'd probably pick Fedora if you like Red Hat. If not, I'd pick Debian. - C
On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 22:04, Dennis Allison wrote:
I'm not excited about converting to the RH Enterprise distribution and so am beginning to shop around for a different, a possibly better, distribution--something stable, well integrated, complete, and with a rational release cycle, stable SMP support, and support for AMD Athlon and AMD-64 processors. There are a number of candidate--Suse, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
Anyone care to document their experiences, good and bad?
I have nothing but good stuff to say about Gentoo. It's a bit different from Red Hat... the package manager actually works, for starters. :-) More importantly, the software release cycles are usually both timely and sane. Community support is generally knowledgeable and friendly. Debian makes a great choice too, but I find that Gentoo's community is just a bit more focused and helpful. $.02, Dylan
On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 11:33:08PM -0800, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 22:04, Dennis Allison wrote:
I'm not excited about converting to the RH Enterprise distribution and so am beginning to shop around for a different, a possibly better, distribution--something stable, well integrated, complete, and with a rational release cycle, stable SMP support, and support for AMD Athlon and AMD-64 processors. There are a number of candidate--Suse, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
Anyone care to document their experiences, good and bad?
I have nothing but good stuff to say about Gentoo. It's a bit different from Red Hat... the package manager actually works, for starters. :-)
I have also really enjoyed Gentoo. Just a few things to watch out for if you're accustomed to a binary-based distribution rather than a source-based distribution: 1) /usr needs a LOT of room. Maybe double what you are used to. 2) leave a lot of time for the initial installation. Even if you use a "stage 3" install which gives you a lot of things initially as precompiled binaries, you will probably end up leaving the machine alone for a long time to compile a bunch of stuff. I've now done a couple of gentoo installs and I have learned to start 2-3 days before i actually want to start using the box. That aside, there are things I really love about it: * emerge is every bit as easy as apt-get. * available versions of software are usually pretty recent. * there is a really easy way to tell the package manager, "I have installed software X on my own, don't complain about it being missing." No need to roll your own .deb or .rpm just to use a slightly different version of something. * It reboots REALLY fast. Much much faster than i've ever got redhat or debian to boot even after disabling most of the default services. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's THE EVIL YOGA INSTRUCTOR! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)
Hello Dennis, as the case is, I happen to use SuSE. SuSE even ships with Zope rpms. For some reasons I prefer to install my own Zope versions and I never had any problems doing so on SuSE. They have great mailinglists, a very responsive security team and I always update online (It's kind a cool zo update a Linux notebook via WLAN). SuSE supports 64-bit AMD and Intel, SMP and a lot of other cool things. Beside that it can be used on really old system too (I happen to still use my 486dx4-100). Ulrich -- World Wide Web Publisher, Ulrich Wisser, Vallatorpsv.158, S-18752 Täby http://www.publisher.de Tel: +46-8-53460905 Fax: +46-8-534 609 06
Dennis Allison wrote at 2003-11-3 22:04 -0800:
... Linux distributions ... There are a number of candidate--Suse, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
Anyone care to document their experiences, good and bad?
I used SuSE Linux from version 4 to version 8.1. Twice, upgrading has been a nightmare. The worst has been version 8.1: * Hangs all around: during installation, after boot, in rescue system all caused by a missing USB keyboard driver module (I have an USB keyboard). * "init.d/boot" not installed -- consequence: file system not remounted read/write, thousands of errors on startup * all browsers without working Java support * severe kernel problems; "APIC" disabled to work around this problems -- broke commercial product (VMWare) * unhelpful installation help desk I decided to switch to Debian the next time I make a Linux upgrade. -- Dieter
participants (6)
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Chris McDonough -
Dennis Allison -
Dieter Maurer -
Dylan Reinhardt -
Paul Winkler -
Ulrich Wisser