[Zope] Linux distributions for Zope Servers

[Paul Winkler]

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!
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