[ale] Web server OS

[David Hamm]

My experience with Gentoo has been really good. I have about 60 web
servers running gentoo and the only thing I don't like about it is the
lack of an auto installer and the size of portage.  That being said the
web servers are all power pc based and a couple ARM9 boxes.

Emerge is very nice but compiling PHP or Samba because the default make
flags aren't what you need can be time consuming.  No I'm back on Fedora
and its ok.  I could live without NetworkManager but Fedora doesn't seem
to like to.



On Tue, 2008-12-23 at 12:01 -0500, Pat Regan wrote:
> Jon Reagan wrote:
> > Thanks for the suggestions everyone... I'll just run some tests in
> > virtualbox on debian/ubuntu/centos, just to see which one is best,
> > especially with setting up a LAMP server.
> 
> Testing those three won't likely help you determine which one is "best."
>  Many of the key differences are things you will only see over a long
> period of time.
> 
> Debian's stable stays "stable" and maintained for a very, very, very
> long time.  "Stable" in this case roughly means that it only gets
> security updates and some bugfixes.  That means you aren't likely to
> get surprised by an update installing something like an incompatible
> library.  That cuts both ways, though, because as the Debian release
> gets older you are more likely to not have a current enough version of
> some core piece of software that you need.
> 
> I do not know the current definition of "very, very, very long time" for
> Debian anymore.  I've been a big fan of Debian for years, but I've
> switched to Ubuntu.
> 
> Ubuntu, for my purposes, is just Debian with a faster release cycle and
> more up to date packages.  Ubuntu's LTS releases are supported for 5
> years and are released about every 3 years.  That is a pretty
> comfortable cycle for me.
> 
> CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL.  It also has a nice slow release cycle and
> long support cycle.  If you prefer Redhat/Fedora, this is the way to go.
> 
> Someone mentioned Gentoo.  I don't think a distro like Gentoo that is
> going to slowly and constantly be sneaking in new versions of libraries
> is a good choice for a server.  You'll do just fine until one random day
> it decides to install a version of some package that is incompatible
> with your core application.
> 
> 
> 
> Pat
> 
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