On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:41:29PM -0700, AJ ONeal wrote: > Eh... I have a strong disgust for RHEL. They have nothing in the repo, you > have to compile just about everything from source or get it from a 3rd > party.
RHEL wasn't meant for you. It's not designed for someone building a server for fun. It's intended for companies with dozens or hundreds of servers and don't want anything to change once a machine is working. Anyway, the goal is generally to not have the latest and greatest of everything. If you want a medium balance between stability and up-to-dateness, Ubuntu LTS releases and Debian really are reasonable choices. > After my experiences with my boss' installation and the issues he's gone > through, I would never use RHEL for a server - too much work!!! RHEL also seems to be best for those who need and use support contracts, which really aren't practical for a single standalone server. I used to be pretty grumpy about RHEL, but it turns out that most of our problems were really caused by bad hardware from Dell. If we had a real support contract, Redhat would have been able to help us track it down. Other unresolved problems were our own fault in the sense that we didn't use the resources available to us like Bugzilla. Again, the right choice in distribution depends on what your specific needs. > Ubuntu has always been so easy and the community is arguably more vibrant. > > It used to be that when you googled for linux problems you'd come up with a > redhat forum or linuxquestions.org, then gentoo had the spotlight for a year > or so with the amazing expansion of the gentoo-wiki, then ubuntu stole the > spotlight and it's been there for quite a while. The Ubuntu community is definitely vibrant, but in my experience a lot of their information is just wrong. Enthusiasm is great, but it's not good enough on its own. :) I also feel that the Ubuntu community is somewhat withdrawn from the wider community. Unlike some of the other distributions, like Redhat and Suse, they don't seem to contribute much back to the rest of the world. Greg KH gave a fun description of this: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html Although his talk was about the kernel, I think it really does apply generally. The only Ubuntu contribution of note that I can think of is Upstart (which is still really premature). There's a Ubuntu mailing list thread on the topic: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-May/004348.html The author of the first message in the thread mentions a number of supposed contributions. Most of these are largely irrelevant (like Bazaar, which is being crowded out by its more mature competitors, Git and Mercurial) or Ubuntu-centric (like Ubiquity). I hadn't even heard of most of the projects in the list. I think that Ubuntu's main contribution has been to encourage a good out-of-the-box and newbie-friendly experience. This is a great contribution, and it's encouraged every other distro to improve. However, given their size and prominence, I'm disappointed that they haven't done much more than this. > But if I ever wanted to go back to hard core, I'd go back to gentoo. Wow. I did Gentoo for a few months (until they really went downhill), and I would never consider going back. If you want something hands-on for your own personal use, consider trying Arch. I would never use it for a server, but I've known a lot of people that really enjoy using it. -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868 -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
