[LUNI] Seen any good distros lately?

[Larry Garfield]

On Sunday 07 January 2007 4:26 pm, Branko Kotur wrote:

> For the server, I'd suggest either Debian or CentOS.  I'm assuming you want
> the server to be stable and just plain work which is why I suggested those
> 2. I know that everything I suggested is free, but those are the only
> decent ones that I can think of besides the non free SUSE and RedHat
> Enterprise Linux.

Avoid CentOS.  We've been trying to run it at work, and it's been very 
trying. :-)  Its SELinux implementation is b0rked to hell, and kept randomly 
causing Apache to spit out 403 errors for no reason.  It also has a kernel 
bug where periodically an apache process will spiral out of control and eat 
up a crapload of RAM.  When the process is killed, the RAM isn't freed.  The 
total system ram is listed as greater than the sum of free RAM and used RAM, 
which is quite not good. :-)  That's the case even after apache is shut down 
completely.  The kernel simply loses that memory completely until it's 
rebooted.  We're soon to be dumping it and switching to Debian Etch.

At home, I used to run Debian Sarge on my server and Sid on my desktop.  The 
hard drive died on the server, though, and the desktop kept breaking random 
things (it is Unstable, of course), so I've recently moved to Ubuntu-server 
for the server and Kubuntu for the desktop.  The server's been very 
well-behaved, modulo me following a tutorial for setting up a mail server on 
6.06 when I was using 6.10 and there were differences in the way postfix 
worked between the two. :-)  

Kubuntu on the desktop has been OK, but with some gotchas.  Video didn't work 
at all until I installed the nvidia binary (I was going to anyway, but I 
expected the nv driver to at least let me get a desktop).  It can't find my 
Bluetooth adapter for some reason (old D-Link 1.1 USB dongle).  And of course 
you have to run through a few extra steps to get proprietary codecs working 
because Ubuntu can't package them for legal reasons (down with software 
patents!).  I know someone else, though, for whom Kubuntu 6.10 found 
everything on his laptop first try, no problem, tastes great less filling, 
even his broadcom WiFi chip.  

I've not used an RPM-based system in a half-decade, and haven't missed 'em.  
Debian/Ubuntu's repositories are so much nicer than RPM hell from 3rd 
parties.

As for filesystems, I don't do anything fancy enough to care about squeezing 
the last drop of performance out of it, to be honest.  I've used ext3 since 
it came out, and haven't had a problem.  Last I looked it also had the best 
recovery tools, although that may have changed and I've not actually needed 
them to date. :-)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
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