Re: Linux/BSD Distro Rec's

David Rieger wrote:
> I've been a habitual Redhat deployer for awhile now but I am interested
> in other distros that you all may be able to recommend and/or discuss.
>
> I have an eye on a few types of deployments beyond web-serving. Some
> stuff I am evaluating are:
>
> 1.) Email
> 2.) Twiki hosting
> 3.) LAN Services (File/Print)
> 4.) Shared workstations (Gnome)
>
> What is the campus doing out there? Thanks for considering participating
> in this thread.

Gentoo! (Sorry, but I _had_ to beat Ross to the punch.)

Actually, I do use Gentoo as a workstation (at home I have a dual-boot
Gentoo/FreeBSD box running on an Athlon 2000+). I also have a gentoo
box that I use both as a workstation and a network performance tester
that is a dual-Opteron box and it also dual-boots with FreeBSD 5.x.

I find Gentoo works well as a workstation, although it might be harder
(but better) to scale it be using it to create your own distro and then
deploying it across all of your workstations.

Of course, I also use FreeBSD as a workstation. I am composing this
message on another Athlon 2000+ box running FreeBSD 4.x and KDE. Works
great, although the app support is slightly better on Gentoo.
(FreeBSD's Linux emulation is quite good, and I have even had "Linux"
binaries run on my FreeBSD system that wouldn't run on RedHat.)

Continuing to work backwards on your list:

3. LAN services

I guess you're talking about a SAMBA server here, and I don't really
have any direct experience, but I am pretty certain that FreeBSD will
work well on this. I suspect Gentoo will work just fine as well.

2. (T)Wiki hosting. I looked at TWiki and it annoyed me because the
upgrade path didn't work very well. (You can't just upgrade it in place
without risking data loss; you must do the manual upgrade.) That sucks
from a FreeBSD perspective, since TWiki is in the Ports Collection, and
upgrading Wiki software is vitally important, owing to the security
nightmare that is Wiki. We're just starting to play with MoinMoin on
FreeBSD. So far, so good.

1. Email.

FreeBSD. It comes with everything you need to "just" run a very useful
mail server based on sendmail, and it's really easy to replace sendmail
with qmail or postfix if you want. It has a Makefile that you can use
to rebuild your .cf file and your access database, etc. Plus the Ports
Collection makes it really easy to install Milters.

As you can see, I like FreeBSD--mainly because it's easy to keep
software up-to-date. In typical *BSD fashion, there's a simple
mechanism to keep the source code synchronized and you can patch and
rebuild the system as an automated process. All of the add-on software
can easily be kept up to date using the Ports Collection and the
portupgrade scripts. If a piece of software doesn't exist in ports, it
takes about 15 minutes for me to make my own port and then have it
compile and build a package.

Probably the reason I like Gentoo is that it's similar to the BSD model
when it comes to keeping stuff up-to-date. I haven't yet tried to make
my own portage (ebuild) script yet--I do like the Makefile structure of
the Ports Collection rather than the python stuff, but it's not really a
big deal.

michael

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Received on Thu Feb 24 18:46:25 2005