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Distro advice...

 
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At work I am needing to build a linux server. I will be putting apache, mysql, tomcat, ftpd, etc.
I won't be running X11. I want a distro that is pretty light, possibly all on 1 CD. I don't need anything but the base os (kernel, etc) and the command line development tools and libraries (for compilation of source). I will install apache, mysql, etc myself because I don't like how they come packaged with Linux distros.
I also need to be able to easily update the distro or libraries, kernel, etc as they become available.
I was wondering what distro you might recommend.
 
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My answer should come no surprises. DEBIAN all the way, you can use the minimal version of it, which installs the very basic stuff. Basically, a shell and kernel, then all you have to do is apt-get install XXXX.
 
Gregg Bolinger
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Originally posted by Adrian Yan:
My answer should come no surprises. DEBIAN all the way, you can use the minimal version of it, which installs the very basic stuff. Basically, a shell and kernel, then all you have to do is apt-get install XXXX.


Thanks Adrian. I figured Debian was going to be mentioned. Another question; is Debian the most "generic" distro. What I mean is, I know RedHat has proprietary libraries and things. So you can have issues installing things on RedHat and Mandrake is slowly getting this way. Or am I thinking about it the wrong way.
 
Adrian Yan
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Debian is the most generic one, beside gentoo I guess. All of its packages are open sources, unless you choose otherwise.
 
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Mandrake I tried on my laptop ,its better than RedHat in its GUI and installation is cool.How about BSD? Have you tried FreeBSD?
 
Adrian Yan
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FreeBSD is a very very good server platform OS. It has a different feel to it than linux. I don't remember there is a JDK version for FreeBSD from Sun, maybe blackdown has one.
 
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I am writing to you from my FreeBSD box and wouldn't change for the world.... Easy to update kernel. Install ports is a snap - you can install from a binary directly, e.g. pkg_add -r mysql or through src with the huge port collection (10796 ports at the moment - see www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html for a full list) which you can install from the CD. Just by cd to the relevant directory and run make install clean, and hey presto.

Originally posted by Adrian Yan:
I don't remember there is a JDK version for FreeBSD from Sun, maybe blackdown has one.



I have Sun jdk1.4.2 and j2sdkee1.3.1 installed and firing on all cylinders


Cheers,

Jon
[ May 26, 2004: Message edited by: Jon Entwistle ]
 
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Originally posted by Adrian Yan:
Debian is the most generic one, beside gentoo I guess. All of its packages are open sources, unless you choose otherwise.



Don't forget Slackware. Patrick (the maker of Slackware) doesn't put any hooks in any software at all. I know for a fact that gentoo and Debian do. Slackware is a 100% pure Linux distribution. Whatever the developer wrote is what the user gets. That's why I love it so much.
 
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I think, that Gregg said 1 CD. Than the only possibility may be Slack. Only few people have so much time for compiling kernel at work (Gentoo).

MDK: Mandrake is not tipical distribution for servers. It is aimed to desktop users, but if you have good linux knowledge there is no problem to build stable server machine.
 
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater.
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