[TriLUG] Debian vs Mandrake vs Redhat vs . . .

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 04:13:58PM -0500, Joshua Bedick wrote:
> Easy updating for security and other fixes.

For simplicity's sake, I'll stick with the big ones. Debian and Red
Hat both score well here.

> Stable!!!

ditto

> Good support for software.

Well, this is really dependent on what configuration options your kernel
has enabled, so...

> 2.4 kernel

Just about every large vendor/organization has this in their recent
"stable" releases. I imagine it's the default for most distros (Debian
still defaults to 2.2, but 2.4 is selectable).

> trivial to maintain

apt-get/dselect/... in Debian, apt-rpm/up2date/... in Red Hat, ...

> Now here is what's going to be on it:
> qmail
> SpamAssassin
> Some A/V
> PHProjekt
> Samba
> MyDMS
> MySQL
> Arkia (sp?)
> Webmin
> iptables
> freeswan (sp?)
> apache
> php
> imp
> DNS (cr.yp.to or latest bind)

All distro-independent. With that said, some distros will require a bit
more reading (mailing list archives and so on). For instance, on Debian,
djb's software license is a bit restrictive, so the source is pulled via
*-installer or *-src (like djbdns-installer and qmail-src, to name a
couple) and then compiled locally via another build-*. You may have to
consult external (non-distro) mailing list archives for a few others, as
in freeswan.

> I've looked at Debian and Redhat so far.  I love dpkg, but there are more up
> to date RPMs for the software I'm looking at, i.e. Webmin in dpkg is .94,
> not the latest with security fixes.  I did look at Mandrake, but the 2
> machines I've tested it on so far where less reliable then the Debian and
> redhat ones.  I'm still open, but a bit cautious.  Haven't played with SuSe
> or a number of others.  Like SME (e-smith) which is based on redhat, but due
> to some odd config items doesn't do everything I'd like.

Assuming you mean the Webmin package in Woody, I haven't pulled the
changelog, so I can't vouch for any backported fixes. Generally speaking
however, you can almost always find a backport from Sarge/Sid if the
version is "outdated."

-- 
Dan Chen                crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
GPG key: www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc