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

[Ron Joffe]

On Monday 10 March 2003 04:13 pm, Joshua Bedick wrote:

> I may be opening a can of worms, but here goes.  What distro do people
> recommend?

I haven't heard anyone say anything about SuSE. I figure it's either a lack of 
experience with SuSE, or more likely it is the fact that ISO's are not 
available for download.

I have been using SuSE for 3 years or so. The original choice for SuSE was 
because of our need for a stable product with support which was specifically 
tailored to utilization of Oracle. 

My initial install was done using their ftp install method. This involved 
downloading a boot disk, and then installing the entire system via ftp. That 
takes a while if you have anything less then a backbone connection. After 
doing that a few times, I mirrored their ftp site locally. This allowed for 
very nice fast installs.

However I realize that many of you would want ISO's in order to try out a 
distro, so I think i need to figure out the best way to provide those of you 
that are interested with these ISO's. The licensing clearly allows copying of 
the CD's themselves, SuSE's business model is just based on obtaining some 
funding through the sales of their distro.

Recently I have started using the SLES - 8 (SuSE Enterprise Edition, Ver 8) 
for production servers versus the pro versions I have used in the past. This 
SLES version is extremely stable and other then some brand new raid cards, 
has given me no trouble at all. SuSE has a number of excellent mailing lists 
which provide me with 95% of the support that I have needed. The rest of the 
issues have been solved by contacting the SuSE support (for the SLES product 
only). They have been very responsive, and follow all issues until you tell 
them that they are closed.

I have run a number of versions of SuSE on my thinkpads (T20 & A31p) and they 
have run just perfectly. The SuSE installer in my opinion is one of the 
slickest and most polished. It's not perfect, but it's really close (perfect 
is defined as the capability to hand my mom a CD, and have her install a new 
operating system without any input from me :)

If anyone has any good ideas on a way to distribute the SuSE ISO's please let 
me know. I can burn CD's till I'm blue in the face, but I really don't have 
the time to do that right now. My cable modem would be a bit slow for a 
distribution path.