[TriLUG] What Distro Would You Recommend?

[Ryan Leathers]

If I were doing this for myself I'd use Debian.  I'd want to know
exactly what I had and how it was glued together.

Since you seem pretty sure you won't be able to invest time in tweaking
or tuning, I'd suggest something else.  Recently, Israel Pattison turned
me onto Clark Connect http://www.clarkconnect.com/  I might have some
reservations about using this in the most serious and demanding business
environments, but I'd also say its probably as close to perfect as you
can get for what you've described.  In under an hour, you'll wind up
with a fully featured and tightly designed mail/file/print server with a
well thought out gui management console.  Its hard to beat in a short
time frame.

Ryan

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 10:07 -0500, Brian Weaver wrote:
> Without trying to start a distro war I'd like to get some decent input so I
> can attempt to make a sound decision for once in my life. I have a server
> that I'm running at home that I need to upgrade. I'm currently running
> Mandrake 9.2 (FiveStar) release. It has been a long time since I've been
> able to update the box and I need to move to a currently supported
> distrobution for security reasons. I have another box I was planning on
> making my primary server, just so I could turn on the old one if something
> went wrong.
> 
> The problem I have is which distrubution makes the most sense from a
> stability and supportability. The two that I've been messing with are CentOS
> 4 and Debian Sarge, other suggestions are welcome. I would investigate Linux
> >From Scratch, but I have a minimal amount of time. Basically, I'm going to
> have to struggle to get the time necessary to setup server initially. After
> that I'm only going to have minimal, if any, time to tune or tweek. My
> requirements are pretty simply....
> 
> 1) Postfix, fetchmail, procmail, mutt, mysql and DBMail for 2 users. (both
> mail users use imap)
> 2) Samba for Windows 2K and Mac OS X file sharing.
> 3) Printing from Windows 2K (cups)
> 4) SSH for remote access.
> 5) Iptables, etc for hardening where necessary
> 6) Software Raid and/or drivers for 3ware raid cards.
> 6) Down the road Apache/PHP may be necessary, java would be a nice to have.
> 
> The box will sit behind a linksys firewall and the only "exposed" port is
> for the SSH server.