[Dspace-general] What Distribution of Linus Works Best?

[Christian Voelker]

Am 01.10.2007 um 20:44 schrieb Greg Bush:

> Greetings,
>
> I am new to DSPACE and Linux and all of the other application  
> components required to make DSPACE work.  I have to setup the  
> system very quickly.
Congratulations.
> Is there a distribution of Linux that is known to work the best?   
> Is there one that is the easiest to configure?  Please provide any  
> tips that you can.
First suggestion: Stick with what you have right now
as long as it works for you. You will gather experience
with that and you will know precisely which amount of
experience and knowledge you throw away of something
else in case you decide to do so.

In general every distro has its rough sides and its
sweet spots. The most important decision you take is
probably the package manager the distro is using.
There are two major directions to go, one of them
the debian way, the other redhat. I am in the former
camp and there Debian itself or Ubuntu are the most
common with Ubuntu definetly being more friendly,
but you have to read debian docs always as well if
you decide to use Ubuntu and run into trouble.

If you decide for the redhat side, then the original
is one obvious choice or the completely free version
Fedora. Then there is CentOS which is kind of the
Enterprise flavor of Fedora and very popular recently.
In Germany there is a historic prevalence for the
Novell SuSE or OpenSuSE, where SuSE is equivalent to
RedHat Enterprise and OpenSuSE to Fedora. But why
would you choose that? Ask your friend and pick
either Fedora/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu.

A third track are sourcecode based Distros such as
Slackware or the more recent and friendly Gentoo,
but I bet you dont want to start with that.

Then last option is to choose the BSD track. It
is an entirely separate world for the base distro
and kernel but above, everything is rather similar.
Some reasons for BSD are security and clean design,
not necessarily fastpaced development. If security
is your first concern than you have no alternative
to OpenBSD and the small and vivid community around
the knowledgeable but excentric guru Theo de Raadt.

If you run PC hardware, then the most common and
friendly distro is FreeBSD, NetBSD is more of a
technology demo for portability of code and no
pratical alternative. FreeBSD has the ports tree
as a package systems which is source based (see
Gentoo) and works brilliantly. I like FreeBSD
best besides Debian but have not run DSpace on
that platform.

Bye, Christian