fedora 7

[David Kramer]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> If you know the standard command line admin tools, you will be able to
> sit down at almost any Linux distro and do what you need to do...no
> GUIs involved.

That's just the thing.  There is no such thing as "standard command line 
admin tools".  Unless you call vi/emacs "standard command line admin 
tools".  Every distro has their own thing.  Fedora has system-config-*. 
   SUSE has YaST.  To this day, we still have different locations for 
major package's files between distros, and that's just silly and 
counterproductive.  Does your apache put the DocumentRoots in /srv or 
/var?  Is it called httpd, apache, or apache2?

Truth be told, *most* services I know well enough to just edit the 
config files by hand, which ain't bad for someone who just plays 
SysAdmin on TV, but I don't think I'll ever be able to do Samba or X or 
iptables configuration without a tool.

> I have run many Linux distros as servers.  Saying Ubuntu is not ideal
> for a "complex server" is just about the same as saying Debian is not
> ideal either.  However, I would like to know exactly what these
> objective people have claimed to be the core reasons why.  Maybe they
> looked at the Desktop version of Ubuntu, and made their analysis that
> way?

The main reasons I've heard are the vintage of the "server" packages, 
and lack of admin tools.  I don't have specifics past that, not having 
run Ubuntu of any flavor myself.  Since their "Software Catalogue" page 
lists about a dozen companies, but no actual software catalog, I can't 
currently verify this for myself.

However, when the trickle-down economics happens (I get my new laptop 
next week, my kid gets my laptop a day or two later, I get her old 
beater Celeron 466 as a guinea pig), I will probably try out Ubuntu on 
that.  Of course the Ubuntu website also doesn't have a hardware 
requirements page (the release notes just mention 256MB of memory are 
needed), I have no idea whether that will be a usable install or not.

> The Ubuntu Server version is actually quite powerful, secure, and
> slim.  Maybe they don't like the fact that SELinux is not installed?
> I don't know, but I would like to hear their reasoning.  I have used
> it many situations and have no qualms about using it further.  As
> always, YMMV.  Don't take other people's word as gospel.  Use it
> yourself and find out why.  Ask questions here when you run into
> trouble.  Don't ever blindly believe something someone else says...

I would like to, but I just don't have another box to try it out on yet. 
  I don't have any reasons to dislike Ubuntu (other than defaulting to 
Gnome :) ), but I'll have limited time to get my laptop up and running.

In maybe a month or so I'm going to build a new server box, and I'll 
have more time and super-duper hardware to try different distros out on.


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.