[ILUG] Dell Poweredge - best distro

[Nick Murtagh]

On Friday 03 May 2002 13:18, cout at eircom.net wrote:
> For control, use Gentoo, yes you might actually have to make some effort
> installing it and 'shock horror' use some money downloading source, but,
> can you really argue with the logic of having a system optimised with your
> favorite compiler switches and you the user/admin controlling exactly what
> 'gets run on boot' and what optimisations or lack thereof your binaries run
> with?

I think for a production system you might want to trade maintainability
and reliability for absolute performance. I can't say I've used gentoo,
and I really like the idea, but it's a relatively new distro, and possibly
too cutting edge for running on a server. What happens when you want
to set up a bunch of different servers with different processors? Are you
going to have to compile everything for each server? Will the guy coming
after you have ever used gentoo? Can you get support for it?

(These aren't meant to be rhetorical questions :)

> In the same motif, I like Slackware, true enough it runs 'more' default
> boot stuff than I would like it to do, however in comparison to
> Mandrakeised/Red_Head distros it has pithe few user friendly options to
> make life 'easy'.

5 minutes with chkconfig should sort that out. In fact Mandrake seems
to disable by default anything it considers "dangerous" which includes 
apache and postfix I seem to recall....

> When I think of literally gigabytes of disk space used up in Mandrakised
> installs as opposed to utilitarian installs of the Gentoo/Slack genre I
> become phased slightly that people think their own 'technical savvy' so
> incomplete that they feel they must be nursemaided by a user friendly
> distro.

Mandrake 8.2 has a ~60 megabyte install option, which is pretty reasonable.

Nick