Help! Which OS?

Hi,

I'll be buying DA licenses direct from John and Mark soon, and I need to decide which OS I want to run. Debian is my favourite Linux distro, but DA don't support it

This leaves me with:

RH8 or RH9
FreeBSD 4.x/5.x
...and possibly very soon RHE or Fedora.

I'll be running mission critical production servers for shared hosting. I guess RHE would be a good choice, although I'm a little adverse to it for two reasons; 1. I might need to pay for it with the datacentre I'm going for, and 2. I don't really feel that it's right that RH are selling free software.

So I thought about FreeBSD... I'll be hiring an admin so it doesn't really matter that I'm not used to FreeBSD. And it seems to have a good following. I'm just a little concerned over whether it'll limit some of my software choices.

I've also wondered about RH8. Apparently there are companies that plan to keep RH8 patched etc, but then that's not really a good long term plan. I want to pick an OS and stick with it.

Fedora isn't an option really... too unstable as far as I understand.

John, Mark, is there anything we can do to speed up DA for Debian? Perhaps a quick whip-round everyone?

Help!

Thanks,
Matt

Fedora is actually coming out with alot of positives and some are reporting it as even faster than RHE, providing upgrades between fedora releases are as smooth as the rh 9> fedora then even I would consider for less important servers or servers running rh9 currently.

RH8 - possible, but probably not the best of ideas... remember, software developers consider RH7.x and 8 beyond their EOL now, and therefore wont develop for them.. so if anything, thats what is likely to limit your choice of software later on.

For now the best choices are FBSD, RH9, Fedora - I believe RHE is currently untested although i'm looking to install DA on one soon

Debian - There has been little said on its DA development, although I would hope and assume that its after the redhat series is complete.

What everyone needs to remember, is with a stack of operating systems being supported, they need to release updates for each and every one differently aswell as sort bug fixes for each, jumping on to many at a time is just going to cause problems.

Chris

thoroughfare said:

So I thought about FreeBSD... I'll be hiring an admin so it doesn't really matter that I'm not used to FreeBSD. And it seems to have a good following. I'm just a little concerned over whether it'll limit some of my software choices.

Click to expand...

My company choose FreeBSD over Linux for many reasons. The most important of them is, it is dependable, FreeBSD holds records for uptime. It is updated easily and tends to have better performance than Linux. It is much more secure out of the box. The kernel is easier to customize and the ports systems to install software is invaluable.

The disadvantage to some people is it does not support some hardware. You must make sure to purchase good quality hardware. For servers this is not much of a problem but a cheep sound-card from a no-name vendor has a better chance to work in Linux than BSD. It is argued that since the code is 30+ year old it is much more robust and stable.

Lack of official support because FreeBSD is not a company but a group of developers. They don't have a phone number of email address for support. Their are many, many great places to get help but you don't have someone to call when things go wrong. Once running things hardly go wrong.

Sounds good

I've ran RH on my own workstation at home and it didn't impress me much... quite slow really.

I agree with you ProWeb, we don't want to overload John and Mark with OS updates... so Debian is a good idea, cos they only bring out new releases every couple of years

Thanks guys!
Matt