thelinuxlink.net

Hi All,

I've been away for a while but am now back in the land of open source again, and see that there are a few new distros to try out.

I'm thinking that it's going to be time to finally upgrade my RH9 web server to something a bit more current, and was wandering what you guys would recommend. I see there is lots of good feedback regarding suse 10.1 and am thinking about giving that a go, although I like the idea of FC5 as well as I guess that the config files will be in roughly the same places as they are in RH9.

As always - your feedback is appreciated.

Regards,

-Gordon.

We'll be talking about Suse 10.1 in detail tonight. Both as a workstation and server.

Excellent - I shall look forward to it.

Thanks,

-Gordon.

gordonmarkus wrote:Excellent - I shall look forward to it.

Thanks,

-Gordon.

Hey if you wanna hear about SUSE, send me a PM or have a chat on IRC.

Hi,

Thanks very much for the offer - I don't have an IRC client on my pc at work, but I'll try and get on later hopefully.

I take it that you'd recommend suse10.1 then?

-Gordon.

gordonmarkus wrote:Hi,

Thanks very much for the offer - I don't have an IRC client on my pc at work, but I'll try and get on later hopefully.

I take it that you'd recommend suse10.1 then?

-Gordon.

You don't need an IRC client. Go here with your web browser:
http://www.thelinuxlink.net/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi

Its the only way I can access IRC from work. They block every port sans 80.

gordonmarkus wrote:I take it that you'd recommend suse10.1 then?

Sort of, if you were a brand new Linux user, definitely not, in that case I'd say go find a commercial version of Mandriva 2006 on BitTorrent. You sound like you know your way around dealing with small issues here and there, I say go for it.

The thing with 10.1 is that, the following is my opinion, Novell forced a new package management system, ZENworks, into SUSE Linux because they needed it for their upcoming enterprise releases, and it has resulted in a sluggish, slow and buggy package management system. This is eaisily fixed although, by just installing the Smart Package Manager and adding a few repositories to it, and then disabling applets like zenupdater, and use Smart's ksmarttray.

Excellent - thanks for the advice.

I seem to remember getting into some trouble with Redhat's up2date package manager, so hopefully the ZENworks manager won't cause me as much pain!

gordonmarkus wrote:Excellent - thanks for the advice.

I seem to remember getting into some trouble with Redhat's up2date package manager, so hopefully the ZENworks manager won't cause me as much pain!

ZENworks won't cause you any problems if you don't use it, I found that if you use it through YaST's Software Management section, it's actually OK for installing stuff off of the install CDs, but trying to do any sort of internet or network install is like installing Mac OS X, slow!

Smart is really cool, works with multiple types of repositories and is very flexible if you run into dependency issues.

gordonmarkus wrote:I'm thinking that it's going to be time to finally upgrade my RH9 web server to something a bit more current, and was wandering what you guys would recommend. I see there is lots of good feedback regarding suse 10.1 and am thinking about giving that a go, although I like the idea of FC5 as well as I guess that the config files will be in roughly the same places as they are in RH9.

At this point, FC5 is no more like RH9 than SUSE is. There have been a lot of changes. Of course that's going to be true for any modern distro.

If you really like the Red Hat way of doing things, give Fedora a try. I'd not even consider doing an upgrade, although it's probably possible if you have no other route. Personally I'd back up and do a fresh install, then configure. A lot of the core server stuff will be the same, but say goodbye to up2date. Despite Pat's constant slagging, yum is a good package manager, and getting better all the time.

Remember that Fedora is on roughly a 6 month release cycle, so if you don't like to upgrade you won't be happy. FC5 could potentially reach EOL in July. There is the Fedora Legacy project, which does updates to older versions, but you may already be familiar with them if you're running RH9.

Personally I'm running FC4 on my server, and FC5 on my main system and laptop. FC5 has some really good security features if you're willing to learn it, but a LOT has changed since RH9.

Gomer_X wrote:Despite Pat's constant slagging, yum is a good package manager, and getting better all the time.

It may be good and getting better all the time but it's still horrendously slow. That's just my opinion.

Gomer_X wrote:Remember that Fedora is on roughly a 6 month release cycle, so if you don't like to upgrade you won't be happy. FC5 could potentially reach EOL in July. There is the Fedora Legacy project, which does updates to older versions, but you may already be familiar with them if you're running RH9.

This is where I think SUSE does a very good job, every single release is supported with security fixes for at least two years, they just discontinued 9.1, but 10.0, which is very solid, which was released last October is great for a server, I use it myself and it works very well, and will be supported until October of 2007, which is still pretty far out there.

gordonmarkus, if you're gonna run a server, DON'T EVEN GO NEAR SUSE 10.1, stick with 10.0.

I just installed 10.1 on my athlon64 3000+, gig of ram, 1 sata drive, 1 ide drive. I chose kde in the installer and put grub on the mbr of the ide drive.

Things I like:
It seems much more responsive than the last time I tried it around 9 or 9.3. Yast was actually pretty responsive I didn't get the sense that I was using a very slow or buggy package manager.


Things I didn't like:
Renaming applications to things like "music player" in menus.
It didn't configure grub correctly to boot windows on the sata drive.
I followed the guide to installing nvidia drivers, xgl and compiz from the link in Pat's blog. Everything went as the guide described but afterwards I didn't have direct rendering. I got the spinning cube but it would only show desktop 1 in the kicer panel. I would configure it for four desktops and apply but it wouldn't change and still only showed 1 desktop.




I wouldn't choose it over ubuntu. I'd probably be a huge ubuntu "fanboy" if kde was the native desktop. Anyone have experience installing kde on ubuntu?

hellonorman wrote: I would configure it for four desktops and apply but it wouldn't change and still only showed 1 desktop.

I think that's a bug. Others including myself are having the same issue.

hellonorman wrote: I wouldn't choose it over ubuntu. I'd probably be a huge ubuntu "fanboy" if kde was the native desktop. Anyone have experience installing kde on ubuntu?

I'll run Suse 10.1 for at least another couple weeks. I haven't decided yet if it will stay on my machine yet.

I have Ubuntu with KDE on my laptop. You have to 'apt-get install kubuntu-desktop' and should be good to go. My experience is that Ubuntu+KDE is more stable than Kubuntu.

if you want something like a headless server and if that is what your redhat 9 is and depending on how many custom apps you have I would recommend centos - it is supported until something ridiculous like 2012 and may cause you the least headache in moving your apps just install apt-get and you should be good to go. you could also give debian a look over for this environment.

but if you want a power workstation/server then I would recommend either suse, ubuntu, fedora, or mandriva. You really can't go wrong with any of those distros. If you have an amd64 machine I definitely would go with suse. to me of all the distros I tried it is the best 64 bit distro.

Man just looking at this post and I was thinking isn't this awesome that we have such quality choices that suit individual needs. And this isn't even counting the great distros like slack, arch etc. Let's see if this was windows uh his choice would be . ... let's see.... its coming ..... um ... uh XP.