Opinions on Server and Home Computer Install

[mowestusa]

As you can tell from my posts and my sig, I have become a Fedora user, and have really enjoyed it, but I looking for some opinions.

First New Home Server:
- I have the opportunity to change some things around.
- I have been using and love my FreeNAS box as my home file server.
- I have had a couple of unexplainable issues with my FreeNAS box.
- My newest Linux Distro installs on other computers can use the Samba shares cleanly, and I don't know way. They will connect, but can't move files to it without being root, and I don't think Fedora would even connect through Samba. I dealt with this by just using DHCP on my DD-WRT router to give a static address to the FreeNAS box, and then use sshfs which always worked great. Windows boxes on the network had no issues at all reading/writing/connecting to the Samba shares, and I seem to remember that an old install of Ubuntu could as well, but newer distros had issues.
- FreeNAS makes for an easy to set up box, but you can't add anything easily like Bashpodder to the install.
- So I'm thinking I should just set up a Linux Distro as a server and then I could run Bashpodder on there, and other things too, like a lamp set up for using PHP apps just on my home network, not as a webserver.
- Remember, I'm a Fedora user (and a happy one too), but I was wondering if I should do a CentOS install so I can kind of install and let it run for a long time, without the need to upgrade the OS every 6 months? Or should I just do a Fedora install with a separate home partition and do an upgrade or reinstall every 6 to 12 months (12 if I skip a version)?
- In using Fedora, would I be able to transfer my knowledge of commands over to CentOS easily, or is CentOS pretty different?

Second the home computer:
- The family is using Linux, but they are frustrated when I do a reinstall and the desktop changes. They don't like change.
- Right now the home machine is running Foresight. I like Foresight, conary, rolling releases, and the community, but it has not worked as well as I hoped. They don't have some of the packages that I love to have installed on my Fedora box. Updates will sometimes break dumb things like the Printing to an HP printer. This should not happen. Right now I'm stuck with conary listing a dependency issue and it will not upgrade.
- I thought that the rolling release would make the family happy because I would be doing a reinstall all of the time, but when stuff breaks they are not pleased.
- Should I:
1. Stick with Foresight, because the awesome community will probably help me overcome these two issues I'm having right now?
2. Jump ship and install Fedora, because I know it, but will that confuse the family when I have to do a reinstall, and reinstall the software that they have come to enjoy?
3. Jump ship and install CentOS, because of the longer life span, but I don't know if they have all of the kids educational games or not (Foresight just added all of the good ones for their "kids' edition")?

Any recommendations from those that have had to make similar choices?

[eddie]

Freenas is bsd not linux. the people who develop freenas intend to make it more open so that you can do the web server and etc bit. Using freenas I never did use samba, but sshfs instead. You may want to reset up your shares so that even non root can access it. You just have to go into the web interface and set it up. I normally use debian based distros for the server thing, but with dimdim, I want to go to centos instead, I grew up on redhat before it was fedora. Fedora is actually rh19 if your keeping score so to speak. Centos is redhat without the redhat logo. As Linc said, the skills should be very similar.
Redhat has promised that upgrading will be easier now. they say they have done f9 to f10 without major hitches. That remains to be seen. Redhat is also making other nice promises. If your family only does the gui thing then, it should not matter the distro. What is under the hood should be what you want most. Normally I would say stay with the same distro overall so that you can have one local repo to keep things updated easier. but I run several distros anyway violating my own suggestion. for a desktop I really like mepis in addition to debian..

[Gomer_X]

- In using Fedora, would I be able to transfer my knowledge of commands over to CentOS easily, or is CentOS pretty different?

You'd be able to use CentOS easier than just about anything else. For a real server, Fedora won't be a whole lot different from CentOS anyway. You're not looking for the latest KDE, right?

Personally I dumped Fedora for Debian on my server and it wasn't that hard. I've been pretty happy.

- Second the home computer:
- The family is using Linux, but they are frustrated when I do a reinstall and the desktop changes. They don't like change.

I'm in the same situation. The desktop my wife uses runs Fedora. Since a Fedora upgrade doesn't work about half the time and I have to do a re-install I usually just run old versions and don't upgrade much. When I do upgrade I make sure I've got a whole weekend to fix everything and get flash and video in Firefox to work before she starts complaining.

I can't reccommend this strategy, but it's worked so far. On MY desktop I just run Debian testing. Rarely are there surprises.

[mowestusa]

Personally I dumped Fedora for Debian on my server and it wasn't that hard. I've been pretty happy.

- Second the home computer:
- The family is using Linux, but they are frustrated when I do a reinstall and the desktop changes. They don't like change.

I'm in the same situation. The desktop my wife uses runs Fedora. Since a Fedora upgrade doesn't work about half the time and I have to do a re-install I usually just run old versions and don't upgrade much. When I do upgrade I make sure I've got a whole weekend to fix everything and get flash and video in Firefox to work before she starts complaining.

I can't reccommend this strategy, but it's worked so far. On MY desktop I just run Debian testing. Rarely are there surprises.

Gomer,
I thought if anyone would advocate sticking with Fedora it would be you. I knew you and switched to Debian on your server, and that is always a good option. I didn't know that you had switched to Debian testing on your desktop. I have run Debian testing on my desktop before, and been well pleased. I guess that the Fedora community and help with Fedora has seemed easier to get for me. When I ran Debian I never knew where to go for help. With Fedora the irc channel has been very helpful at times. Also the Fedora Forums have also been friendly and helpful too. With the Fedora Unity project and their howto's I have had many of my issues addressed there as well, where I could just read the answer. Perhaps if I could find the kind of community outlets for Debian that I have enjoyed for Fedora, that would be an easier switch. I still feel like I don't know much, and find myself looking for help for lots of things, especially since I'm not in the computer industry and don't administer Linux boxes for a living.

Thanks for your thoughts. I need to set up my home man cave before I start recommissioning computers.

[Wally Balljacker]

Personally I dumped Fedora for Debian on my server and it wasn't that hard. I've been pretty happy.

- Second the home computer:
- The family is using Linux, but they are frustrated when I do a reinstall and the desktop changes. They don't like change.

I'm in the same situation. The desktop my wife uses runs Fedora. Since a Fedora upgrade doesn't work about half the time and I have to do a re-install I usually just run old versions and don't upgrade much. When I do upgrade I make sure I've got a whole weekend to fix everything and get flash and video in Firefox to work before she starts complaining.

I can't reccommend this strategy, but it's worked so far. On MY desktop I just run Debian testing. Rarely are there surprises.

Gomer,
I thought if anyone would advocate sticking with Fedora it would be you. I knew you and switched to Debian on your server, and that is always a good option. I didn't know that you had switched to Debian testing on your desktop. I have run Debian testing on my desktop before, and been well pleased. I guess that the Fedora community and help with Fedora has seemed easier to get for me. When I ran Debian I never knew where to go for help. With Fedora the irc channel has been very helpful at times. Also the Fedora Forums have also been friendly and helpful too. With the Fedora Unity project and their howto's I have had many of my issues addressed there as well, where I could just read the answer. Perhaps if I could find the kind of community outlets for Debian that I have enjoyed for Fedora, that would be an easier switch. I still feel like I don't know much, and find myself looking for help for lots of things, especially since I'm not in the computer industry and don't administer Linux boxes for a living.

Thanks for your thoughts. I need to set up my home man cave before I start recommissioning computers.

You can try,

http://wiki.debian.org/
http://forums.debian.net/
http://www.debianadmin.com/
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/

Or you can always post a question here, I'm pretty knowledgeable about Debian.

[Gomer_X]

I guess that the Fedora community and help with Fedora has seemed easier to get for me. When I ran Debian I never knew where to go for help. With Fedora the irc channel has been very helpful at times. Also the Fedora Forums have also been friendly and helpful too. With the Fedora Unity project and their howto's I have had many of my issues addressed there as well, where I could just read the answer. Perhaps if I could find the kind of community outlets for Debian that I have enjoyed for Fedora, that would be an easier switch.

Those are good points. I spent probably a couple years reading Fedora mailing lists and found them to be tremendously helpful. Fedora has some great people.

I guess for me Debian just works most of the time and when it breaks it does so in a way that I don't need immediate help. I can limp along until i feel like figuring out what the problem is. I read the Debian forums and there are some royal elitist asshats there, but most people are helpful. Debian feels really big and unwieldy at times, but it's comfortable to me. Their documentation is the best, but it can tend to be out of date. You can find what you need, but it's more work.

Of the options you gave I'd personally stick with Fedora. It's more work to keep going, but you get all the new stuff. Of course I've never run Foresight.

I only run Debian on machines that other people (besides me) don't have to deal with.

[mowestusa]

Debian feels really big and unwieldy at times, but it's comfortable to me. Their documentation is the best, but it can tend to be out of date. You can find what you need, but it's more work.

Of the options you gave I'd personally stick with Fedora. It's more work to keep going, but you get all the new stuff. Of course I've never run Foresight.

I only run Debian on machines that other people (besides me) don't have to deal with.

I as well, ran into great Debian documentation, but at times it was out of date and didn't keep up with the new options in configuration or the new programs that administered hardware detection or networking or other pieces of hardware.

I think that one of the things I can do to make running fedora easier even as my server is to put the install on a separate hard drive from the data, that way I just wipe one drive, and access a different drive for the data. That would make even full reinstalls easier.

Foresight is an interesting project. The leaders are very welcoming to new people. The developers are willing to help individual users on IRC. It is just a very positive group with some interesting features in their distro. They have a "rollback" function which lets you easily rollback to a stable install if an update borked your system. The package management and updates are fast too after the first update. That first update can be a bit longer, but then things seem to fly. I know that I'm going to set up another Foresight box at home to hack around on, test packages to help them expand their library of packages and see other ways to help the project. Foresight is not a server distro at all though. Package selection is still better with distros like Debian and Fedora for either a desktop or a server, but Rpath and Foresight are getting close.

[Gomer_X]

I think that one of the things I can do to make running fedora easier even as my server is to put the install on a separate hard drive from the data, that way I just wipe one drive, and access a different drive for the data. That would make even full reinstalls easier.

I maintain two 10 gig root partitions and a separate /boot. When it's time for an upgrade (which is 1 to 6 months after a new release comes out) I copy the current root to the other partition and upgrade that.

If anything fails I can roll back (usually). One time (I think it was Fedora 5 to 6) the installer wiped all my old kernels (even though I told it not to mess with the /boot partition or update GRUB) so I couldn't go back. If things go really bad I can try a fresh install on the second root partition and go from there without loosing all the cusomization and configuration on the old system.

I of course run a separate /home and most of the time that works OK too.

[mowestusa]

I maintain two 10 gig root partitions and a separate /boot. When it's time for an upgrade (which is 1 to 6 months after a new release comes out) I copy the current root to the other partition and upgrade that.

If anything fails I can roll back (usually). One time (I think it was Fedora 5 to 6) the installer wiped all my old kernels (even though I told it not to mess with the /boot partition or update GRUB) so I couldn't go back. If things go really bad I can try a fresh install on the second root partition and go from there without loosing all the customization and configuration on the old system.

I of course run a separate /home and most of the time that works OK too.

Neat idea, thanks for all the different ideas. These are great. I love hearing how others more experienced than me do things.