[SlugLUG] Debian As A Server

[Rohan Sheth]

I have been really reading up on the politics issues especially and I've
come down to these two: Debian Testing (since it has security updates
now) and Gentoo Hardened.

I really like Debian because I have been using the stable branch on a
number of machines around here and have never had any problems.  But
using Debian as a desktop does cause it to suffer from politics and
such.  Gentoo is another distro I have run on machines for a while...and
it has interesting aspects.  The whole build-from-source thing has the
"cool" factor...but functionality increases are fairly low and I find it
more to be a hassle to compile things like X.org considering they take a
decent amount of time.  The Hardened factor of Gentoo is again
interesting, they are gone to great lengths to include security features
and they have documented them quite nicely.  I think I will end up using
Debian testing on this machine...unless something goes horribly wrong. 

--Rohan



cerise at armory.com wrote:
> I'd recommend Ubuntu over Debian.  It uses the same packaging system and
> is otherwise just like Deb.  What it doesn't have is all the stupid politics.
>
> Ubuntu was using X.org almost immediately after it came out.  Debian kept
> using an outdated version of XFree86 for around a year or so because the X 
> team couldn't decide how they wanted to migrate people.
>
> Incidentally, many of the people I know who were left in the cold by that
> started using the already available Ubuntu packages.  Of course, this hit 
> them with dependency issues down the road -- another reason I don't recommend
> Deb.
>
> If you really want a distro that's withstood the test of time, use Slackware.
>
> -Phil/CERisE
>
> On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 13:50 -0700, Rohan Sheth wrote:
>   
>> Hiya, I know some of you guys are busy with finals and whatnot, so
>> answer this question whenever you get a chance...
>>
>> I have been thinking about buying a new dell poweredge server but I
>> can't decide what to run on it.  The server's main purpose will be web
>> serving (mysql/httpd/etc) and if that was the only thing it did, I would
>> be running Debian Stable on it.  However, it will also act as a
>> thin-client server meaning that it will run all the applications that
>> users on the network use.  Therefore, debian stable is a bit outdated
>> for it, considering most users like running relatively recent software. 
>> Therefore, I have been having trouble deciding between debian unstable
>> and testing.  I realize that unstable is the best choice in terms of
>> recent version releases, but as this is also a web-server I need
>> something that is relatively secure and "stable."  I am strongly
>> considering Debian Testing because of the reasons listed above, but I
>> would love additional opinions.  While some of you may recommend
>> completely separate distribution of Linux (which is fine), I prefer
>> Debian because of its steadfast history of stability and its rampant
>> recognition.  What should I use?
>>
>> --Rohan
>>
>>     
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