Best Free Distribution

[hairballx28]

I was wondering if someone could tell me which Linux Distribution has the best free server? I would like to use in a corporate environment. It would not deal with e-comerce or webhosting but it may become the email and proxy server.
For teh begining it will primarily be just a file and print sharing server

 

[RhythmAce]

Red Hat

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



I'd say Redhat or Suse. Mandrake has got an excellent reputation nowadays for ease of installation, etc., but their distribution is based on redhat anyway and, for a server, I can't see any advantage over redhat itself which is the most widely used server distro (

http://www.redhat.com/products/)

.



On the other hand, Suse (

http://www.suse.com/us/products/index.html)

was the one originally chosen by IBM when they first moved towards linux and tends to be slightly quicker than redhat to release new versions of stuff.



You've also got caldera (

http://www.caldera.com/products/)

who pitch very much at the corporate market and claim to have the advantage of deeper linux/unix knowledge from also owning SCO unix, etc .



Regards

 

[wzrd]

Well, I use Debian and it's great when it comes to install and mantain updates. All I need to do is type a command and bewm! I get the software I want. If I need a distribution update, it's also another command .. so I have no overheads of how to keep my box up to date and getting it to work, it will just let you focus on the real job!

If you have some experience with linux, you have to try it out!

wzrd

 

[hasrin]

the best way to decide which one is to find out the most familiar distro for you. If you're a regular redhat user... go for redhat..so the same if you're reguslar debian user.. and so on... good luck...

 

[arlequin]

Debian would be the best choice...
You will have to read more and learn more about GNU/Linux, but that's the idea.... Arlequín
arlequin@montevideo.com.uy

http://www.arlequinadas.com

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Well, if you really want to get your hands dirty why not make your own distro. (

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org)

;-)

More seriously, while you can argue that the .deb package management tools (apt-get, etc.)are better than you get with rpm distros, I'd have to say that debian remains a little difficult for newbies and the friendlier derived versions - Progeny & Corel - are sadly no longer with us.... Having said that I use debian myself for some things so I'm far from anti - just not sure about it for newbies.

Regards

 

[StarTAC]

i think SuSE is the best.. i get incredible uptimes, and fast updates from SuSE's FTP server.. it's neat and will detect all your basic, and advanced hardware..

good luck..

 

[marsd]

Pre AC at Red Hat SuSE was in another league as far as
their kernel tweaks and their responsiveness to problems.
Their user support and configuration tools for X are still incredible. RH was brain dead in a lot of ways when
I tried it and had it on a production network.
I used it back in 6.x and always found that it was the
hardest box to make safe out of the box.
I stopped using them when the lone RH box on the subnet got rooted while BSD, and SuSE, and Slackware were fine. A RH
specific lpd thing.
They used to let their master config utility listen on a
high unprivileged port out of the box. Dumb.
Then they switched to xinetd standard,but it's just a
fancy inetd that bungs up more often IMHO, and you
can do everything you want with tcpwrappers, and netfilter
so...
RH bashing aside..
Check out SuSE 7.3 "professional", its cheaper than RH.
Debian and the rest are great for a novelty, and for
chest pounders but there is no real benefit to apt-get
-vs- YOU and RPM.