For starters, I want to point out that you can run a pretty decent linux home server on just about any distribution, excluding the likes of DSL and Puppy maybe. Some may require a little more tinkering than others, but in essence it’s quite feasable with any decent linux distro. This means I could just pick my favorite desktop distro, Arch Linux, and go on from there.
The thing is, I want to do it thoroughly. And at the same time, maybe learn a thing or two from a type of distribution that I’ve never used before.
Also, and for the record; This is not a guide on which distro you should use for a server.
I only describe here, what I find important and what lead me to my choice.
I don’t make a habit of telling other people what to do.
So what aspects do I consider essential when choosing a linux distribution for server usage?
- Software stability.
Quite obvious of course. I don’t want to be using beta software, or bleeding edge software on a sever
- Software life.
A distro with a short release cycle will ‘force’ me to upgrade far too often. Also I don’t want software upgrades in mid-release. I’d prefer to use backports then.
- Security and Support.
I need bugfixes and security updates. And I need them over a long period of time.
- Package Management.
I don’t plan on compiling everything by hand. But most big distro’s have quite a good package manager anyway (pacman, apt, yum,…).
- Not too bloated.
Although I probably won’t run into any problems with a sever setup here, I do have to bear in mind that the machine I’ll be using is quite old.
- It needs to be Linux.
So no Solaris or *BSD. I don’t know if the difference is that big. But for now, I’ll focus on linux distributions only.
- A good community/wiki/documentation.
If ever I run into any kind of troubles.
I’ve only looked at “The Big Dogs” in the Linux world. There are many smaller or less well-known distributions, often geared towards one particular aspect of server usage. But since It’ll be more of a play/tinker project. I want something that can handle all kinds of server tasks.
So I came up with this shortlist of possible candidates, and I admit it’s kind of predictive:
- Debian Stable
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Ubuntu LTS
- CentOS
SLED and RHEL aren’t free as in free beer. So they don’t qualify either. I’m not going to pay for a silly little experiment. And if I’m going to use a Debian-based distro, I’ll much rather pick the real thing over a derivative, so Ubuntu is out of the race as well.
So that leaves CentOS and Debian.
I’ve used Debian (testing) before and I still like it a lot. But in a spirit of learning new things, I decided to give CentOS a go. Furthermore, CentOS is a real enterprise distribution. It’s 99,99% rebuild of RHEL, but without the official logo’s and support. Red Hat without the hat, so to speak.
Unfortunately, I ended up not really liking CentOS. Or at least, I didn’t really get used to it.
Don’t get me wrong, CentOS looks like a truly great distribution for a server (and maybe even for a stable desktop too). But I just couldn’t find the time or the motivation to really get to know it. Besides, if I was going to do some distro-hopping, I’d be better of doing that on my laptop or in VirtualBox. So I might give CentOS another go later.
I reinstalled Debian Etch and restarted from there.
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