Recommended Distro for Web Applications

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Tuesday 01 February 2005 15:06, kirblam at comcast.net wrote:
> My company is making some of its first moves into looking at Linux
> capabilities for web applications. We're a 95%+ Microsoft shop (my
> personal experience is more broad, stop throwing things...)
>
> Anyway, my boss is pulling for a Red Hat license to get started. I'm not
> sure what you really get with RH beside support that would make it
> better/worse than other distros. I'm aware of the issues of excessive
> packages that used to be trademark of previous RH versions.
>
> For app development, you can assume we'll be experimenting with tomcat,
> eclipse, php, maybe mono. It's probably a given we'll run some version of
> apache.
For a development platform, you will probably be well served with 
distributions, such as Fedora Core 3, SuSE Professional 9.2. 
Note that the Enterprise editions (RHEL or SLES) do require licenses but are 
generally configured as servers, NOT development workstation. 

Additionally, you can buy 1 boxed set of the above distros and legally 
spread it across your company, or download the distro. 

The main difference is that the enterprise editions come with a support 
agreement, are very stable. For instance RHEL 3 Update 3 contains the 
2.4.21-27.0.2 kernel (I just installed one on an opteron and ran up2date). 

Additionally, your enterprise licenses are per seat. So, my recommendation 
is to use the use either Fedora Core 3 or SuSE Professional 9.2. When it 
comes time to run a server, then evaluate what you want to do. Both Fedora 
Core 3 and SuSE Professional 9.2 contain just about all the server software 
you need, or at that time, by an enterprise version for your server. 

Note that Tomcat, PHP, Apache, Eclipse and Mono (both run-time and 
development tools) is included in the SuSE 9.2 DVD. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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