Re: Best free server distro with long life span?

From: Matt Payton (mattpayton_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 06/12/04 

Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 14:15:00 GMT

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 11:13:29 +0000, daprole wrote:

> Best free server distro with long life span?
>
> What would you start with?
>
> We will just using it for file servers, domain controllers and policy
> controllers on Windows 2000 and XP machines at first.
>
> I am busy trying to learn Samba now.
>
> Eventually we want a thin client set up in our library.
>
> We have 18 servers in a growing school environment and I want to
> switch to Linux within the next 6 months.
>
> We do have a very small software budget--less than $500.
>
> I want to download and start setting up a test lab at home this week.
>
> Thanks.

I like Slack, and as already mentioned, Debian is a fine choice. But
"best" is impossible to say, except by you...Do you have exerience with
any particular distribution ? Are you going to be running any software
that is "supported" on a particular distribution ?

Another possibility is one of the RedHat enterprise "clones".
Distributions that have taken the gpl'ed code from RedHat enterprise, and
rebuilt it. There are 3 that I know of :
Whitebox - http://www.whiteboxlinux.org
Centos - http://www.centos.org
Another one that I can't recall at the moment...And quite possibly
others.

They're all based on the RedHat Enterprise source code, and are
trying to be as compatible as possible. So that means that if it runs on
RH AS/ES, it *should* run on one of these. Also, RH is guarantees
support for 5 years for AS/ES, so that covers your "long life span"
requirement.

I recently started testing CentOS to replace two RH AS 2.1 machines. So
far it's looking pretty damn close to the original. And updates have been
released *very* soon after RH releases their's. 

-- 
- Matt -

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