Re: OS for AMD64 server

On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 16:44:59 -0500, OSbandito wrote:

On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:08:19 -0500, OSbandito wrote:

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:58:33 -0500, OSbandito inquired:
<cut>..one for casual use and one for use as a freenet or similar
server.
It seems Freenet, JAP and many P2P are written in Java. Java on older
Mac (and some Win machines) has been slow. I've already settled on AMD64
Skt.939 with one of 3 boards: Gigabyte GA-K8N, ECS KN1 or the Tyan K8SE.

My question is on which OS to go with, considering my mostly beginner status.
Solaris vs: Ubuntu is what I've come up with so far. Distro can be
32-bit; main interest being relatively easy setup and usability with
Java-based app's.

Thx~


General Schvantzkoph responded:
If you haven't bought the system yet you'll want to change your hardware
requirements. Socket 939 is obsolete, AMD has ceased production of 939
parts. The current AMD socket is socket AM2, if you are looking for an AMD
system that's the one to choose. The best performing CPUs at them moment
are the Intel Core 2 Duos, that would be your best choice.

For your purpose you'll certainly be better off with Linux than Solaris.
My personal preference is Fedora Core, but any major Linux distro will do
the job for you. If you want to use Ubuntu, that's fine, but you might
want to install a number of different distros before you make your final
decision. When you partition your drives make sure that you create a
number of OS partitions so that you can have a number of distros on the
system. You need about 8G per OS partition, the /home and swap partitions
can be shared. In addition to Ubuntu you might want to try Fedora, SuSe,
and Mandriva. All Linuxes are based on the same components so you can do
your job with any of them, but each distro has their pluses and minuses.
The best on is a matter of taste which is why I suggest you try a few
before you settle on one.

Greetings, General. Thanks for the info. I know the Core Duo's are
pretty snappy in testing but I have a religious aversion to anything ms
or Intel.. my bad upbringing with a Mac, no doubt. I like your ideas
about AM2 and running a variety of distros to try. Price (overall
components) will have to determine whether 939 or AM2 for me. I was a
little surprised at your Inference (I think) that Linux is simpler to
setup than Solaris. Have'nt tried either,as noted, but haver long been
under the impression there would be a months-long learning curve before
I could get a Linux server/home-use rig running smoothly. One question I
have on installing the various distros on multiple partitions concerns
the ramdisk which is created on all the partitions. Will I be able to
install Fedora, say, and have the other distros run off the same
ramdisks which were created by Fedora? I made the mistake once of trying
to install Yoper on an XP Windos machine. Could not get rid of the
ramdisk later on uninstall. That was what spooked me. SUSE was looking
really good to me till two months back when Novell went darkside. Thanks
again for your thoughtful reply.

the General hit me with:

By RAM DISK I assume you mean the swap partition, the swap partition is
sharable by all of the distros.

Yes, swap partition.

If you are talking about some pseudo
disk to keep programs on so that they launch faster, I don't think
such a thing exists on Linux. Linux does a very good job of file
caching so a pseudo partition isn't necessary.

When sharing the /home partition you have to take a little care to make
sure that the same user numbers are assigned to the user accounts. Redhat
and Mandriva both start numbering users and groups at 500, I don't know
what SuSE does but I seem to recall that Ubuntu has a different starting
point. So if you start with Fedora or Mandriva you can put the other one
on your system without a problem as long as you create the accounts in the
same order, with Ubuntu you would want to explicitly assign the user
numbers when you create the accounts. You can always change them by
editing /etc/passwd, so this isn't a big deal.

With any distro I recommend that you install webmin which is a browser
based admin tool, http://www.webmin.com. Webmin works for almost every
Linux distro, and for Solaris as well, so you can use a consistent
interface on all of the OSes.

If you want to try Solaris as well as several Linux distros there is no
reason you can't put it on the same system, after all disk space is
practically free. You could try a BSD if you want also. I've only used
Solaris as a user, I've never put it on a system so I don't know if it
understands Linux file systems or not, before you install it you'll want
to figure out if it understands EXT3 or some other Linux filesystem, if it
does there is no reason that you shouldn't be able to share /home with it
also. Before you put anything important on this system you'll want to play
around a bit figuring out what works and what doesn't. After you settle on
the system you like best you can start to do some real work with the box.

General, I appreciate your detailed info. Some of it is still
unfamiliar to me but between your answer and the other two I think I'll
try to keep it simple: one live-disk Linux with a basic install on one
HD, trying one distro at a time. Can put Solaris on a second HD. As
much as I'd prefer to eat barbed-wire rather than use Windows, I'll
probably have to use a small Windows (like 'ME') somewhere to keep web
access working while I screw around with Linux and BSD. Thanks again.

When you partition your drive you should always create at least two OS
partitions even if you aren't interested in running multiple distros. The
reason for having two partitions is that it simplifies doing upgrades.
Linux distros are upgraded frequently, in the case of Fedora Core it's a
couple of times a year, in the case of RedHat Enterprise Linux its every
couple of years which is still much more frequently than Microsoft which
takes 5 years to get out a new release. Although you can do an upgrade
from one release to another it's generally safer to do a clean install
especially if you've used third party RPMs. Also you might not like the
new release as much as the old one or you could find that it's not quite
ready for everyday use. If you have two OS partitions you can alternate
between releases, that way if something goes wrong with the new release or
you just don't like it you can switch right back to your previous OS.
Managing multiple boot partitions in Linux is trivial so you shouldn't be
afraid of it. The only thing you have to be careful about is which install
owns the MBR. When you install your first distro you will let it put it's
boot loader into the MBR (which is the default). When you install your
second distro you will have the installer put it's boot loader into it's
root partition instead of the MBR (on Redhat installs you have to click
the advanced options box on the boot loader install window to get to the
option that lets you do this). After you've installed your additional
distros you just add a chain load to the /etc/grub.conf file on the
primary distro. This is a simple text file, all you have to do is edit it.
Here is an example. This is my FC6 grub.conf file, you can see that I also
have XP, FC5 and FC6_64 on my box,

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,6)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda7
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda7
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,6)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2849.fc6)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
title XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
title FC5
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
chainloader +1
title FC6_64
rootnoverify (hd0,8)
chainloader +1
.

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