Re: Linux distro for new server?

[Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi>]

On Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:50:47 -0700
Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> wrote:

> On 01/02/2013 05:42 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> >
> > One thing I definitely want to avoid is a setup that loads up lots of
> > unncessary software (Ubuntu does that, for instance). As a server, it should
> > have almost nothing on it beyond the stuff it is running or needs to
> > function.
> 
> I'm totally not qualified to answer your question, but we run Debian stable 
> servers at work.

Another vote for Debian stable (meaning 6.0.x currently). I have a few
virtual servers (mostly for hobby purposes) running Debian stable and
I haven't had any bad problems with them.

I should note that Debian stable comes with gcc/gnat 4.4 by default and
version 4.4 does not support Ada 20xx well (Ada 95 support is ok).

Other options besides Debian are Ubuntu and Fedora. Both Ubuntu and
Fedora have shorter release cycles than Debian and also more up-to-date
software (Fedora 17 has gnat 4.7, Ubuntu 12.10 has gnat 4.6). On the other
hand, they also drop support for older releases faster. In practice, this
means you need to update Fedora or Ubuntu distribution once a year or so
(unless you run Long-Term-Support version[1]).

I probably would not use Fedora as server, since it has habit of doing
big software updates even inside one release. This means that your
software might break if you run 'yum update' and API/ABI of some
updated package changes.

You should also decide whether you want 32-bit or 64-bit version.
In most cases it doesn't matter, but some software might run only
on 32-bit or 64-bit system. My variant of Not-Claw-Sockets[2]
is one such piece ;). It (barely) works only on 64-bit systems.

-- 
Tero Koskinen - http://iki.fi/tero.koskinen/
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
[2] https://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/not-claw-sockets-linux-x86
    (x86 is misleading, I ended up doing x86_64 version, but
     did not change the repository name.)