Cheers,
-R
P.S. The stupid poll thing won't allow me to do large text blanks. Post as a comment if you need to. Also, if you're not an LJ member, feel free to post a comment with answers, since you can't do the poll. Stupid LJ.
If you run a Linux server or servers, which distribution(s) do you use?
Red Hat Enterprise Server
2(12.5%)
Fedora
1(6.2%)
CentOS
0(0.0%)
SUSE Enterprise Server
0(0.0%)
OpenSUSE
0(0.0%)
Ubuntu
1(6.2%)
Debian
2(12.5%)
Other (specify in next answer)
3(18.8%)
Regarding #1, why?
If you run a Linux desktop workstation or workstations, which distribution(s) do you use?
Red Hat Enterprise Client
0(0.0%)
Fedora
2(16.7%)
CentOS
1(8.3%)
SUSE Enterprise Client
1(8.3%)
OpenSUSE
0(0.0%)
Ubuntu
1(8.3%)
Debian
1(8.3%)
Other (specify in next answer)
2(16.7%)
Regarding #3, why?
What environment do these systems operate in? (For example, home, university lab, etc etc.)
The people setting up our Asterisk server will be installing fedora, I think, so that will be a likely choice for the rest as well, just to keep things consistent.
Finrod here
At my job we run a ton of CentOS server boxes, plus one RHES-- the reason for the one Red Hat box is that Oracle *only* supports Red Hat, if you're using the CentOS clone they won't support you.
At home, I'm all FreeBSD and OpenBSD. If I end up wanting a Unix laptop, though, I'll probably end up running some Linux variant because FreeBSD's laptop support doesn't seem up to par yet.
(whatever that means)
Meanwhile, I'm standing there asking "who the hell is Susie?" while kicking the server and asking why the printer isn't working. For bonus irritation points, I'll ask him why they chose a red hat and is it a fedora or a beanie or what?
-- curious_jp
Why Mandrake? I gravitated toward Mandrake when it started off as "Red Hat with KDE", because I wanted to try KDE, and because it was getting a lot of good press at the time. Then I just stuck with it for a long time, because it was what I knew.
Why CentOS? Because I wanted to take advantage of the fact that developers always support Red Hat, without shelling out for it. And CentOS supports both "yum" and "up2date" for package installation and maintenance.
Why RHEL? Good support and patches.
Why Fedora Core? Similar to Red Hat but costs $0.
Richard Johnson says
I used to like SUSE, but given their asslike suckage when it comes to kernel patching on the recent core dump holes (among others), I now have to disrecommend them. I mean, come on, exploits for a trivially exploitable hole in widespread active use, and they say they'll get around to finishing their testing in a week or two? Furrfu. Perhaps Novell has boned them. Or maybe they came pre-boned.
RHEL and CentOS are OK. They won't give you the latest bells and whistles with 3d video and the like. But they also won't require you to ditch everything every 6 months during an interestingly bleeding edge upgrade the way Fedora Core does.
Then there's debian stable. The politics of purity tends to get in the way, but otherwise what I said about RHEL and CentOS holds. Wonderful for servers.
For luser worsestations, well, one of the faster moving distros will give them things like the video support they might want. However, I've yet to find one of those distros that will provide security patches for older installs. They just don't have the resources to keep the old ones live that way. If the upgrades were even half as quick and easy as OpenBSD manages year after year, that wouldn't be such a big deal; but they're not. Oh my, how they're not.
Ignore for reality
Later, when I got around to building a new home server, I found out that a few coworkers of mine at the time were big fans of slackware, and had disks easily available, saving me a few billion hours of downloading it and trying to burn a workable copy.
I've gotten used to its foibles overall it does what I need in a nice, low stress fashion.
Re: Ignore for reality
APT is still the benchmark package management tool. It's much less of an issue these days with almost every distribution having decent higher-level package management. But the dpkg format and comprehensive packaging policy still make debian considerably friendlier than RPM-based distributions.
Packages are usually much more consistent with regards to things like naming conventions, configuration file locations, and initial configuration. My favourite example is bind. The maintainer thoughtfully sets up a default configuration to work as a caching, forwarding nameserver, with a clearly marked sample zone file to add any local zones. For the vast majority of cases, you can just install the package and go.
The long release cycle can be a bit of a hassle; I've spent a lot of time before maintaining repositories of backported packages. This has been slowly improving though, and the ubuntu guys are committed to a six month release cycle. I'm not entirely confident deploying ubuntu in a server environment because of concerns I have over the way they handle packages in their unsupported repositories, but it's certainly an option.
As for the desktop, ubuntu is awesome. They've poured a lot of effort in to integrating everything nicely, and it's still debian under the hood.
CentOS rising
However my personal server used to be Fedora (FC2) before it got corrupted. Since then, I reinstalled it with CentOS, which is basically a clone of RHEL, and I've been happy with that. I'm building a new personal server this weekend (got a 4-way 700MHz Xeon for $200), and planning on using CentOS for that too.
Ubuntu is certainly "popular" of late, but I think it's more mindshare than market share. I've never tried the Debian or SUSE route, because we tend to use a lot of 3rd-party packages and a few commercial packages, so it pays to stick to the mainstream, and that means being as much RedHat-compatible as you can be. But anything that runs on RedHat will run on Fedora & CentOS just fine, in my experience.
For the desktop, I've played with CentOS, but that was just as practice before loading my server. I generally stick with XP on the desktop. (I don't care about desktops, they are disposable to me-- servers are my game.)