Linux distro

paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

There is no "right" answer to this.

For a Postgres server though I would probably not go for Fedora or
Ubuntu as they are more desktop oriented and have frequent updates and
relatively short life cycles. If I were to recommend anything I would
suggest CentOS - or even RHEL if you need enterprise level
support/certification.

Eddy

On 01.08.2007 13:29, paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

You need to learn general Linux/Unix administration first, what
distribution is not so important in the first step. If you have some
basic knowledge chose the distribution that fits your needs best. I'm
sure Google or Wikipedia will come up with a comparative list with pros
and cons of each.

As you say it it's a server, I assume you'll have it in a production
environment. It's never a good idea to have anything in production with
an OS you are not familiar with.

--
Regards,
Hannes Dorbath

Paolo, I started with linux 6 years ago after being a confirmed
microsoftie my entire career, this is the experience I can offer:

Ubuntu: What Windows wants to be, what the Mac is w/o the $$$$ and with
more control. I just replaced a hard drive in a dell machine. A
generic windows CD (the customer did not have the specific recovery CD
for that box) could not install drivers for the network, the video, or
the sound. Ubuntu did all of them. Ubuntu however is a desktop OS.
Great graphics, great package management. However, it is still Linux
and you still have to do some Googling here and there to find a HOWTO.
Perhaps the most annoying problem is lack of support for widescreen
monitors, you have to type tech data into an X config to get that
working. Also, IMHO stay away from 7.04, I've tried it on two machines
and had troubles on both, to the extent of wiping one and starting over
at 6.10. Stay with 6.10.

Suse: going for the same space as Ubuntu. I tried it first, 6 years
ago. It was ok at the time but can't tell you about the modern stuff.
I don't trust Novell to get it right though, just a personal feeling.

Fedora I don't use but as I understand there is a large body of people
with a lot of cultural knowledge about how it works. So when you go
Fedora you join the club as it were and do things their way. I tried
Red Hat back when it was Red Hat some 9 years ago and again 6 years ago
and I always found myself stuck on some detail that I could not find an
answer to.

Now if you want a hardcore distro to learn everything about linux, go
with gentoo. There are no binary packages (at least not that I use or
can easily find), but you end up knowing *everything* about how Linux
works. Very active community. I used this as a desktop for 3 years as
a sort of long-term boot camp. It did make me very comfortable with all
things linux.

Conclusion: I use gentoo on my servers and Ubuntu on my desktops.
Except for the virus ^H^H^H^^H gaming machine that I have for the kids
running XP.

paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

Thanks in advance,
Paolo Saudin

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match

--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
www.secdat.com www.andromeda-project.org
631-689-7200 Fax: 631-689-0527
cell: 631-379-0010

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 13:29 +0200, paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

Thanks in advance,
Paolo Saudin

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match

Is this going to be a production server. or a learning server, or a i'm
learning all things linux server/desktop?

If it's a dedicated production server, look at UBUNTU 6.10 server.
If you're planning to connect a monitor and run X-windows ( i.e. I
bought a server, but i'm going to use it as a learning platform for
LINUX in general also), i'd suggest either UBUNTU 6.10 or 7.04 desktop
( or, start with the 6.10 server, and use apt/synaptic/etc to add
whatever additional packages you want )

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which
distribution ? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

If this is a server you intend to keep around a while, the most
straighforward way to proceed is to install either RedHat Enterprise Linux
5 (if you can justify paying for the software and want official support)
or its free but not officially supported clone CentOS (which lags the real
RedHat a bit but is otherwise fine for many people). It's straightforward
to remove the PostgreSQL that comes with the operating system and install
the 8.2.4 binary builds from
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.2.4/linux/rpms/redhat/ , and
enough of us here do that regularly that if should you run into a problem
it will be easy to get help. That's really the main strength of using
RedHat--the problems you do run into, typically lots of other people know
about as well. One thing to be aware of going in is that the default disk
partitioning scheme may not be right for you, which can bite you down the
road; make sure you consider that carefully before installation. I always
customize the partition layout myself.

The related Fedora distribution isn't aimed at server use in the long
term. I consider it quirkier and less reliable than the real RedHat
releases, which are also bad qualities for a server, and only recommend
Fedora for general tinkering with Linux.

SuSE used to be a reasonable alternative instead for server applications,
but the recent backlash from their dealings with Microsoft have made their
future too uncertain for me to recommend any new installations use their
distribution.

Ubuntu might be a reasonable alternative for you, especially if you have a
lot of software besides PostgreSQL that you want to install on the
machine. The ease of adding new software to Ubuntu is much better than
most other distributions, particularly when it comes to applications that
are more desktop oriented. The downside is that getting the latest
PostgreSQL on there using the standard packages takes some work, and the
way the database server is managed is a little different from other
distributions which adds a layer of things you'll need to learn.

Gentoo can be a good server environment, but the learning curve to get
started is probably harder than you want to take on if you're new to
Linux.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

Thanks in advance,
Paolo Saudin

First, let me echo Hannes; You do not want to go into production with a
network operating system you are not familiar with! Doing so is just
begging for down time. Unless this is a server you will have time to
learn on and/or you have someone with a Linux background to help you,
stick with MS for now.

With that caveat out of the way, Linux as a server is amazing! I, too,
was a MS-kids from way back (DOS5.2). I switched about five years ago to
Linux (RH5.2, coincidently) and honestly have never looked back. It's my
servers OS, my desktop OS and my laptop OS. It is very much worth the
learning curve from a sysadmin and stability point of view. You just
need to give yourself time to feel it out.

As for which distro; that's a question you are likely to never get the
same answer twice. :)

/Personally/, I love Debian on servers.

It's not quite as 'hardcore' as Gentoo (a great distro, but not one to
start with!). It's the foundation of many of the popular distros
(Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) and the Debian crew is very careful about
what they put into the 'stable' repositories. I had been a Redhat/FC fan
from when I first switched to Linux until v7.3 (the best version Redhat
ever put out, in my opinion). After v8 though, things went south... Too
many "Redhatisms" in the Redhat derivative distros (Fedora Core, RHEL,
CentOS, etc) reminded me of the reasons why I left Windows.

On desktops though I am a big fan of Ubuntu. Oddly though, I found the
6.x series less than great, and have found 7.04 to be *way* better. I
run it on my desktops and my laptop. I also had the problem with my main
desktop's widescreen, but that seems to be a Linux-wide issue. The fix
is easy if you know how to edit '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' (in my case, change
the '1440x1440' entries to '1440x900' and restart 'gdm'), but that would
be troublesome for people new to Linux.

Ubuntu is a great desktop... My boyfriend's 83yo grandma uses it with no
problems. I've moved several people over to the recent Ubuntu versions
and have yet to have any ask to go back to Windows. They've all had
nothing but compliments for it. It's just not a great server OS, as
Kenneth explained.

IANAL, YMMV, etc... :)

Madison

I'm about to install a new Linux server, and I've followed this thread
with interest, being a tinkerer rather than any sort of expert.

I'm going to try out Debian, which I haven't used before - the server
it's replacing is running an old RedHat - and would be interested in
people's comments.

This machine will be running PostgreSQL and nothing else, and I'll
probably compile Postgres from source.

Ray.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Raymond O'Donnell, Director of Music, Galway Cathedral, Ireland
rod@iol.ie
---------------------------------------------------------------

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] Per conto di Reid Thompson
Inviato: mercoled� 1 agosto 2007 15.15
A: paolo@ecometer.it
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Oggetto: Re: [GENERAL] Linux distro

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 13:29 +0200, paolo@ecometer.it wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing
PostgrSQL 8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to
install a Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on
which distribution ? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

Thanks in advance,
Paolo Saudin

---------------------------(end of
broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match

Is this going to be a production server. or a learning server, or a i'm
learning all things linux server/desktop?

This is going to be a test server holding meteorological data (100 tables
with 1-2 millions rows each) that will serve as a kind of replica/backup
for others databases (pull data from an FTP server via perl scripts). No
matter for data loss since all the other databases are backed-up on a
daily basis.

On 8/1/07, paolo@ecometer.it <paolo@ecometer.it> wrote:

Hello,

I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?

Thanks in advance,
Paolo Saudin

Be careful when rolling something out you are not familiar with. You
really shouldn't go into production with an OS you don't know.

As for Linux, using an *Enterprise OS* is the ONLY type of OS you
should use. Others may say that they "never had any problems" with
non-enterprise OS versions, but they have missed the point. An
enterprise OS is something that is tried-and-true, has long term
support, and has been proven to be stable and working. That basically
leaves RedHat Enterprise (and it's clones) and some versions of SuSE.
Ubuntu claims to have a "long term support" version, but it hasn't
been around long enough to be proven.

My recommendation is to go with CentOS, which is the best clone of
Redhat enterprise (redhat even works with them behind the scenes).
They release updates within 1-7 days of when an update comes out from
redhat, and it has been around a long time; tried and true.

Another important point to make is that if you plan on having more
servers in the future, you really want to have the same OS on
everything. It's not a good idea to try one OS here, then try another
OS there. That's fine for your desktop or for doing research, but is
an unsuitable strategy when deploying things in production.

Ubuntu, fedora, and many of the others are "desktop" linuxes, and are
not suitable for use on a server.

On Wednesday 1. August 2007 16:15, Madison Kelly wrote:

/Personally/, I love Debian on servers.

It's not quite as 'hardcore' as Gentoo (a great distro, but not one to
start with!). It's the foundation of many of the popular distros
(Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) and the Debian crew is very careful
about what they put into the 'stable' repositories.

I agree totally. Debian in a server configuration is quite easy to get
started with, and is rock solid. My first Linux "test server" (my old
Pentium 133 MHz desktop) way back in 2002 ran Debian Woody. I kept it
running until it died from old age a couple of years ago. Later I fell
in love with Gentoo. But if I'd have to run a server with maximum
stability and uptime, I think that I'd still prefer Debian.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen | Registered Linux User #338009
http://solumslekt.org/ | Cruising with Gentoo/KDE
My Jazz Jukebox: http://www.last.fm/user/leifbk/

At 4:52 PM +0200 8/1/07, Leif B. Kristensen wrote:

On Wednesday 1. August 2007 16:15, Madison Kelly wrote:

/Personally/, I love Debian on servers.

It's not quite as 'hardcore' as Gentoo (a great distro, but not one to
start with!). It's the foundation of many of the popular distros
(Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) and the Debian crew is very careful
about what they put into the 'stable' repositories.

I agree totally. Debian in a server configuration is quite easy to get
started with, and is rock solid. My first Linux "test server" (my old
Pentium 133 MHz desktop) way back in 2002 ran Debian Woody. I kept it
running until it died from old age a couple of years ago. Later I fell
in love with Gentoo. But if I'd have to run a server with maximum
stability and uptime, I think that I'd still prefer Debian.

As an alternative viewpoint, I've been running the latest postgres on
Mac OS X Server 10.4, and it's been great for me. It was my first
time using a server, and my first serious use of postgres (although I
have had a lot of previous unix experience.) All the power of unix,
all the ease of the Macintosh (and it's server installation gives you
lots of great things for free and already installed - granted most is
publicly available, but it's already installed and ready for use
that's the big advantage). Not only that, but I can run windoze in
Parallels (or even Boot Camp if I desired).

-Owen

Raymond O'Donnell wrote:

I'm about to install a new Linux server, and I've followed this thread
with interest, being a tinkerer rather than any sort of expert.

I'm going to try out Debian, which I haven't used before - the server
it's replacing is running an old RedHat - and would be interested in
people's comments.

This machine will be running PostgreSQL and nothing else, and I'll
probably compile Postgres from source.

Ray.

Hi Ray,
Good luck with this endeavor. I would urge you to consider using the debian-packaged version of PostgreSQL unless you have a
good reason not to. I would include the following as legitimate reasons to want to build from source:

1. You're interested in learning about stuff and the machine isn't slated to be "in production"

2. You need features from a newer version than is available in Debian.

3. You need to build in functionality that is not available in the standard Debian package.

If you do build from source it's often possible to use the debian tools (dpkg-buildpackage) to assist you in making your own .deb
files (which may make long-term maintenance of the server/software easier than if you choose to take a generic PostgreSQL tarball
and do ./configure; make; make install).

be well,
~c

I just moved one of my desktops and my laptop from Fedora 6 to Unbuntu
7.04 because Fedora lacked hardware support that Unbuntu and my Fedora
machines had all sorts of problems like sound dropping out and machines
locking up. (Also the Fedora installers are terrible).

My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt
2) It doesn't include xen support like Fedora does
3) Support. The redhat bugzilla is much better than the Ubuntu bug
tracker and the Ubuntu docs are just a very sparse Wiki.

But my big gripe is that it won't let me run 32 bit apps on my 64 bit
system, which means a lot of firefox plugins don't work. If I had
realized this I would have just installed the 32 bit version to begin
with. I don't see why this is such a big problem for Ubuntu

charlie derr napisal 2007-08-01 17:37:

I would include the following as legitimate reasons to want to
build from source:

2. You need features from a newer version than is available in Debian.

Martin Pitt - Debian's PostgreSQL package maintainer makes a great job.
You won't wait too long for newest versions - even beta and rc.

Regards,
Tomasz Myrta

Joseph S <jks@selectacast.net> writes:

My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt

You *must* be joking. In Debian and Ubuntu, I've never had a tenth of
the dependency hell that you regularly hit with RPMs (though yum has
improved things somewhat). Besides 'apt' and 'rpm' aren't directly
comparable--'apt' is a wrapper around 'dpkg', which is the direct
equivalent of 'rpm'.

-Doug

On 8/1/07, Douglas McNaught <doug@mcnaught.org> wrote:

Joseph S <jks@selectacast.net> writes:

My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt

You *must* be joking. In Debian and Ubuntu, I've never had a tenth of
the dependency hell that you regularly hit with RPMs (though yum has
improved things somewhat). Besides 'apt' and 'rpm' aren't directly
comparable--'apt' is a wrapper around 'dpkg', which is the direct
equivalent of 'rpm'.

-Doug

Please don't start this. These issues are exactly why one should be
looking at an ENTERPRISE OS for a server. Fedora, ubuntu, etc... are
not enterprise OSes, and any discussion of such issues are certainly
off-topic for this mailing list. An enterprise OS has all of the
dependency issues ironed out already.

Incidentally, I really think that all of the "apt lovers" out there
jumped to Debian in the days before tools like yum existed, and have
not been paying attention to the changes made since. You are correct
that yum handles most of the dependency issues, and it is certainly on
par with apt in any modern system.

Joseph S wrote:

I just moved one of my desktops and my laptop from Fedora 6 to Unbuntu
7.04 because Fedora lacked hardware support that Unbuntu and my Fedora
machines had all sorts of problems like sound dropping out and machines
locking up. (Also the Fedora installers are terrible).

My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt

Heh, see, this is what I meant by "you won't get the same answer twice".
:) Personally, one of the big selling features of Debian (and Ubuntu)
was how much better /I/ found 'apt-get'/'aptitude'/'synaptic' over
'up2date'/'yum'.

You may want to download all the popularly recommended distributions and
play around with them to see which suits your fancy.

The major distributions I would suggest (in no particular order) you
play with:
- RHEL (if you can afford it)
- CentOS
- Debian

Ubuntu is not really appropriate as a server, ditto with FC. Their focus
is too much on the desktop (not bad, just not appropriate here). SuSe is
in the dog house with the OSS community right now and that could
translate into serious support troubles down the road (when did you last
see anyone use Caldera? :) ).

I somewhat agree with Brian's argument of using enterprise-grade
distros, however I think that his particular argument is a little
strict. If you have a healthy budget, then definitely go with a
backed-distro. However if, like many of us, you want very good
reliability without a (heafty if any) price tag, versions like CentOS
and my fav. Debian are mature, tried and tested.

I would never have any qualms recommending some distros as servers that
don't have direct "commercial" suppliers. It's like PostgreSQL vs
MySQL... The formal has a very strong community that makes it viable,
where MySQL has the added benefit of direct paid support, should you
want it. (Ignoring technical differences, please).

Play around and choose what you like.

Madi

"Brian Mathis" <brian.mathis@gmail.com> writes:

Please don't start this. These issues are exactly why one should be
looking at an ENTERPRISE OS for a server. Fedora, ubuntu, etc... are
not enterprise OSes, and any discussion of such issues are certainly
off-topic for this mailing list. An enterprise OS has all of the
dependency issues ironed out already.

Like Debian? BTW, HP has provided enterprise Debian support for a
while now. I think Ubuntu will be there soon, but as you say the
track record isn't there yet.

Incidentally, I really think that all of the "apt lovers" out there
jumped to Debian in the days before tools like yum existed, and have
not been paying attention to the changes made since. You are correct
that yum handles most of the dependency issues, and it is certainly on
par with apt in any modern system.

Mostly agree; I was just staggered that anyone could consider bare RPM
(and the OP didn't mention yum or apt/rpm) as superior to apt on
Debian/Ubuntu.

-Doug

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Joseph S wrote:

My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt

This is drfiting off-topic for this list, but this statement is so odd I
can't let it go unchallenged. You must have some odd criteria for
"better" or run into something quite unusual, because it's rare one finds
people suggesting a preference for rpm over apt. I've spent countless
hours of my life stuggling with rpm over the last decade, and it's only
recently using it has become a more bearable situation due to better
dependency tools such as yum. apt is rarely hard to deal with. I'm sure
you've got a story as to how you decided rpm is better than apt, but I
wouldn't agree and I think you'll find it a difficult opinion to defend.

2) It doesn't include xen support like Fedora does

Ubuntu has had Xen packages available since the 6.10 release:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XenVirtualMachine

But my big gripe is that it won't let me run 32 bit apps on my 64 bit
system, which means a lot of firefox plugins don't work.

32-bit apps not building/running correctly on a 64 bit installation is not
a problem limited to Ubuntu; it's an equally messy problem on all Linux
distributions, and the workarounds for each are similar. On the topic of
Firefox plug-ins:

Fedora/RHEL:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-flash-java-realplayer-under-64bit-firefox.html

Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1174435

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD