Security Basics mailing list archives
Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation
From: "Brian Whitehead" <bwhitehead () whiteheadconsulting com>
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 00:56:14 -0600
Honestly this is kind of a loaded question. There are several good distributions and all of them depend on personal preferences. I personally prefer Debian, but I primarily use Red Hat ES at work. The only reason I stuck with Red Hat at work was because of place in the industry. More software and hardware vendors support it and certify their products against it. Every distribution has its good and bad and it takes playing with each to find the one you like. I've used just about all of the well know distributions and have some opinions about them. A lot of distributions are simply just customized versions of one of the mainstream distributions like RedHat or Debian. These are some pros and cons to some of the more popular ones. Red Hat - Pros: Ease of use, industry standard, commercial support Cons: commercial support isn't that great (ie.. just because you're paying doesn't mean they're going to solve your problem), they are starting to smell a little like Microsoft with their licensing. Only the Fedora version is free now, you have to pay for the RedHat versions now. Debian - Pros: Very stable and secure, one of the largest selections of applications, very easy to update and upgrade with 'apt' Cons: Always a little behind and very slow to release new versions (they still use the 2.2 kernel by default although 2.4 is available) SuSE - Pros: Industry standard in Germany, now owned by Novell, probably the second or third industry standard in the U.S., a lot of vendors are starting to support and certify their products on it, one of the better distributions for supporting a lot of different hardware. Cons: Things are a little different if you're used to Red Hat. It's great to have aliases and functions, but you'll never see your environment variables by typing 'set' because a gazillion lines of aliases and functions fly by. (Just one of my annoyances with SuSE), some other minor bugs with dependencies. Mandrake - Pros: Dumbed down for the new users with lots and lots of eye candy. Comes with every options under the sun. Cons: Dumbed down for the new users with lots and lots of eye candy. Comes with every options under the sun. Some of the customizations are annoying and make an experienced Linux person look like a newbie trying to figure out what they've done. It primarily depends on the purpose of the system as to which I would recommend. If this is going to be a production system that you are going to need support and want applications that are certified to run on it then Red Hat will probably be the best solution, although not my favorite. If you want a good stable secure system that can be stripped down or have everything and be easy to manage, check out Debian. Brian W. Kareem Mahgoub (kareem () thewayout net) wrote:
Hello list, I would like to have recommendation for a Linux Distribution satisfying the following: a- Secure enough for Buisness applications ( i.e. Mail Server) b- Kind of Easy to manage and use. c- Available Updates maintained by the production company. Any help will be very much appreciated Best Regards, Kareem Mahgoub
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Current thread:
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation, (continued)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Alvin Oga (Mar 08)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 11)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation matt (Mar 12)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 12)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Michael Gale (Mar 08)
- RE: Linux Distribution Recomendation Rod Trent (Mar 09)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 11)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Byron Sonne (Mar 09)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 04)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Vincent (Mar 08)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 11)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Vincent (Mar 15)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 16)
- Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation Peter Busser (Mar 08)