Recommended Distro for Web Applications

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> The main difference is that the enterprise editions come with a support 
> agreement, are very stable. For instance RHEL 3 Update 3 contains the 
> 2.4.21-27.0.2 kernel (I just installed one on an opteron and ran up2date). 

Stability comes at a cost.  At work, we are in the process of trying to 
set up a Subversion server on a Red Hat Enterprise 3 box.  We ran into 
lots of trouble because RHEL3 comes with some very old software.  In fact 
there are well-documented bugs in the particular Berkely DB they used in 
that release that they refuse to upgrade because that wouldn't be 
"stable".

In the end, we had to replace the Berkely DB and apache and one or two 
other things.  Since there are no RHEL3 RPM's of later revision 
software "floating around" as there are for other distros, we had to 
compile from tarballs for some, and grab non-RHEL3 RPM's for others.  
Either way, it's a mess.

If you want to play with Apache and all those languages, especially Mono, 
my guess is you would be much better served with a distro that comes with 
newer software.

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