Recommended Distro for Web Applications

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 08:06:31PM +0000, kirblam at comcast.net wrote:
> My company is making some of its first moves into looking at Linux capabilities for web applications. We're a 95%+ Microsoft shop (my personal experience is more broad, stop throwing things...) 
> 
> Anyway, my boss is pulling for a Red Hat license to get started. I'm not sure what you really get with RH beside support that would make it better/worse than other distros. I'm aware of the issues of excessive packages that used to be trademark of previous RH versions.
> 
> For app development, you can assume we'll be experimenting with tomcat, eclipse, php, maybe mono. It's probably a given we'll run some version of apache.

Start with the really non-flashy things: mail (if your boss
insists on keeping an Exchange server, put the Linux box in
front and have it do spam and virus filtering), DNS, ntp. Move
on from there to Samba for file sharing and print services.

Distribution matters mostly in three areas:

- Will someone trade money for hand-holding? How much of each?
- Is it kept up to date with good security patches and a sane
  system administration system?
- How friendly is the installer?

-dsr-

-- 
Nothing to sig here, move along.