would be best for a beginner in Linuxx that wants to make his own server? what kind of opensource server software is out there?
Hi.... For people new to Linux you can first run live cd's of the distribution you are interested in to see how it works Knoppix is a good live cd distro. A user friendly distro is UBUNTU great community and helpfull forum good to run as a desktop distro.For the desktop simply mepis is also userfriendly.For a server there are specialized distro's out there like clarckconnect and centos. topologilinux can run from within windows and is easy to install.... It also depends on what you plan to do with the distro fedora has great support for new software and is a fast distro ,debian is nice to use also but involves some tweaking <that is why I like it >, slackware is very stable and is also good for learning about llinux at some point all distro's have their pros and cons hope it helps http://distrowatch.com/mepis http://distrowatch.com/ubuntu http://distrowatch.com/4165 http://distrowatch.com/4164
i hate live CD's because they are slow. the CD rom drive is a bottle neck to performance. it is not a fair comparison for distros. a linux live CD will be A LOT slower than an installed linux version. for an easy server, Suse has a good package. Ubuntu is good but idk about for a server. of coarse there is always Debian and Fedora. it all depends on what you are doing with the server and your own skills.
SUSE ENTERPRISE every single time !!!! IMHO - I dont think theres a better written linux server suite out there - well not one that I can manage to tame
Mepis is the best distros I've tried. It comes as a live CD/DVD that can be pretty easily installed if you like it. I've done many Linux installs over the years only to find out after an hour or two's work that it didn't recognize all my hardware, or I didn't like it for some other reason. Knoppix, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are pretty good, too. SUSE is wonderful if you have a good system, it's always run slowly for me. Same for Red Hat. Slackware will run on a pure dog of an old system, but it can take some fiddling to get some of your hardware working. Slackware is fast and solid. I've never had a need for a server, so can't help there.
slackware uses the 2.4 kernel. it is design to work on all systems from the old 386 processors with 640k, up to huge supercomputing systems. honestly, i cant recomend slackware to anyone who doesnt know a bit about linux before-hand. it can be difficult unless you know linux. Mepis is a good distro if you want linux the easy way. there are faster disto's though. the only thing mepis is good for is running live and easy install. and btw, Linux can work with any hardware. you just need to tell it to work with the hardware. lets take the belkin 54G wifi PCMCIA card for example. it doesnt work if you just install fedora core 5, but it doesnt work if you install windows XP either. in XP you have to install a driver to get this card to work. welp, same thing in linux, you have to install the driver. there is always a driver out there for anything you just have to find it. if you cant find it there is alternatives, like 'ndiswrapper' or 'fwcutter' that will force the windows driver to work with linux. it is all about applying yourself and using google. and it's free.
I love Gentoo! It isn't a quick and easy install in one day kind of distro. Gentoo is the kind of distro that will take some time to build but is well worth it for learning purposes, I learned maybe 2 years worth of stuff in a few weeks from it and there is a full handbook =DD my favourite feature with Gentoo is portage, if you want pretty much any program all you need to do is type "emerge _______" and it builds the program on your computer =D it helps to know someone who can help you out cause it can get really frusterating when you hit a wall.
If you really want to learn indepth how linux works I would recommend Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo in that order. Otherwise, if you want to get a nice system set up quickly go with Ubuntu.
I think Debian is overrated (though I don't want to get in an argument about it guys...) and I don't know much about Slackware other than it is in depth for beginners. The thing I love about Gentoo is the manual, (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1) it's big...
I think if you are going to build a server you should go with the distros that are taken as industry standards like sun systems, novell, red hat, suse I think those distros like debian and slackware are good for experimenting with and hobbyists but people like novell, suse RH etc are making distro's for industry
There was a time when slackware was one of the most used server distro's by company's because it is stable... suse is derived from slackware....
