Re: Linux Distribution Recomendation

[Ansgar -59cobalt- Wiechers <bugtraq () planetcobalt net>]

On 2004-03-02 Alvin Oga wrote:
> > 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.
>
>       debian distro ... you gotta like command line features
>               - too klutsy for newbies to use
>               - too far behind on the "latest releases" imho

I beg to differ on this one.

Sure Debian takes some getting used to, but IMHO the distro is pretty
much straightforward, so you can get a feel how the stuff works, when
reading thru scripts/configfiles. When having a look at SuSE and Redhat,
I had the impression that they were obfuscating the system too much in
the attempt to make it more usable to newbies (I may be wrong on this
though).

The stable branch is really far behind as you say, but when they say
"stable" they mean it. All the security-related fixes get backported,
too, so for any business-related server Debian would be my choice. If
one needs to be more bleeding-edge, he could switch to one of the other
branches (testing, unstable).

With respect to management of the system: Debian does not come with
fancy administration tools. You have to read the man pages and edit the
configfiles and that's it (I would expect any admin of business-related
servers to be able to do that anyway). Installing software and updates
OTOH is very easy, thanks to apt. For getting a Debian up-to-date all
you need to do is run "apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade", which may
be automated thru a cron job.

The real issue for the OP may be that Debian updates are not maintained
by a company but by the respective package maintainer (which means by a
member of the community, since Debian is a community project).

Regards
Ansgar Wiechers

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