Server Distributions

[Jonathan Hutchins]

As I said to Dave Hull, I have some clients who are still running RH 7.x 
servers, and I'm at a loss for what to tell them about upgrading.

They can't afford RedHat's Enterprize subscriptions.  If they could, they'd 
probably go with Microsoft because there are more prople who are familiar 
with it.  (They don't have to go looking for linux geeks.)

When RedHat changed it's policies they promised that they would document the 
procedure for upgrading from 7.x and 9.x to Fedora, but I've never been able 
to find those documents.

I have had too many bad experiences with SuSE's package updates (particularly 
KDE) to recommend the downloadable version for a server.  I feel the 
purchased version is not current enough given the price, and I would not be 
comfortable recommending it given the quality of the downloadable version.

Gentoo is nice, but either you let it get behind or you risk upgrades that 
will break things.  The etc-update system does not adequately discriminate 
between files that are normally customized for the local installation and 
files that are not usually changed by end users, leading to a lot of work 
sorting out configurations every time you update.  Gentoo also has wierd, 
non-standard configuration issues - like the DHCP client over-writing the NTP 
configuration by default.

Mandrake is a good desktop distro, but I've never run it as a server, and 
there are issues with packages such as not participating in KDE's binary 
distributions, not making bug-fix updates available, update mirrors being 
chronicly unavailable, etc.

I mean to try Debian, but am reluctant to rely on source code packages without 
a package manangement system.  It's not clear to me that you can do a 
complete debian install and stay within the apt system.  Can you?

I'll be interested in the list's comments on this, and other suggestions.