"Best" version of Linux

We're using Suse 9.0 Pro on our web/email/dev server. From my experience, Linux is linux no matter what distro you use. You can go as far under the hood as you want, though each has their little tweaks. Suse's contribution is the Yast wich gives you the opportunity to take care of a lot of maintenance issues (patches, user scripts, firewall, etc) through a GUI. You can still use the command line if you want, it's not like they took it away. For a noob, its good, but if you want to learn through force, one of the other distros may be the way to go.

One really cool thing is all the open source software. Right now we run our CM through CVS on the linux server. We use tortoise to interface with CVS -- it integrates seamlessly with windows explorer. Plus, if you use Ximian, a graphical environment based on gnome, you can get the benefits of .Net emulation on you Linux box through Mono. We're in the process now of setting up "test on commit" scripts to run unit testing on the linux box after every commit of the .Net apps we developed in Visual Studio on our windows PCs.

The best part -- All the above mentioned software is available through the open source community. Which is where the "don't get hacked" comment came from. Becuase everything is open source everyone can see the code thus exposing vulnerabilites to that code making things easily hackable. The good thing -- everyone can see the code so things that are hackable are found and fixed quickly. Many eyes make safe software.

Sorry, you guys hit a subject I'm very excited about. Good luck with your linux experience. I've had nothing but good times with mine...after overcoming a small learning curve. I mentioned a lot of different stuff above...all of it can be found on the web pretty easily. That's how I found all of it. Good luck and have fun!
 
Adapter came in :)
I installed debian, heh - im desperately trying to avoid using KDE .. so im not gonna install KDE - this is just a "Safety measure" for me to force my way through and learn hardcore linux w/o distractions

I'm using this tutorial (http://www.devside.net/web/server/linux) to install my server :D. I've also set up openSSH and Putty on my comp so i can set it up remotely .. useful if you wanna browse the net and do linux stuff (e.g. view a tutorial on the web without using KDE, but using windows and putty to connect).

I've gotten so far as installing zLib.. however when i try to install openSSH, its saying perl is not found.. apt-get install perl says i have it, and i even tried reinstalling it.. but then again, openSSH is saying that perl cannot be found in a certain directory...
I"m sure ill find a workaround for that :).

Thanks you guys for your help and support.

-The Pentium Guy
 
I know this is a little late, but have you considered a bsd variant? I am currently using NetBSD (www.netbsd.org) as my subversion server. I have apache, openssl, subversion,ssh and php. All of the apache services are over ssl.

I absolutely love NetBSD, it is relatively simple to install and get up and running. I have mine running on an old amd k6-2 400Mhz with 64MB of ram. I had experimented with linux 5 years ago using redhat. I had used it as a NAT router and firewall. I found it came with too much stuff.

NetBSD has a system called pkgsrc which is basically all of the source code to all of the software you could need to run a server. If you want to install a package, say apache, flip to the apache directory in pkgsrc and run make install && make clean && make clean-depends. The thing about NetBSD is nothing is installed unless you want it.

I have been running the server for a couple of months now and I love it. I don't use any GUI becuase I like to be able to administer it remotely through an ssh shell. You learn pretty quickly how to do things.

Cheers....
 
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