What Linux Distribution?

[mlse]

Hi,

I have a requirement to install an Apache 2.0 server running PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0 on an as yet undecided Linux distribution.

The server will be for my own development purposes only, and I will be resurrecting an old 1.4Gb Pentium 4, 400Mhz FSB, integrated network card and 256Mb RDRAM (yes, it really is that old!).

In a nutshell, does anyone have a recommendation (from experience) of a good Linux distro to install?

My ideal requirements for the distro would be:

# Vanilla kernel (This is very important! I have used RedHat 9.0, which runs a very non-vanilla kernel - in particular glibc is non-vanilla under RH9.0, often leading to all sorts of problems whenever one wishes to perform a package upgrade).

# kernel support for pthreads and mmap.

# Ships with Apache 2.0 running PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0 as standard.

TIA,

Mike.

[firepages]

Not really sure how a generic kernel affects packages in decent distros these days .. never had any issues with ubuntu , I have just deployed an ubuntu dapper server which after apt-get'ting the usual suspects leaves me with PHP 5.1.2 , MySQL 5.0.22, Apache 2.0.55

I run 2.6.17-11 generic on my workstation (so I get all the cores ;)) and have compiled PHP5.2 CLI without issue for PHP-GTK

..anyway, the short answer was ubuntu ;)

[ralph l mayo]

AFAIK, all the major distros use their own set of kernel patches, so I'm seconding Ubuntu or maybe original flavor Debian. I've got an Ubuntu laptop I've used the package manager to upgrade with for 3 major releases now with no ill effects.

It's currently at Apache 2.2.3/MySQL 5.0.32/PHP 5.2.1. There are some 2.1 packages but it doesn't look like Apache 2.0 is still available in fiesty.

Be sure to do the minimal server install and use aptitude to install only what you need since it's legacy hardware.

[gsnedders]

I for one have a tendency to use NetBSD on truly old hardware, though on something as new as a P4, I'd use FreeBSD, Gentoo, or Debian.

And yes, I'm aware that half of those suggestions aren't Linux.

[Jeroentje]

I used Centos for a several of time, and installed them on 5 various webservers back in the days i use to work at a hosting company. They did pretty good actually.

[mlse]

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the advice!

I will try ubuntu I think. So long as it supports my legacy hardware and can run Apache 2.X with PHP 5.X and MySQL 5.X then I'm happy!

The problem with the hardware is that it is one of the original P4s running RD RAM - the motherboard is a little strange as a result - The motherboards were completely redeisgned for DDR RAM. I think the original P4 motherboards were one of Intel's little hiccups!

Mike.

[oracleguy]

The problem with the hardware is that it is one of the original P4s running RD RAM - the motherboard is a little strange as a result - The motherboards were completely redeisgned for DDR RAM. I think the original P4 motherboards were one of Intel's little hiccups!

You shouldn't have any problems. The only thing really different on those boards is the memory and Linux shouldn't have any problems with it. I have Gentoo Linux running on a 1Ghz Pentium III which has RD RAM and it works perfectly fine. You can run Linux on much older hardware if you want too.

[ghell]

That machine isn't old at all, I just installed a ubuntu dapper desktop on a 500mhz cpu, 128mb 100mhz ram, 10gb hdd... it wouldnt even run the dapper alternate installer, I had to use breezy alternate then upgrade (and I couldn't upgrade to edgy because i couldnt get the ess audiodrive es1869f (es18xx driver) working on edgy so it had no sound unless I used dapper. Even that machine wasn't THAT old.

However, I would not try do use a ubuntu server, they can be pretty unreliable from my experience (I don't know if thats just ubuntu or debian as a whole). My distro of choice for the desktop is fedora, but you have already said you don't want rhel. Fedora is also a pretty big distro and I find that if you want to remove some of the default packages in anaconda when you install, the system can also become unstable when it really shouldn't.

You shouldn't really have to worry about anything that ships with the latest versions of those apps as standard, as long as they use some kind of ports or package management system then you can put them on easily enough. If you really want a stable server that uses barely any resources, you plan on installing and then leaving the server pretty much unchanged and you are comfortable with unix or linux, you should probably use freebsd or netbsd.

[firepages]

they can be pretty unreliable from my experience
not in mine, I administer 3 debian sarge servers and 1 ubuntu (dapper) server.
(note I have previously used RH & RedHat enterprise servers (and still do on some VPS's) and have had no `reliability` issues there either )

apt-get is what sold me to anything debian that and debians keep it safe/simple philosophy which defaults to only known stable software, for anything more up to date (PHP/mysql5 etc) you are better off switching to ubuntu since you can still use stable debian packages .. and if I have learnt nothing else I have learnt to keep to prebuilt packages if and when possible.

[GJay]

ubuntu edgy doesn't have php 5.2 in the repositories (it wasn't backported last I checked either...) so you'd have to use Feisty, which isn't released until thursday (pre-releases are available and I've found them good enough for use on my desktop, but could understand not wanting it on a server...)
Debian Etch was released last week (Debian releases are given a *lot* more testing and QA than ubuntu ones, so a new release is a fairly sure bet) and that does have 5.2 available.

[ghell]

not in mine, I administer 3 debian sarge servers and 1 ubuntu (dapper) server.
(note I have previously used RH & RedHat enterprise servers (and still do on some VPS's) and have had no `reliability` issues there either )

apt-get is what sold me to anything debian that and debians keep it safe/simple philosophy which defaults to only known stable software, for anything more up to date (PHP/mysql5 etc) you are better off switching to ubuntu since you can still use stable debian packages .. and if I have learnt nothing else I have learnt to keep to prebuilt packages if and when possible.I'm not entirely sure where the instability was, it may have only been in a particular version of a partiular library. I ran a dapper server for a while as a game server and found that some of the games would randomly crash (one game in particular crashed a lot, but nowhere near as much as that poorly written server crashed on windows server 2003 x64) on that box but not on other distros. After looking around I found that on some of those game's forums using a debian based server was advised against (particularly on that one that crashed a lot on windows too)

I also had problems with dapper detecting my 52 in 1 internal card reader (which uses an internal usb header) as 4 hard drives, and more often than not trying to boot from at least one of the empty drives instead of my nf4 raid0 as they kept moving around as the /dev/sd*/ between boots. Many other people had this problem with usb storage plugged in on dapper desktop bootup (some people on ubuntuforum were even suggesting to unplug all usb devices including keyboards and mice :confused: ). However, I think that usb problem has been solved. I don't know if the instability I was experiencing on dapper server has been fixed in edgy or feisty, or just in a package update, if at all.

I find yum and apt pretty similar anyway. Yum in fc6 can be unstable when updating hundreds of packages sometimes though. I think apt installs dependencies by first installing everything with 0 dependencies, and itterating up or something, which seems weird to me but it seems to work.

[mlse]

I ended up going with Debian in the end ... what a difference from Red Hat 9! netinst is great! apt-get is great! Call me naive if you will, but I've just discovered the wonders of modern Linux! :D

[ghell]

In modern red hat there is software similar to apt-get etc :)

I'm probably going to end up going back to Fedora 7 (pretty much red hat for desktops rather than RHEL for servers, if you have been on RH9 long enough not to already know that hehe) once I have my minimal 64bit spin good enough. I tried out Ubuntu Feisty for the last couple of months but I have a few gripes with it (like libssl.so exists but if anything wants to use it it has to specify 0.9.7 or 0.9.8 so some things just won't work right, such as msn 7.0 under wine [no, I don't want to use gaim/pidgin or aMsn ;)], which is hard enough to get working in the first place without this nonsense)

I'm looking forward to trying out my F7 absolute minimal spin (or as I call it, "linux without all the crap" ;)) outside of vmware. Thank god for pungi and revisor!

[firepages]

Call me naive if you will
nope, so many linux distro's fall over at the package management stage that we get a bit sus' about success stories , I now have SUSE linux on my acer lappy and whilst its quite cool YaST fails to update due to dependency issues (on an unmodified out of the box install ;))

I am sure there is an easy fix... but at the same time I have just built and deployed a pair of DNS + Radius servers on Debian Etch ... really it was so easy its embarrassing :) , apt-get has got it !

just remembered : could not get the dnssec-enable extension working unless I wanted to build bind+extensions myself .. which I do not really want to do, so not a flawless install ..but good enough~

[firepages]

In modern red hat there is software similar to apt-get etc
..same with SuSE (see above)... but (and this is just my experience) the only package manager that comes close to debian/apt-get would be yum on redhat which was the only way I was ever comfortable with RH package management.

such as msn 7.0 under wine
Wine is IMO more trouble than it is worth, especially when you can simply run the whole OS in vmware or use some application server etc.

[ghell]

I have problems with yum on fedora when it has a LOT of updates to do (say when I was looking after my fiancé in hospital for a month and come back to find i have 400MiB of updates) because of dependencies. I end up updating all the packages that start with an a.. then all the packages that start with a b.. etc, just to get it to not lock up in the middle and leave packages corrupted (it particularly likes to leave HAL broken for some reason). apt-get seems not to have this problems simply because it has a simpler method of processing packages (I think it it something like all the packages with 0 dependencies, then all the packages with 1, or something like that) but I still like yum better for smaller, more regular updates :)

You can put apt-get on fedora anyway, but I don't really see the point when yum is good enough.

Yea, I am running windows live messenger under vmware at the moment (because I just happen to have a virtual 64bit windows server on here for testing for 64bit specific problems before deploying to my real server) but it seems to lock up for a few seconds every single time a new person talks to me so it needs to automatically open a new conversation window or someone sends me a custom emoticon that I haven't already downloaded from them. etc. My sound stuff doesn't really like running through vmware either which leaves me able to send and view webcam but not voice (even though it has detected my camera's microphone, I can't actually select it from any lists, for example)

What I really hate is that I can't get any help running msn under wine, although I know people use 7.0 under wine, because every time I ask someone tells me to use gaim/pidgin (which has pretty much none of msns best features and is only really any good if you use more than just msn to talk, such as aim, yahoo, google etc) or amsn (which as far as I can see is the only client that can actually send custom emoticons, but is just painful to use). I also get a lot of replies telling me that msn was the reason they moved away from windows but considering the limitations of linux IM software that actually lets you talk to people who aren't on linux, I don't see how that can be the case.

[firepages]

You can put apt-get on fedora anyway
sorry, I keep saying `apt-get` but its just a front end for dpkg and the whole .deb debian packaging system which IMO appears more stable than some others.

I have had uninstallable packages from time to time but usually only from non-free packages or packages converted from rpm's.

My only gripe would probably be with the Ubuntu update manager which keeps on trying to install kernels I do not want, and whilst you can stop them from installing ... there is no option in the update manager (that I can find) to `don't ask me again` ala windows.

[ghell]

Yea I just disable the update daemons, they always just annoy me.

Ubuntu likes to give me kernels and then not let me take the old ones off. I end up manually hiding them from grub just so that I don't have to look at the huge list every time I turn on.

Isn't apt-get actually intended to be a back end for software such as synaptic. I find that it has some annoying things about it that you just cant stop, like say I want to install something thats 200KiB to download. It doesn't give you the option to cancel, because the download is soo small you must want it. It tells you the suggested packages still though. It reminds me of the old darts gameshow Bullseye, where after people lose he says "and heres what you could have won: ...". There is an option to always say yes, there is an option to simulate so that it doesn't actually affect anything, but there is nothing to always prompt, which just seems weird to me :P

I quite like RPMs but I don't see much in it between debs and rpms anyway.

Really its all just a matter of personal preference anyway. I know a lot of linux users who seem to want to make their own lives difficult because they pretty much believe computers shouldn't be usable by idiots, as idiot users are the reasons for almost all computer problems in my experience :). I like a system that gives me control while making a good try of doing what it thinks I want in the first place (like the address bar in windows vista's explorer, I can go back directories like in linux but I can also easily get the whole path up for copying it or typing my own, and i can also go to subdirectories quickly with the little down arrow thing :))

[firepages]

like the address bar in windows vista's explorer
hmmm I don't like the vista explorer interface (at least the default), what happened to the 'up' arrow for going up a directory, and the drop down address bar showing the path if you have the folders pane closed ? ... not sure why they fixed some things that were not broken :)

I think there is a way to configure via apt.conf the behaviour of auto downloading trivial packages though I have never tried.

apt is the backend for synaptic and probably dselect? but at the end of the day the real work is done via dpkg, which, again I like a lot.

I know a lot of linux users who seem to want to make their own lives difficult
lol not me :) , I like it easy, and from playing with lots of distro's and constantly getting frustrated with one thing or another I discovered debian seemed to work for me and made my life easier... however you are of course right in that its all about personal preference, the things I like in Debian might annoy others who prefer $flavour_x

[ghell]

Yea as far as I can see theres no point using anything other than red hat or debian based linux (unless its some weird situation like you want to put damn small linux on a 64mb usb flash drive or a smoothwall box or whatever) I've never even tried suse though :)

I don't think you can change that setting, I was looking for a few days and I'm pretty sure I would have to modify the source and recompile it. I expect frontends are supposed to run simulations etc and get more data before actually doing anything, but to me it seems like a weird behaviour to automatically download it without asking if it is small, and not very linux like :rolleyes:

For vista explorer you can still press backspace to go up, otherwise you can just click the button for any directory higher than you are in (including the current directory's parent) just like you can in nautilus. The only difference there is that nautilus also lets you go back down quickly by not removing the buttons until you go somwhere else, but I suppose if you want to go back to the directory you just went up from, you can just press back :P There are dropdowns on any of those buttons for submenus and if you click anywhere on the address bar that isn't a button it shows you the text path and lets you edit it. There is a dropdown at the end but I don't know what it does. The very first dropdown before the first directory in the list next to the icon contains things like your home directory, documents, network, recycle bin etc if that was what you were looking for (or at least it does for me, it is actually just what's on your desktop but I like to have lots of crap on my desktop)