[ale] Small Office Server Distro Recommendation

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri April 21 2006 09:02, Bob Toxen wrote:
> I would either go with one of the major Distros, such as Fedora or SuSE
> and enable the automatic updates or go with Slackware as a smaller yet
> well-maintained Distro.
>
> An advantage with Fedora or SuSE is that any Linux person can take
> care of them so you won't "own" the problem for the rest of your life.
> An advantage of SuSE (if you buy the CDs) is that you get real support.
> I'd definitely avoid BSD as not as good as Linux and not as easy or
> friendly to deal with.
>

I am kind of surprised to see that... you know, FreeBSD does pretty well 
handle many of the things that you would think would be "hard to deal 
with," and an added bonus is that FreeBSD == FreeBSD == FreeBSD, whereas 
Linux !=  Linux != Linux, and so with a Linux distro, you may not know what 
it is you're getting in terms of the base system, system layout, or package 
management system.

FreeBSD's way of doing things makes a good deal more sense, where kernel and 
userland releases are coordinated, and it is robust enough that once you 
configure the server, it will be staying that way for a good, long time.  
There is even a rather nice NAS distribution that runs with FreeBSD and in 
something like under 20 MiB installed -- http://www.freenas.org/ -- A very 
nice project.  Has a web interface, so you don't even have to worry that 
it's BSD.  I happen to be of the mind that BSD makes an *excellent* server, 
and Linux is an *excellent* workstation system (though it can make a good 
server, too).

(Note:  I'm certainly not saying that Linux is bad.  I'm merely pointing out 
that Linux can be more confusing and difficult from the perspective of 
somebody new, because there are a number of quirks in the way it works, and 
the software isn't "standard" with a Linux install, and sometimes not even 
within the history of a distribution.  BSD comes with the BSD system, the 
BSD kernel; man pages are up to date; most of the same add-on software can 
be used, such as CUPS; and there are no differences from one FreeBSD 6.0's 
userland installation setup and another one, unless the person who 
installed it intentionally made it different.  It's consistent, which is 
something that Linux definately lacks.)

	- Mike
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