[thelist] Building A linux Server

[Alan McCoy]

=> Mandrake is probably about the easiest distro to install and 
=> is probably 
=> even easier then windows XP. Once you have the ISOs, head on over to

+1 on the Mandrake recommendation. We've been using RedHat servers for a few
years and I'm just about fed up with the state of their RPM updates. For
example, the highest RPM of PHP that was available (up until a few weeks
ago, I believe) was 4.2.2. We needed to upgrade to 4.3.x because we wanted
to use some of gdlib's new features. I ended up having to recompile PHP and
a few other packages from source to get the upgrade to work. And forget
about being able to keep all of the KDE stuff up to date with the current
KDE release.

Think I'll stick with Mandrake (or SUSE or Debian) for my next Linux
install. Of course, the Knoppix distro is great for trying things out. I
*would* suggest trying MandrakeMove, which is a CD-based distro similar to
Knoppix, but you'd have to purchase the USB key (comes with the boxed CD) if
you want to be able to save anything. However, if you're just trying it out,
it may be worth downloading.

Alan