[LBo] best distro for a server install

[Niki Kovacs]

Tim George a écrit :
> 
> I have a couple of annoyances with the RedHat servers:
> RedHat Enterprise is more reliant on GUI based tools and installs X by
> default.
> Some potentially very useful packages are not available direct from
> RedHat.
> When installing packages, you are sometimes asked to 'insert a CD'
> which is not easy from 80 miles away. There's no workaround except
> copying all the CD images, and mounting them loopback, or in my case
> using a special piece of hardware (DRAC card) that allows me to mount
> the CD drive of my PC onto the server across the network.
> 
CentOS is an exact clone of RHEL (that is: minus the artwork). I always 
start from a very minimal system which gives me not much more than a 
bash shell and SSH access. Then, I configure various addon repos which I 
trust (rpmforge, for example), and manage my system with Yum (which 
works well since 4.0). For the odd unavailable package (mpd, libshout, 
...), I choose SRPMs from Fedora core 6, and they always build well on 
CentOS 5.0.

I made some detailed descriptions of install process and package 
administration on my site http://linux.kikinovak.net, but it's in french.

Are you sure RHEL installs X by default? A friend of mine is running our 
university server on RHEL 4, and there's no X around.

Plus, RHEL is one of the rare distros where GUI tools won't get in your 
way when you edit things in /etc/sysconfig by hand.

cheers,

Niki Kovacs