Redhat or FreeBSD ??

Roger_Ramjet

It's 10 years since I did any serious UNIX work and I'm out of touch. I need to set up an intranet server and I don't have the time to play with the various new versions and choose which one to use. Does anyone have a recomendation for the best choice, and why? eg: Performance, available tools, GUI admin.

Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL

piersk

Debian

Great package management

Roger_Ramjet

Don't need packages, not a desktop machine. I need most robust and reliable intranet server Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL will be all that it runs.

piersk

Well, debian is very stable. I know a few sites that use it, for example this one

goldbug

I'd say FreeBSD, or if you must run linux... Gentoo.

FreeBSD is a breeze to setup/configure, but only if you're not scared of the command line. If you need GUIs for everything, Redhat/Fedora is a pretty painless way to go. If you don't have a problem editing a couple config files by hand in vi/ee/whatever, FreeBSD is great.

I personally run FreeBSD on all my "internal" servers at home, and it's rock-solid (only time my machines are down: power failures, kernel upgrades/rebuilds (reboot), and hardware replacement--the OS is solid), and the ports system is great to work with (although I don't use ports for Apache/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL--I prefer to roll my own compiles there)

PickledOnion

I have both and would recommend FreeBSD for any server use (beyond anything smple like a single machine setup to test webpages), and Linux (particularly Gentoo) for desktop use.

Why? In my expereince (and that is all I can talk about), FreeBSD has superior networking stability and configuration but is slower than Gentoo for 'heavy' desktop use. 12 hours a day on a computer and I do notice speed differences in opening and using progs.

So looking at your requirements - I'd say go for FreeBSD.

Roger_Ramjet

Thanks for the input. It is for an intranet server so FreeBSD it is then. I'm not afraid of command line - I'm old school mainframe operations and sys programming. In fact, I always hated winders because you had to use the mouse and waste so much time navigating the GUI. Been a long time though; I'd forgotten about VI, shudders, think I'll have to find something a bit better for text editing. Anyone got any suggestions?

goldbug

It's not the most powerful editor, but "ee" is installed by default in FreeBSD and is pretty versatile for simple editing tasks. (and of course, there is always vi)

dalecosp

ee will get you going easily enough; it's surprisingly got several features that I've never used.

Currently there are 241 programs under /usr/ports/editors, and 57 of them have the string "text" in their description. I'm sure one would do.

I was a real newby once, and someone told me "pico" was the thing. I got hooked, unfortunately (well, it's not that bad) and now:

alias | grep pico
pico     nano

So, it's "nano", which is the GNU pico (a few extra features, but I've used nano so long now I've forgotten the disadvantages of the uw one...)

And I discovered this one --- /usr/ports/editors/e3. Written in assembler, 10000 bytes (relatively tiny) and has pico, wordstar, vi, emacs and nedit style interfaces/key bindings. Small enough to build, stick in /bin in the extremely unlikely event that things ever get fubared and
/usr can't be mounted ... like Hard disk failure, I guess...

Oh, BTW ... good choice, FBSD 😃

dalecosp

ee will get you going easily enough; it's surprisingly got several features that I've never used.

Currently there are 241 programs under /usr/ports/editors, and 57 of them have the string "text" in their description. I'm sure one would do.

I was a real newby once, and someone told me "pico" was the thing. I got hooked, unfortunately (well, it's not that bad) and now:

alias | grep pico
pico     nano

So, it's "nano", which is the GNU pico (a few extra features, but I've used nano so long now I've forgotten the disadvantages of the uw one...)

Oh, BTW ... good choice, FBSD 😃