Win ME or Linux?

Anon

I was wondering if it was better to develope PHP applications in Win ME or Linux? If it was linux, which distribution would be better Redhat or Debian or Mandrake or Slackware?

Anon

debian is a good software o/s for web servering. red hat would probably be easier to start off with, not sure.

to create php scripts, you can use notepad in Win ME and then upload it to a unix server.

Anon

I'd definately go for linux to run php scripts on.
Redhat is extremely easy to install. I gather that SuSe is also quite easy and userfriendle, but I have not used it.

About editing; I use a samba fileshare so I can edit scripts on my testserver directly from my windows workstation.

Anon

I'd choose Linux for it's stability. Debian, Slack, RedHat, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Suse, and a couple others are all fine distros.

For databases look at running mysql and / or postgresql. Between the two of them you can do just about anything you'd want on a medium to small machine.

Anon

I'm going to vote linux also, but if you dont know linux at all, it may hamper your learning of php. Thats not really a bad thing because linux can be allot of fun (yet somehow still very irritating..lol) to learn.

Anywho; I would recomend Mandrake to a new Linux user, It's EASY to install and has some nice administration features that will help you get your box up and running right.

Thats just my opinion though.

Anon

I use a win32 version of Apache with PHP, Perl etc installed on a Windows NT machine for development. You can quite easily put MySQL on it as well. If you're in a group that uses Windows it's probably easier to stick with that. The Apache group says that stability and performance are bad under win32 and there are some differences between PHP as a module and as CGI but I've had no problems whatsoever. Apache on my aging NT machine seems to be more stable than the IIS 4 we used for our live site.

Anon

I understand Xitami can run php, and I used it back in my NT days. It's very fast and efficient, and very easy to setup and administer.

OmniHTTPD is almost as fast, and even easier to install, and I remember seeing it used with php somewhere.

If you're gonna do serious database work, THEN look at a linux box for the database, or as a minimum NT. 95/98/ME are just not stable enough for a heavily worked database.