I'm back! (and I bring linux stuffs)
Anyway i'm back with some advocacy to kick off my re-posting.
Most servers, as we know, run on redhat. However, redhat is a pretty ugly distribution in my eyes, it's bulky, rpm is far from the best spec and it's actually hard to learn for newbies as it sugar coats a lot.
My favourite two distributions would be the following
1. Gentoo - A fantastically maintained and documented distribution, designed around the portage system which by default compiles every application, the installer also (depending on which type of install you choose) can compile even the basic utilities (binutils, gcc, libc, ncurses etc) from scratch optimised for your architecture. Smart dependancy monitoring via the USE variable and customisable packages with greater ease than debian or redhat means this is my favourite distribution of all time.
2. Debian - An equally well maintained distribution, debian's flaws exist in that although the 3 repositories are a good idea, testing isn't up to date enough to be secure, stable is too old to provide the latest features and unstable is slightly too unstable. This makes it difficult to run a high performance and secure system without excessive maintainance. However, apt-get with dselect or aptitude is a formidable packaging system, binary based so per-system optimisations aren't in-place, you can download sources regardless, it's a very good distro, it just doesn't feel as polished as Gentoo
Right, that's my advocacy, what's your favourite linux build and why? I'll be answering as many questions in this thread as I can for potential linux newbies.
Oh and just to clarify, unfortunately my main machine is still Windows XP but I run Gentoo 2.6.0-test-6 on my laptop (with a patched kernel and patched xfree 4.3.99.14)
