[Durham] Variations of debian

[Richard Mortimer]

Andy,

On 11/07/2012 19:48, andrew wrote:
> Saying that Im considering the following distro's to have a play with next:
>

I use a combination of Debian Stable and Ubuntu Server depending on my 
mood at time of install. Notes below.


> Fedora
> Debian Testing

I wouldn't really consider this on a server (well not on one I care too 
much about anyway). I know its pretty reasonable but for production 
servers I just don't want any surprises.

Debian Stable - I find this generally top notch and it works well. I've 
got a few servers that have never been reinstalled in over 5 years. The 
dist-upgrade mechanism works pretty well. I did have some fun upgrading 
a few years ago before mounting via uuid was the norm.

Also add onto that the fact that Debian covers all sorts of wierd 
architectures (Sparc and various ARM boxes) and it meets my needs pretty 
well.

The only real niggle that I have with Stable is the fact that the old 
stable distro is only supported for 12 months after a new one is 
released. That can make it a pain for scheduling upgrades at 
quiet/convenient times but for the price it is a small niggle!

> Ubuntu server 12.04
A few of the more recent installs I've done have used Ubuntu. It has 
many of the upsides of Debian but also has a 5 year LTS support term and 
also has 6 monthly upgrades for lesser (experimental) servers.

I have found that Ubuntu is less stable than Debian (especially on the 
desktop). Some QA seems to go out of the window to meet the release 
timescales but certainly with the LTS release that settles down in the 
first 3 months after release.

I've been playing a lot with LXC containers on the latest Ubuntu 
releases. I'm finding that they are working really well as lightweight 
environments for database mirroring (live backup) and server 
rsync/cloning rather than trying to shoehorn things into a OS install.

>
> Anyone have any preference between these and any reason for such preference?

Overally I'd go with either Debian or Ubuntu they are very similar in 
day to day usage.

Regards

Richard


>
> Just looking for opinions before I rip arch off and bang a new distro on.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andy
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