[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Ken Hough]

Martyn Welch wrote:
> I have managed to get a debian/testing (sarge?) box up and running at uni and 
> it seems stable, it uses the 2.4.26 kernel. I guess it would be best to stay 
> with the 2.4.x tree for a little longer for servers.

I would hope that it does appear stable in the short term.

Why stay with 2.4.x? Version 2.6.x is pretty well tried now and is 
widely reported to be OK. It is said to have some benefits over 2.4.x in 
terms of speed, hardware support, etc. If you are concerned about 
stability/etc, why go for a distro that's a major update that's not yet 
proved in the field?

Ken

> 
> I'm against both Mandrake and SUSE for this box, too graphically orientated. 
> This is a web server, it doesn't need X, in fact it would be far better if it 
> didn't. Most of the Mandrake and SUSE tools require X and probably the GTK 

NOT TRUE! With SuSE, you can choose to do a non graphical install and 
select to install without X. YAST works well on a text only terminal 
(via ncurses).

Ken



> libraries as well, most of the useful tools will be useless from the command 
> line hence I would favour Debian or Fedora. However I have read many reviews 
> of Fedora core 2 which have been less than positive.

As I've mantioned previously, you can hack SuSE from the command line if 
you so choose. I do, but for anything non-trivial I use YAST.

Ken

> 
> If nothing critical comes up I can try and take Wed afternoon off if anyone is 
> interested in doing some stuff then?

Would like to help, but am busy this week. Good luck.

Ken Hough