[Sderby] Linux lap top but running server apps

[David Jolley]

David Williamson at Varilink wrote:

>  
> Checking out Red Hat now it seems to have gone down a separate 
> offerings route for server and workstation. This leaves me confused as 
> to which way I should be going on my brand shiny new lap top. Guess I 
> could always stick with my 7.1 disks but I reckon I ought to be 
> looking to upgrade.

In my humble opinion, there's no reason at all to have anything other 
than a workstation install on a laptop.  Don't think of the servers 
running making it a "server" machine.  If it's primary use is 
development, I'd suggest installing workstation, then getting the apache 
RPM (or source, if you're brave) and installing that on top of the 
workstation install.  Likewise PHP.  Unlike MS products, there is no 
differentiation between server and workstation installs except for the 
level of support that you'll get from the helplines - there's *no* 
connection throttling on the workstation install of a RedHat system.
As well as this, Apache, once installed, just keeps going.  At least in 
my experience.  This'll mean you only have to watch for security updates 
to apache (and PHP) and manually install them.  10 minutes admin every 
week, which as you know, you should be doing anyway :)
On this note, staying with 7.1 might come up and bite you eventually; 
there may come a point where the website you design just *needs* PHP 
10.5.1 and apache 6, and RH7.1 won't give you it.  Of course, you can 
still install them yourself, but you may as well run up-to-date 
everything, just in case there's an exploit that hasn't been patched.
As well as that, of course, you don't get shiny new kernels with 
impressively engineered schedulers in them on RH7.1 - the 2.6 kernels 
absolutely *fly* on recent hardware, over and above previous kernels...

>  
> Any advice?

Install Debian :)

Cheers

Dave.