Title: Linux Server Series Part 1

This is the first part of my series on setting up a Linux Server. As the series progresses I will explain how to set-up a Linux based server starting from choosing a Linux distribution through to choosing hardware and setting up, or upgrading to that latest version of, the likes of:

for a small home sized network.

This first part of the series deals with choosing a distribution. The next part will cover choosing hardware and the third installing and setting up the Linux distribution. After that I will look at configuring the packages listed above, starting with Samba.

It doesn't make a great of deal difference to me which distribution of Linux I use for the server and there are many to choose from so I posted a query to accu-general to try to get an idea of which distribution people are using and what they would like to see the article based around Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat, Debian and Slackware came up again and again. Below I have summarized the general feeling about each of these distributions based on the comments I received.

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/

The main points made about Mandrake were that it was very easy to install and very good at detecting lots of different pieces of hardware including some of the relatively more `exotic' devices such as USB printers, DVD Drives and CD Rewriters. This makes it very good for Linux beginners.

http://www.redhat.com/

RedHat is a main-player in the USA, however it tends towards the non- standard edge of things. Not as easy to install as Mandrake, but seems to be in wider use, especially in industry. It has some other strange features such as installing postfix instead of sendmail as the MTA. A few problems were pointed out such as SCSI compatibility issues and faulty compilers.

Just about everyone mentioned RedHat at some point. Most didn't give a reason, but said that RedHat would be the first distribution they tried.

http://www.suse.co.uk/

SuSE is big in Europe, especially Germany. It equals Mandrake in terms of ease of use and installation and has a better hardware detection system than Mandrake. SuSE actively support XFree 86 development and KDE development (http://www.kde.org/ - a very popular desktop).

Unlike RedHat, SuSE has printed manuals that actually have useful information, they also offer 60 days free support for their personal edition and 90 days for their Professional edition. SuSE has a much broader selection of ancillary packages and uses the concept of maintaining the configuration files using rc.config.

Again a lot of people mentioned SuSE, generally as the second distribution they would try after RedHat. All comments were be very positive and this distribution is obviously very popular.

http://www.debian.org/

Debian has many fans in the USA, apparently due to the apt-get package manager that keeps the system well patched. However, it's strictly non- commercial and all the developers and maintainers are unpaid, so the release cycle can be lengthy.

Debian has always at least three releases in active maintenance, Potato (`stable'), Woody (`testing') and Sid (`stable'). Woody went into `almost- frozen' a couple of months ago preparing for the new 3.0 release and will later become the new `stable'-release.

http://www.slackware.org/

Slackware was mentioned by just a few people and is popular because it does not try to do things for you, like most of the other distributions. It has a very simple package manager that just requires tar and gzip. There is greater control over what is installed and Slackware is the only distrobution that is compiled for 386/486 "out-of-the-box".

However, Slackware has its strong proponents and some found it too sparse for their needs.

When I first read all the replies I received to my original post, it was clear to me that RedHat was popular so I decided I would use it on my server and have now gone ahead and purchased the distribution. However, now that I have looked more closely at what people have actually said, most people just mention RedHat as the distribution they would try first. The most `popular' and highly thought of distribution appears to be SuSE, with no one having anything bad to say about the later versions.

I have some previous experience with RedHat and I am keen to give it a go. However, I am also keen to try SuSE as a result of the response to my post. Therefore, if people are interested I am prepared to do two versions of my Linux Server Series, one with RedHat and one with SuSE, they will more than likely overlap in many places anyway. If you would like to see this, please let me know.

All of these distributions are available from the Linux Emporium (http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk) in the UK.

Thank you to everyone who replied to my original post on accu-general. I hope I've got you all here: Neeraj Korde, Tim Pushman, Ewan Milne, Anthony Williams, Andy Leighton, Graham Whaley, Richard Moseley, Charles Polisher, Jason Gruber, Phil Hibbs, Kevlin Henney, /dev/null