Hello,

I am responsible for creating an open source desktop environment for about 300 users. I am quite familiar with different distributions, but am having trouble deciding which to use. The distributions I have narrowed down to are: Centos, Opensuse, Ubuntu.

We have laptops and desktops to deal with. From this standpoint, Ubuntu seems to work the best. Centos is solid as a rock, but getting wireless, mousepads, etc. set up on a laptops seems difficult at best. Opensuse seems to be the most comprehensive distribution, but is somewhat clunky with yast. I am leaning towards Ubuntu on the desktops, and Centos, for the enterprise apps as the server OS.

Has anybody had experience similar to what I am embarking on. How did you choose the distribution?

Regards,

Randy.

One consideration is how are you going to maintain the 300 desktop users. Are you going to do the maintenance or is each user going to maintain his own desktop machine? Ubuntu creates a single user installation and the user does maintenance by liberal use of the sudo command. If you are going to do the maintenance yourself then you will want to create a root user on each machine with a password unknown to the user. You will also want to take all sudo privileges away from the users. This will hold true regardless of how many machine you have to service the 300 users (i.e. you could have several users per machine).

You can set up Ubuntu to provide root users and deny sudo to users. However it would be easier to use Debian. I recommend Debian for your 300 desktop users.

CentOS is a great choice for servers.

Ever since Novell signed the Microsoft-Novell agreement I have been recommending that people avoid openSuSE.

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Steve Stites

You should take a look at Mandriva. That distro is very nice.

I would recommend ubuntu. For a desktop system its one of the best out there. I would seriously suggest that you make a custom install cd though that deploys with a unified root password and various items setup to function automatically that will make interacting with the system easier (I would suggest that regardless of which distribution you decide upon.)

The only time I've deployed linux large scale for the desktop the distribution was chosen by my preference since I was the resident linux geek. I choose debian (over redhat or slackware effectively), however ubuntu didn't exist then. Having it to do over today, I would choose ubuntu. That being said, for servers I typically choose debian.

Hi,

your decision should be made on your requirements:
- what hardware are you using? Noname or hardware from large vendor like HP,Dell or so?
- what about business support? required yes/no?
- what about distribution lifetime? How long do you plan to use the hardware and the distro installed?
- are there any business applications required to run? Are these supported by your distribution?
- what about software maintenance and update? Do you plan centralized update server or some like this?
- Are there any preferences in paket management?
- What about documentation?

I prefer CentOS, as you mentioned it is rock solid and supports business hardware very well. I cannot find any problems in laptop hardware, i use RedHat/CentOS since 1996 and there were only minor problems to solve. Also the very long support times for CentOS is one of the main reasons to use for me.

I would think that a dominant decision factor would be the administration aspects. I would tend to choose a distro that I felt most comfortable with configuring and trouble-shooting.

Because the first "normal" user is given admin privileges (and the the root account disabled by default), I would not choose any of the 'buntu family. Obviously, if a 'buntu were your first choice for other reasons, you could work around this.

I'd agree that the administration aspect is the most critical. You will have to quickly fix problems as they arise, so you need to be thoroughly comfortable with the structure and tools of your chosen distribution, particularly the automated installation facilities.

Managing a large-scale deployment also requires systems and tools that no distribution provides out of the box: identity management, centralized updates, etc. YaST was poor the last time that I looked at it, but Novell has proprietary software products like eDirectory and ZENWorks that are specifically designed for supporting networks. Red Hat (and therefore CentOS) is probably the leader in developing open source management tools for networks: FreeIPA, Satellite, Cobbler, Func, etc.

Ubuntu is impressive for self-managed systems, but for a larger roll-out I suspect that you need to roll your own solutions for a bunch of stuff, or you'll have a horribly labour-intensive setup.

WRT the issue of hardware support, with 300 users you basically have to standardize the hardware configurations to a small set, or you will go insane. If there is a budget, look into moving at least some of the desktops over to thin client. It's often not practical to use thin client exclusively, but it can reduce your management overhead more efficiently than anything else.