Best linux for small server?
 

Hey folks,

Having recently had my windoze 2k server hacked, i am finally biting the bullet and switching to linux.

My server is not the newest - a PII-450 with 1GB RAM - but not too bad. I use a mac laptop (osx) as my everyday machine (no saracasm please - I love OSX).

My question: Which version of linux do you recommend for a small server (standard LAMP setup).

I don't care about x-11, KDE/Gnome etc. since it is a server and i'll be ssh'ing into the box from my laptop to do all my config - this to me seems to negate a lot of the kewl stuff that distro's like Mandrake, Lindows (or whatever it's now called) offer - but i don't want to miss out on anything that I "should" be installing... Questions like "is rpm better than apt get" are running around in my head, although I do not REALLY know the differences between these package managers..

I am a complete newbie to Linux - I am comfortable in OSX/bash etc. but know pretty much nothing about which flavour of Linux I should be choosing. I have been recommended Redhat (is it still free?) by a friend, but would something of the BSD flavour may be better if I am using OSX?

Any advice very gratefully accepted!

Cheers,

D.

I think Slackware or Debian would be a good choice, personally. I'd stay away from Fedora for the moment, since releases become unsupported so quickly, and if you don't have regular console access to the machine, upgrading is a major pain (been there, done that). A BSD would be OK, but don't expect it to look like OS X (which is a Unix that has been very heavily tweaked by Apple). In general, any distro will be fine if you just install the packages you need. Apt-get will work with RPMs, so that shouldn't be a concern.

Also, a word of warning -- simply switching to Linux will not make you secure. If you're running a server you need to take responsibility for applying security fixes and doing other preventative maintainence to make the machine as secure as possible. Linux and its applications have their share of security holes. I think they're generally patched more swiftly than MS security holes, but you still need to make sure that those updates get applied.

thx for the advice - i was actually looking at Fedora so maybe I'll look a little harder.

Agree on the security stuff - I just like the fact that there are so many LESS headaches for linux...

Another question: how do you recommend I would move files to/from the box? I can use ssh/sftp of course, but another option might by SAMBA which OSX has nice support for..? Sorry if this a dumb question - i only have experience with osx->windows.

Cheers again,

D.