Suggestions? Fedora (2/3) or REDHAT 9
 

Hi all. Here is my situation. I am relatively new with *nix and want to run a *nix based CVS server for our projects. Some Project members will need to securly reach the server via internet, while others via ethernet.
My server for this is an old dell 200 somthing,PII processor with i think 64 mb of ram, but it might be only 32mb.
I tried SuSE 9.1 and its exctreemly slow. I had at one time REDHAT 7 and it ran faster than SuSE. But my question is,
what does anyone recomend for this situation.
We will run mono, CVS (subversion), and VNC or VPN (still confused on the differences)
Should i go with REDHAT 9 or Fedora. If Fedora, should i run 2 or 3?
thanks
John

if i were u, i would go with slackware. i think it is the best choice for slow hardwares.

Well, fedora is seriously secure out of the box but, it's BIG. I guess that doesn't matter if you don't run X. However, it's p4 optimized. I'm not 100% sure, but you might not get the most out of your hardware with fc2/3. In terms of 2 vs 3, go for three. Fewer security updates to download, and newer software.

I think Debian or Slackware would be ideal for you. I'd recommend Fedora but will not for the reasons mentioned in the post above.

with these specc...pff I would not take rh or fc in consideration, not even in text mode...you wont be able to run x i suppose

my rh and fc1 needs + - 170mb ram at boot...so imagine....

yeah something like Slack would be ideal. I wouldn't recommend Redhat 9, it's an old distro thats no longer officially supported by Redhat even though you can still get support from other people/companies I don't believe it's worth the hassle. Fedora would have been ideal for you. vut your hardware is really modest so you need a distro that won't guzzle up a lot of resources whilst it's just booting up.

I'm using Fedora C2 on a PIII 733 128MB pc133 20Gig UDMA 66 HD with Firefox, Evolution, Kmail, KDE etc.
I think that it is as fast as Win XP on the same box.
It is a bit faster loading Apps. than Mandrake I think.

I also have it on a Celeron 366 196MB pc66 6Gig UDMA33 HD with Gnome. (Gnome is lighter than KDE I think) it works ok but you have to wait 20 seconds for Firefox to open on first instance. But it is a perfectly usable machine. As you would expect the email clients, browsers, file managers, take a bit longer to get open.

I have Debian on a PII 400 and I would say that it is a bit faster to boot and to load apps than Fedora.

Whichever distro you choose I would buy 128MB more RAM for it. Adding more RAM to a Linux box will perk it up. I would not even try to use a box with less than 128MB. And even then it starts swapping right away.

There are also some lighter window managers that you can try that will take up less sys resources. IceWM is one. You won't get the full bodied functionality of a KDE, but it does provide a GUI to operate in.

I wouldn't totally agree with you (and so would a lot of other people) that GNOME is a lot lighter than KDE. You can pick and choose what you want to install in KDE, so you can end up with a very minimal install, eg, you can just install kde-libs and kdebase and, you'll have a fully functional KDE desktop.