Debian or Fedora for my business?
 

Hello

I've installed Fedora Core 4 on one of my hard drives to use for my web devlopment business. I'm currently doing a web site in PHP and I want to use JSP/Servlets as well.

I had to reinstall Fedora just over a week ago because I managed to fill the hard drive with too many files and apparently Fedora Core 4 breaks if you do that. I've also noticed one small bug with the OpenOffice splash screen showing on boot up a couple of times even when OpenOffice isn't even starting. Overall I've been pretty happy with Fedora so far and I've been looking to get Fedora Core 5 soon. We studied Fedora as part of my Software Installation subject in my Information Technology course last year.

I've read about how Debian is supposed to be very stable. I know I've spent a lot of time getting Fedora Core 4 up and running, including with Firefox 1.5.1, Internet Explorer (with ies4linux) and KDE but something inside me thinks I should look at Debian as a stable choice for my business.

I've currently got:

Pentium 2-350
448 mg PC100 SDRAM
8.4 gig hdd for the Linux install
10 gig hdd for Windows


I'm looking at getting a new computer this year.

I'd just like some advice about whether or not I should look at Debian

Thanks

I have been using Debian for a year. AMD64 was new and there were a few bugs, but once installed everything just kept working. For production, please use stable/sarge. If you need a couple of bleeding edge packages, you can put them in individually. The apt packaging system rocks. The size of the repository is amazing. I have only had to install a few packages from elsewhere. Note that OpenOffice and Freenx are still not available in 64bit version so I used a 32bit chroot. Not a big deal.

Do not throw away the old box. Clean the dust and use it as a second screen with an X connection to the new box. GNU/Linux is a true multiuser system. You can login twice, or more.

If you want a stable distro based on Redhat/Fedora Core technology then use Redhat Enterprise Linux or free rebuilds like CentOS. Debian is worth looking at because its a very stable OS.

If you want absolute stability, go with Debian .. otherwise I'll advice you to stay with Fedora as you already have some experience with it and also it includes more cutting edge software :-)