We have a network with 2 Mac OS X Servers and 200 clients.

We are investigating replacing the Servers with Unix/Linux servers.

The servers need the following services:
Mail
Open Directory / LDAP
File Server
etc


Can anyone suggest what would be the best distribution to use?

Similarity to Mac OS X would be an advantage, but not essential.

Any thoughts?

From my experience, I would recommend either RedHat or SuSE commercial products. They both meet the above criteria and have good gui and cli support.

I haven't used Mac OS X but have heard good reports about it. Just out of curiosity, why do you want to change?

Tom (retired penguin)

Look here and decide which distro's actually support mac's.
http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php
seems that debian and suse are the real deal... all else, offer limited support.
But YMMV
RP

Thank you tommyttt and racepres for your recommendations

tommyttt:
Although the Macintosh clients are fantastic, the Mac server OS is full of bugs and unstable - Open Directory keeps crashing. The server OS offers some very nice easy to use GUI tools that would've been great if they actually worked, but unfortunately they rarely do. There are common problems in Mac OS Server that have been around for years and don't get fixed - I believe Linux would be much more stable.

I have used Fedora before (although not as a server) so I'm sure commercial RedHat would be easy for me to use and will investigate this.


racepres:
that site simply shows which Linux distros can run on PowerPC hardware. ie. very old Mac's. Apple has switched to Intel about 4 years ago and if I set up a Linux server it won't be on an old PowerPC box, so this is not really relevant to me.


I was also considering FreeBSD since this is what Mac OS X is based and I suspect this may be more compatible with the Mac OS X clients. Any thoughts on this?