Which Server OS Should I Use?
 

I have a 400mhz, 128mb ram server and I was wondering your opinion on what distro to use. I have considered Red Hat, SuSe, Debian, and Gentoo. What is the mininum Red Hat can be installed on? All I need is command line (no GUI) Apache with PHP, Pearl, MySQL, PhpMyAdmin (optional), and proftpd. P.S. I want to use a control panel and I have a 6 gig drive. Thanks in advance.

CLI only... any distro will run on it quite well. Slack or mandrake or debian or whatever depending on the mood. Probably the distro you know best. I guess you will want webmin? Or just ssh in to do stuff?

Yes I do want webmin, I have experience with SuSe (its the OS on my personal pc), but so many servers use redhat. Would wonder if that is the best one for it?

Any of those should do. I would use Mandrake because it uses 586 instructions while RH used to be 386. It makes a bit of difference in speed. Be sure to use the 2.6 kernel for speed, too. Without a GUI, you can probably get this going in 300 mB without the served data. You are low on RAM if the server will be busy serving much data. Lots of RAM is very useful for caching files. You will likely have the HD being a bottleneck.

What do you mean by "control panel"? If you mean a GUI control panel, you can set that up by using webmin from a browser on a remote PC. That serves up a https page. I usually use naked ssh/scp/sftp.

Does pentium 2 (deschutes) support 586 instructions?

Yes
See a list.

Ok thanks. One more question though. Can I get away with only burning cd #1 for Mandrake? I only need what was in the top post.

Yep. 586 is pentium up... Anyway, I have i586 mandrake running on dechutes machines here... Ah... actually no, I upgraded them to PIII katmai now, but they DID run deschutes til recently :)

The deschutes would be considered 686 or better like the pentium pro I think?

Ok. Thanks for your help, I have decided to do a ftp install.

Why do you need to burn CDs for an ftp install?

Backup?

You can see what RPMs are on what CD here

apache, MySQL,perl, some of php is on the first
some of php is on the second

For a ftp install, you burn boot.iso. I can't get it to work, i guess i have to burn the cd 1.

SuSe is one of the OSs i have looked into for a server, but currently i am running a Whitebox 3 server. this is the exact same as the RH 3 enterprise servers without the fees, and support from RH.

basicaly a small group of ppl have taken the RH source and striped out all of the HR icons and mention of the word RedHat (not trade mark and registered info though) and labled it Whitebox.

as for a CLI only, you can run just about any distro on that hardware in a CLI only situation.

Are you familiar with burning images of CDs? If you have installed burning software on a GUI system, just clicking on the icon of the file will likely get you started. Many beginners do a copy/burn which is not the same thing. The image has its own filesystem. It wants a byte for byte copy procedure...

What went wrong with boot.iso? Did it boot? Were you able to get a network connection?

Yea it booted, but it would not connect. I am currently installing fedora core 1 (ftp) fine. The only problem is servers that use IIS6 won't work. So I had to try a couple. I am guessing that this also happend with mandrake. When i installed mandrake with cd1 it asked for cd2 + 3 so I pressed cancel. When I booted it up, it would not accept my root password. I did the same installation 2 times.

Fedora froze in the installation so i think i'm going with white box. I will have to upgrade my harddrive for that. I might be able to get a 80 gig drive.