Which of the following distributions is the best one in your opinioun for servers. Important is a easy way to keep the sytems updated in case of security happenings and the option to do some kind of selection during install so not needed software won't be installed. Reliability is of course also important ...

FreeBSD of course...
I bet that most of the people that give another option have never used FreeBSD...
Netcraft can give you some evidence... try it out!

I voted for slack because it is the most lightweight distro, so your CPU cycles and Ram are spent on serving pages and files, rather than 'mundane' desktop stuff...as far as updating, I have to go with RedHat, they email you with all security concerns that apply to your system, and you can update your packages very easily using RedHat Network. Course if you have more than 1 system it's hella expensive.

I always wondered about trying one of the BSD's. Are they fairly straitforward for someone competent with Linux?

1 vote for RedHat!

Mainly due to the up2date feature.


The RedHat Network has an entitlements section. You can effortlessly change the entitled system and do the update. You can have many profiles in your account, and only one at a time entitled. This way it is free for all systems.

Debian - because of apt.

Currently I only know of Debian and RedHat with an update feature. What I don't know though if you can exclude stuff from being updated if you choose apt ?

Honestly I thought of choosing Debian but since I don't know FreeBSD, etc so well I decided to ask for help here ;-)

Bulliver: I experimented with mandrake, redhat, suse and some other crappy distros when I was still new to the *nix world...

didn't like any of them...

So I gave up on *nix until I tried fbsd a year or so later...
Only by using that OS I fully understood how unix worked - the mandrake etc distros don't learn you this and if you've got one problem, you're screwed and you have to reinstall because you don't know how a config file works or what a command line is :/

I have to admit that I'm using gentoo linux now as desktop, but I'd choose fbsd as server system...
They have an excellent manual (and portage system) so I can really advise anyone to install it once and work with it, you'll learn a lot.

@=X¥®µ§=:

I've installed RedHat on a server system a while ago, the things required to secure the distro is a long walk ... a walk where you wonder why things are configured insecure from the start rather than secure. The thing is RedHat and S.u.S.E. are trying to make it more comfortable as a desktop OS which is the fine but the way this goes on is the wrong one. Like with giving people permissions to gcc, etc by default.


I don't have a problem with anything which is a more difficult to configure, etc - this would just be a challenge :-) Maybe LFS would be the ideal distro ... but it's too much time consuming I bet! And about the update requirements it would be a lot of continously work I suppose!

markus1982:
then you should really give fbsd a try...

if you know the basic unix commands it shouldn't be any problem

read through the manual first and you'll already see why it's so powerful (it doesn't have a fancy installer like redhat, but it does what it's supposed to do) and especially updating the whole system or only a few packages is very easy with portage (you never run into a dependency hell or even an endless loop as I've had with redhat... and it does have the most recent software officially - unlike debian...)

of course all the given distros are perfectly capable of acting as a server - I'm not telling any of those distros are BAD or something...

Of course any distro can be used as server, maybe I should give FreeBSD a try :-)

I vote for Debian. It is one of the most stable distros you can find, one of the reasons for having "old" software is that its well tested before it is accepted. They dont do like f.ex. Redhat that always have the newest packages, and by that most bugs.

They also have a security mirror, so you can make a cron job where its checking for updates and installing if its needed, this mirror is only for bugfixes and security issues. And they are also one of the quickest too send out these fixes.

And when you install it it is really a basic system unless you tell it too install additional software (no servers (except for ssh), no x etc.)

Either Slackware or Debian.

A Debian system can easily be completely updated with a single command (via apt). It is also pretty lightweight.

Slackware is lightweight and trustworthy. It doesn't have a slick update feature like Debian (or RedHat), so it will require a little more attention (which isn't a big deal in most cases).

I have tried nearly all the *nix versions except Gentoo and slackware. the conclusion I came to was If you wanna make a server use OpenBSD or infact any of the BSD's FreeBSD makes a nice desktop while NetBSD does both pretty well.
In case of Linux for desktop the best is mandrake its the distro which is actually giving M$ Windoze a run for their money. If you want to amke a server in Linux Debian is the best suited.
Linux BSD
Desktop Mandrake FreeBSD
Server Debian OpenBSD
Both Redhat,Suse NetBSD

I use slackware as my webserver with php and mysql. Slackware 10 comes with apache and mysql and php. So it is more easier than before. I vote for slackware lightweight server.

Slackware for lightweight stability and easiness of update with swaret.