Best distro for home developement/file sharing server
 

Hi,

I presently connect to the web through a Linksys modem/router, which also provides a wireless network in the house. My desktop (WinXP/Mandriva SE2005) connects via ethernet, and I have a laptop connecting wirelessly.

I want to set up a server on the network, so I can use it for my web developement and perhaps for filesharing later on. At the moment I am unsure which kind of distro would be the best to run the server. I have copies of Mandriva SE 2005 and Ubuntu already, but I am unsure if they would be the best option. I know that RedHat and Fedora are the most popular OS's, would these be better?

My goal is a LAMP set up.

Thanks,

Mei

It really doesn't matter which distro you use. The only important thing is that you know your way around the distribution enough to be able to fix things when they break.

Hi and welcome to Linuxquestions.

If you want a rock solid server you should pick Debian Sarge. Depending on what hardware you have you could pick a light running distribution like Vector or DamnSmallLinux, using one of those will give you ressources for server use.

Fedora is good and easy to use but it holds alot of new software - often beta versions. That means that you should be ready to fix things by hand once in a while.

Redhat reached its 'end of life' some time ago, so you wont get any new updates if you pick that one.

Good luck and have fun.

Sincerely, Jørgen

Thanks for your replies.

I read somewhere that the GUI should not be installed. Should I follow that advice?

I think I'll try what I've got at the moment to start with.

Cheers,

Mei

The reason it is recommended not to use a gui is because they take up precious system resources that could be put to better use.

I'd recommend you use whichever distro you have most experience with. If you feel that maybe another distro would better suit your needs, get it installed on a test machine first and get aquainted with it before putting it on your 'real' server

If you want to go the Redhat route then use something like CentOS or WBEL which are clones of Redhat's Enterprise OS

I'd have to recommend Slackware for a server.
It's rock solid stable, and it's the quickest and most painless install that I'm aware of. It doesn't even boot into a GUI by default!