Top Distribution to develop Applications
 

Hi all,
I'm currently planned to do project in IBM softwares like Rational Application Developer, DB2 etc. Which distro is best suited to develop applications, without bugs? And can u tell me which are the top distributions?

Distrowatch.org

If you want a stable one, try Slackware.
If you want it easy & shiny, try Ubuntu.
If you want loads of setup tools, try SuSE.
If you want to avoid a million argue posts, why not do a google search for distro comparison, pick up a recent page and try the topmost distribution?

They all got bugs, everything has. "Big" distributions have a lot of bugs fixed, and most of the distributions you find work more or less well. If you develop software, you'll just need any distribution with a compiler and then install some IDE on it. That means _any_ distribution I know of.

The usual answer to this question is Debian. It is the most programmer orientated distribution.

Well you haven't supplied bugger all in terms of requirements/restraints (don't worry, that's SOP for people on here).

I normally reccomend Arch to people, not because it's the best (they're all pretty similar when you get down to it) however there are some factors to consider (in no particular order).

* Internat availability - Size of distro you can download or whether you have a stable connection that you can use to update/add packages to the system.

For instance Debian stable (used to at least) come on 15 CDs with every package available. Might suit you if you need to download off site and can't update the machine itself. Or say Arch that has a very light base download, that can be bulked up with Arch

* Package Versions/Kernel - Does what you require need particular package/kernel versions? which distros supply these out of the box, which will require compiling millions of dependencies etc.

For instance Arch uses pacman for a package manager and all of the packages are bleeding edge.

* Hardware requirements - What you have vs. what a distro generally requires .

Most distros are pretty easy going on hardware, and they can be tweaked for what they are runnign on though, however for eye candy GUI apps some requirements will be imposed. Ubuntu requires about 200MB Ram minimum to even install.

That's a few things off the top of my head but since you know what you have/need and we dont.... you'll have to research

Mandriva
 

How about Mandriva Linux?

How about Fedora 7? Unlike Debian/Ubuntu/Slackware, you can easily set up a system that has both 32 and 64 bit libs and applications. It takes only a few minutes longer than installing only one architecture. A lot better than having to mess with chroots. I've always thought those are ugly and inconvenient. The only downside I can think of is the absence of the Sun jdk but that can be installed separately. Btw, Mandriva makes a good candidate too. Easy to set up and manage, fast and stable and dual-arch.

About Debian
 

Does debian has support to install ibm softwares? What are the other features of debian?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ration...ranch_id=56180 . It works on Linux according to link, so no reason why it shouldn't work on Debian. Debian comes with wall-to-wall programming stuff.