[ale] Linux Server distros

[Jim Popovitch]

Richard Kolkovich wrote:
> If you do not care about "official" support, I would recommend Gentoo.
> I run it on my servers with no problems as long as you read before
> updating packages (but that is the case with most anything...updates can
> break things ;)).

;-) I've seen those sort of issues even with "professional" distros.


Here's what I doing:

I am setting up a few vmware server servers.  On the base install I 
don't need anything that vmware server doesn't need.  I don't 
particularly need LVM, but when using a RedHat distro (or derivative) 
LVM (and several other totally unnecessary things) must exist for the 
base install to exist. <- F**KING CRAZY!  I don't need nfs, or nfs libs, 
hotplug (it's freaking server!), USB (who uses USB mice/drives/etc on a 
server?), DHCP (argh!).  It just amazes me that in this day and age of 
using Linux on so many _servers_, it requires that the operator have a 
team of engineers to re-engineer a "professional" distribution in order 
to use it in their environment.  Part of the problem is that every 
distro tries to be everything to everybody.  Redhat Enterprise Linux, 
IMHO, is not a server distro, it's a workstation distro (but alas not a 
modern-day laptop distro).  Debian (and it's derivatives) comes closest 
to being a secure and small install... BUT vmware doesn't provide out of 
the box modules for Debian, therefore I have to install _development_ 
tools on a server just to get it to do what I need it to do.

I hate Windows, BUT none of the above applies to using Windows... except 
that if I use Windows as a VMWare host I won't be able to sleep at 
night. ;-)

I think there is a serious market for a Linux Server distro that is 
secure, stable, small, and doesn't have any dependencies on unnecessary 
crap.

-Jim P.