[ale] Ubuntu for developers?

[Mike Harrison]

> decisions for you.  Since these guys are developers, and we tend to need very 
> explicit versions of various tools, I've kind of steered them away from 
> Ubuntu.  Have a made a mistake?  Would this be a good distribution for them?  

If the tools will run run on Ubuntu.. do it. Ubuntu makes a nice desktop 
distro that lets you get real work done without messing much with day to 
day stuff. 

I'm now using the Ubuntu LAMP server as well as RH ES4 in production work
and I've only needed to install a couple of things beyond the basics
to be a happy LAMP programmer: zip/unzip and Joe (editor). 

It took a little more work to install GCC, make and such.. 
to compile some odd stuff from source on Ubuntu, and all has 
worked well so far. 

Apt-Get, Wajig, Aptitude, dpkg..  it's not a bad place to be working
but it's a little different from my RedHat world. 

The Debian and Ubuntu maintainers have been doing an incredible
job and deserve some credit.