Josh Trutwin <josh at trutwins.homeip.net> wrote: > Mostly a matter of taste, anyone can be a shitty admin in a distro > they don't understand so I guess I'd recommend staying with what you > are familiar with. If that Fedora, then you'd probably be the most > effective admin on that distro until you've had some exposure to > something else in a non-production env. This is some very good advice. You really cannot go wrong with most distributions today. I'm particularly anal about what packages get installed on my servers, so I use Debian's installer and refuse to use the Task/Template based installations or the aptitude application (personal preference). dselect, as odd as it may seem to use at first, is quite effective at selecting packages and being prompted for selecting dependencies, recommendations, and suggestions. However, from the command-line apt is really hard to beat. $ apt-cache search KEYWORD $ apt-cache show PACKAGE # apt-get install PACKAGE For example, say you want to find out what packages are available for apache2. $ apt-cache search apache2 ...(list of packages and 1-line descriptions)... Let's say I want apache2-mpm-prefork, the prefork multi-processing-module version of the Apache2 server. # apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork ...(lists other packages it must install and prompts you for confirmation)... This way, you know EXACTLY what gets installed on your server. If you're making a static web server, all you need are the base packages and an httpd server. You don't need a desktop, you don't need X11 packages, you don't need eye-candy. Just the server nuts and bolts, and maybe an ssh server. Don't like OpenSSH? Install dropbear. Don't like Apache2? Try thttpd. They're all just an apt-get away. Good luck! You can't really make a "wrong" decision, as long as you're committed to learning the system you choose. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */