to buy a distro I'd probably go for SUSE for the reasons you mention however I got Mandrake 7.0 as a freebie at a trade show sometime back so it was a bird in the hand job.

As someone with an eye on the commercial side of things, what's your take on these servers on a PCI card (so called blade servers)?

Regards, Keith Email: mailto:kpwatson@luna.co.uk Web site: http://kpwatson.ontheweb.com ____________ This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. ____________ This email and any files transmitted with it is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. If you have received this email in error please notify your system manager.

-----Original Message----- From: Laurie Brown [mailto:laurie@brownowl.com] Sent: 12 April 2002 07:18 To: kpwatson@luna.co.uk Cc: Anglian Linux User Group - Main Subject: Re: [Alug] Introduction

Keith Watson wrote: > Just a quick hello from someone who's just joined.

Welcome to ALUG, Keith...

[SNIP]

Although I understand that Mandrake is the easiect to install, I doubt it will suit someone with real knowledge, with results you've seen. I've found that, as my knowledge has increased, I have become more and more frustrated with packaged Linux systems. My personal favourite, and which remains so for the desktop, is SuSE. I'm quite happy to allow them to cosset me in the land of sound, X, and such stuff. However, servers are another matter entirely.

[SNIP]

Then I found Gentoo... http://www.gentoo.org

Not perfect, it requires quite a lot of investment in learning how it works. Broadband helps a great deal, as does patience. Everything, from compilers to libraries is compiled first, then the kernel, and then every single package you want to install. All optimised for your system, according to a) an editable make.conf, and b) one's own kernel options.

Everything is downloaded as required from a server (one can take a local copy, currently 2GB) and install any of 1600 packages, all prestructured, dependencies dealt with. I'm still testing before we put a server live, but so far, a few glitches and quirks along the way, I remain impressed and optimistic. I've put it on an old AMD K6-2/550 with 256MB and a 2.5GB HDD, and am setting it up as a web-server with apache/php/mysql (quiet in the cheap seats!). So far, I am blown away with the speed this thing runs at...

If you're looking at LFS, you could do much, much worse than look at Gentoo...

Cheers, Laurie.

-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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