Cent OS, Red Hat or Ubuntu

[brianlange]

What are the advantages and disadvantages between cent os, red hat, and ubuntu.

Which one would you choose for your server?

I can't post to the Linux forum. If necessary please move this post.

[requinix]

You missed the big red sticky I take it?

 

Use whichever you're most familiar with. If you aren't familiar with any, try Ubuntu.

But it depends where the server is, what you'll do with it, who can access it, whether it'll do more than host a web server...

[trq]

Ive never been a fan of the Red Hat systems (this includes CentOS) and much prefer Debian based ones (this includes Ubuntu). It is however, just personal preference and what you are used to.

 

I used Debian for servers because it is a solid OS that is considered very stable. However this also means that it can lag behind with software versions. For instance I think Lenny (current Debian stable) only has php5.1 officially. There are ways of course of getting to 5.3 (which I do) but these meens you need to stray from the official repos and risk some of your stability.

 

You'll find allot of hosts using Red Hat based distro's too. Thjis is again, because they have always had a good foundation and are known for being stable systems.

 

Ubuntu is a dekstop distro. Made in particular for ease of use. There is however a server version available, I've not used it, but I should imagine it wouldn't be that far off a minimal Debian system.

 

Anyway, your best bet is to just choose one and stick with it a while. Especially if your new to Linux. It'll take a little while to get used to things. You can install the same software on any Linux so it doesn't really matter that much. Once you get used to a particular varietty, you might want to try another to see the differences.

 

Theres also source based distro's like Gentoo around. These can teach you allot more about how GNU & Linux work together to make a complete OS. They can also cause you a few headaches if your not prepared to be patient or don't have allot of time. I use Gentoo (Funtoo) on my workstation machine.

 

Hope this helps at least a little bit.

[j.smith1981]

RedHat as an actual distribution is paid for, as a subsription for their support services, might be a bit out of allot of peoples price range.

 

But all the RHEL family like CentOS, Fedora and the like are all entirely free, so they lack the official paid for support (all advice on their forums is for free, kind of like the way PHP works as such).

 

CentOS actually stands for Community EnTerprise Operating System (the letters of the abbreviation being in uppercase of course), really all that means is when say they update an application or service, they will leave the old functions available for you to use still, if they don't then they will offer free notices to how to amend what you may have used in the past and how to update them to get them to work.

 

Without the paid for subscription (which is quite expensive if you want the RHEL server software, goes at something like $800 p/year or something for a 25 node network working off a RHEL server, that was 3 years ago I checked though), they won't help you personally with this if you don't pay for it, but there are forums for such distro's.

 

My personal love is for CentOS, I found that with Fedora when I was trying to compile ProFTP they changed it quite dramatically the RPM for it, in which case the old configs wouldn't work, I have done this on numerous occasions on CentOS and never once had a problem upgrading it.

 

That's essentially what enterprising is all about, keeping the old functions allowing you to get on with your work, without having to deal with configurations all the time, I just basically got sick of Fedora eventually and decided to move to CentOS, the only difference with the 2 is that Fedora has a huge (and it literally is just huge), the number of people that decide to include applications or services and just add them.

 

Where CentOS keeps all the users contributed repositories disabled by default with the RHEL package manager called Yum it's configurations in /etc/yum.repos.d, where as I can't remember Fedora having those configs, where you can decide not to include the user's contributed software and just go for the official software from the RHEL family.

 

I just love using CentOS myself, but there are some that will even allow you to use just the pure Linux OS (from what I have been told by our network tech at work, although I have never looked into this), Debian I am told is the only distro to offer the pure Linux OS (no software but what was included inside the OS), keep meaning to have a look at it to see what I can do with it.

 

But as I am unlearning and relearning PHP that has been the major priority and fiddling a little when I get bored of PHP with C++ and Assembly, really has kind of moved me onto thinking the way a computer really works, their actually incredibly dumb machines.

 

Hope this somewhat helps (apologies if I have waffled a bit too), just though I would give my views on this, as I have asked this similar question in the past.

 

Just a note aswell I actually use a customised version of FreeBSD too for my very old computer which acts as my router, just to allow myself some application security, I could with that in mind actually do away with mysql_real_escape_string as the categories I have selected when I installed Snort (the free based categories and rulesets included within them), I would be defended against SQL Injection attacks, although going off one persons advice I am a little dubious in just removing security off my applications as I haven't found the time to really dig into Snort.

[QuickOldCar]

I use CentOS and Ubuntu Server for my servers. For development I use appserv on a windows box.

 

I would have to say Ubuntu is the better of the 2 due to being more popular and better support in forums if had issues.

The only real reason I used CentOS was to run a hosting package that only worked on CentOS 5, Fedora 2,3,4,5,6, RHEL 5. I'd use CentOS again though.

http://lxcenter.org/software/hypervm

 

[ankur0101]

I use CentOS for hosting service.

2 PCs in our office are using ubuntu. Never used RHEL.

 

If you want to run/test PHP applications, I would suggest CentOS as it is free.

[phpfreak]

I prefer CentOS. It allows me to get things done quickly, easily, and it's redhat based so it's just what I'm use to. I can do anything I need with CentOS in a server / hosting environment. It's updates are easy, there's tons of repos for different levels of packages (old, new, even cooler than the default). Yum is easy to use, generally easy to prepare for compiling PHP from source I'll use default packages on CentOS and then compile PHP into Apache. It's pretty straight forward.

[simn_stv]

I first started out with Redhat 9 back in '05; solid distribution and wonderful package management system backed by a pretty solid company. I'd recommend use of Redhat based systems (CentOS precisely) on servers. I use Ubuntu on my workstation (Desktop installation) and i've had to patiently fix issues manually, i've never used the server version of Ubuntu but my experiences with the desktop it keeps me away from using it on a production server.

 

Debian on the other hand is very solid but the learning curve is a bit steeper which may not be an issue for you, it depends.

[pantu]

You might also take FreeBSD into consideration, depending on the purpose of your server.

With FreeBSD you will get the advantages of using ZFS (v28 currently) for a good performant file server and the ability to use jails - FreeBSD instances inside FreeBSD (sort of light-weight virtualization with the ability to nullfs other directories into them)