Saturday, May 26, 2007

Debian and Fickle Old Me

After Ragging on Etch last month, the last two servers I've built at home have been Etch boxes.

Downloading the cd installation iso has been so painless and quick (thanks to the CERIAS mirror) close by. Then

apt-get install tightvncserver openbox xterm

I know the identical command would probably work on Ubuntu for a nice headless box, I'm now leaning towards Etch on the server in place of Ubuntu Dapper LTS.

We'll see how Xen and Vmware-server go.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have given Gentoo a try after both Debian and Ubuntu upgrade nightmare.Ubuntu 6.06 LTS upgrade to 6.10 did not go well and corrupted the kernel built with vmware GSX modules( i guess "seemless upgrade" is only for vanilla ubuntu.. ) Still with it. I could not get host vmware on BSD, so I liked the bsdish portage with linux availability of host-side vmware. It's optimized, light, and stable. Plus,
AFAIK, they have sensible approach to security with pax/grsecurity et. al. ( check out hardened gentoo )

Matt Franz said...

I went through a Gentoo phase back in 2004 but didn't last long. The prospect of recompiles (maybe they've solved that) is too daunting and outweighs compile/execution time countermeasures. I used BSD's and work and I don't care for ports, especially OpenBSD. It may do a good job with the core OS, but doesn't update packages and having to continually keep a ports tree in sync is a showstopper. FreeBSD is slightly better but still annoying.

I think Debian Etch XFCE is the way to go for me. Ubuntu Feisty (Desktop) install was so brain dead and the alternative install CD wasn't much better. Haven't tried the server and see no need to.