Linux "equivalent" to freebsd

[Jeff Rollin]

Hi.

On 01/03/07, mailing-lists at msdi.ca <mailing-lists at msdi.ca> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry this question is a little off-topic...
>
> We've been using Freebsd for many years and all of our servers are running
> freebsd.
>
> The only thing that is a pain with freebsd, is poor commercial support :(
>
> We are running in a situation where a customer needs Zend platform 3
> (http://www.zend.com/products/zend_platform) which won't be available for
> freebsd until the end of the year...
>
> So I will need to setup a machine with linux.
>
> I don't know much about linux distributions, could someone recommend one to
> me please.
>
> We are looking for a platform that will support amd64 extensions, will act
> as a console only server and that has a good way to install ports and
> upgrade. We want something secure and stable. We don't wanna go with Redhat
> or any commercial distribution.
>
> I really like the cvsup/make install/portupgrade way of dealing with
> software installation and updates and I am looking for something equivalent
> on a linux distribution.
>
> Could you recommend a distribution you are using in production, we've check
> ubuntu, fedora and Debian, but I wonder what freebsd users recommend...
>
> Thanks
>
>

The Zend vendor (Zendor?!) is most likely to support Redhat but if you
are feeling brave or lucky you could try Gentoo, for which I'll add my
vote. Slackware and Arch are nice too but Slackware leaves all the
compiling and installing to you (unless you use one of the packages
like slapt-get, etc., which aren't the "official" solution for
installing packages) and when I tried it, Arch (a) had a smaller
package selection than Gentoo and (b) had less complete documentation.

Debian is good too if you have supported hardware (I've found their hw
support not to be as good as say Gentoo's or Arch's) but if you prefer
freebsd ports to packages then you may wish to avoid it, as although
apt-get appears to have a mechanism for installing from source, it
looks complicated cf. Gentoo's.

My £0.02

Jeff
-- 
Q: What will happen in the Aftermath?

A: Impossible to tell, since we're still in the Beforemath.

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