Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro

darthcamaro writes "Looks like Red Hat is still the #1 distro according to Netcraft stats cited by Internetnews.com. Gentoo is now the fastest growing, replaced Debian which was the fastest growing distro just six months ago...and as we all know, and as the article rightly points out, the stats aren't accurate cause most webserver admins disable version reporting...right? So if all version were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting? Read the Netcraft stats (without the context that they're BS) here"

Comments

BSD?

[Coneasfast]

i wonder what the BSD numbers would be like. anyone know where to get those stats? would be nice to see if all those 'bsd is dead/dying' arguments are right or wrong.

Re:BSD?

[PacoTaco]

FreeBSD has 2.5 million sites, about a million more than Red Hat (with the usual Netcraft caveats).

Re:BSD?

[drclaw007]

Some would say quality is more important than quantity :

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

BSD variants still dominate the average uptime chart.

But each to their own.

Re:BSD?

[moZer]

Get the facts:

"Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days."

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html#whic ho s

Re:Red Hat / Fedora

[mirror_dude]

its all redhat distros , including fedora
So means RH X , Redhat Enterprise X and Fedora X
Where X is a version number

Red Hat internationally

[davejenkins]

Red Hat, as we all know, dominates the US market. SuSE used to have a strong hold on Germany, and I think momentum is taking them through that to some degree. Mandrake seems to have plucked the right strings with the French Govt (major buys lately) and they will see some domestic growth there.

Asia is still wide open: Red Hat is the only real distro around, but their execution is leaving a lot to be desired. SuSE just isn't here, and Turbo, Miracle, Red Flag are such odd little operations that they cannot seem to gain any marketshare.

I would think that the place things get interesting is where the race between IBM and HP in the developing world (Indonesia, Malaysia, Middle East, India) brings a linux with them. Increasingly, IBM is bringing SuSE with them, while HP signs deals with whatever local distro is the flavour of the day (Turbo in Japan and China, Red Flag in China, ? in Korea).

Re:Red Hat internationally

[jayaramk]

I would tend to disagree with some parts of Dave's opinion.

While it is true that Red Hat is the dominant distributor worldwide(I run Fc2),many other distributors arent sleeping.

Mandrake is doing very well,many of my peers in colleges and in corporates have now begin to evaluate Mandrake as well as Suse before taking a call on what to purchase.

Suse has a lot going for it.The support from Novell is one of the best things to happen to os/fs in a long time.Novell is also hiring aggresively(not in terms of number of ppl but in quality of ppl) for its Bangalore(India based) center primarily for its open source initiative.

The best way to increase market shares as we all know is to sign up long term deals with major OEM's like HP,Compaq and Dell.While some of the distributions have achived success in this,a lot still needs to be done.

In developing countries like India and China that have huge markets but major major piracy problems,getting users to use Linux instead of a pirated windows is going to be the key.Most home users understand that piracy is bad but continue using it because the OS is just too expensive. How linux distributors approach these ppl is going to be crucial in deciding future growth rates

fastest in terms of percentage?

[alphan]

from the article :

Community-driven Linux distribution provider Debian held on to the third spot with a 15.9 percent market share rating, up a half percentage point.

and

For Netcraft, the fastest growing distribution this time around is Gentoo Linux, which showed a rate of 49.5 percent. But that's growth toward a 1 percent market share.

THAT means Gentoo's growth is around .5 percent MARKET SHARE which is around Debian's. A draw if you ask me.

Relative percentage doesn't make sense considering all new distributions around.

Re:Come to Gentoo :)

[rd4tech]

To each his own flavour. There's the time component and I have to agree with you on that one. But if one has extra time for playing/tweaking, it pays off grealy. It's also good as a general distribution if you start from stage3, then it goes fast. And you can also install binaries. OS for everyone practically.

Re:I think part of it is

[Seven001]

Good point. Not just cPanel, but Ensim too. I'm pretty sure Ensim still uses RedHat exclusively, too.

And how would they determine distro?

[bigberk]

Linux is the kernel, and the TCP/IP stack is in the kernel. So you can't tell from a TCP/IP connection whether a host is running Redhat, Slackware or Debian.

What the survey site is probably doing is looking at information tags within the Server: field of the HTTP response headers. Redhat does advertise itself there in the vendor-supplied Apache packages, but some other distros don't. Slackware's Apache packages will return nothing more descriptive than 'Unix' in the Server string.

So not all distros will reveal themselves, and anybody can easily prevent this information from being shown period with a simple Apache configuration directive. I think that's a good idea to do on your own servers, by the way. Give attackers the least info possible at your setup.

Re:Whatever it is...

[HermanAB]

According to IBM's figures, there are 30 million Linux systems, of which 23 million are desktops and 7 million servers, plus more than a billion embedded devices.

So in total, there are probably way more Linux than Windows machines out there.

Re:There are certainly drawbacks with Gentoo

[dcstimm]

I have 10 Identical servers, one happens to be not used for anything except logging, so on that machine I compile all the updates using the --buildpkg option, so I have a binary pkg I can share between all 10 of my machines. It saves me a ton of time, and I dont have to hunt for outdated rpms.

Re:Come to Gentoo :)

[atomic-penguin]

In Slackware, how are packages managed?

Slackware uses .tgz files, glorified tarballs with an install script. Same as an rpm on a low-level, just without dependencies and a fancy database to track things. You use upgradepkg, installpkg, removepkg mostly to manage these. Information about each package is kept in /var/log/packages in plain greppable text. One package per file under /var/log. Every file coming from a package is kept in it's corresponding entry under /var/log. If I want to know where a file came from I can type grep /var/log/packages/*. If I want an inventory ls /var/log/packages > inventory.

Why do I think this is better than rpm or other package systems? With RPM I have to know the name and version number of something to remove it. With Slack packages, I just cd to /var/log/packages and removepkg *. Most packages are independent of each other, exceptions of course are libraries and backend programs. I must say I have had more headaches with RPM than I ever have with a Slack Package.

Re:Whatever it is...

[Odin's Raven]

I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together.

Since you mention having far more servers than workstations, I'll assume that Fedora isn't what you're looking for. (x86_64 support, free updates, but sometimes a wee bit too much on the bleeding edge.)

If you want the stability of Red Hat Enterprise software on an x86_64 but don't want (or simply don't need) a support contract, you might want to check out:

• Tao Linux
• White Box Enterprise Linux

Both of these distros are based on the Red Hat Enterprise SRPMs (legally they can't say that they are Red Hat Enterprise), and provide updates for free.

FWIW, I'm currently using Tao on a dual Opteron system. (Back when I was setting the box up, White Box hadn't quite finished their x86_64 release). Installed without any problems. If you've got a spare x86_64 machine to test with, you might want to take a look at these distributions.

Re:I think part of it is

[ckaminski]

SuSE at least picks sensible defaults, like bash color values that you can actually read when you need to list a directory, unlike RedHat's dark blue on black scheme. And the horrible vim highlighting... shudder.

While I like both, I spent more time configuring redhat to not be trivially annoying than I ever did SuSE.

Re:Bah

[Etyenne]

If you think RedHat/Fedora users still deal with "RPM hell", you are sadly mistaken and out-of-date. While you recompile your software for the latest patches, I update with yum/apt-get/up2date. Welcome to the 21st century.

only 26% of linux active servers have a known dist

[xutopia]

26% of Linux Active Servers have a known distribution according to Netcraft (2003)

Does this mean that Red Hat, Cobalt, Debian, Suse, Mandrake and Gentoo make up only 26% of all active Linux servers and that other distros take up 74%? Or does it mean that there may be more of these servers that just don't mention what they are to the world? Either way it doesn't much matter. As many slackware users have mentionned it doesn't matter what is most popular. What matters is that the Linux market grows and grows and grows.