The easyones... Redhat or Suse, trouble = call Redhat has always been a bit more square feeling than Suse, for some reason Suse always seemed to be more finished Distro. But these 2 have also been my worst nightmares when it came to develop software. Something running on these 2 might not make it to other linux without trimming. But as Workstations they are great. They are a bit weak on the science tooling...
Gentoo The hard one but good... if all of your systems are quite similar, install gentoo(time consuming for the first one), make precompiled packaged that are good for the lowest common denominator(easy), and get yourself a mirror of portage(easy), then install all the distfiles and precompiled files somewhere easy to access(easy), write some good cron jobs(easy). Remove all the compilers stuff if needed (easy), make a liveCD (time consuming but easy)
You can write your own profiles, so let's say you have one for each situation, DMZ,local only servers, endusers, technical users.
That way, the company does not become a compile farm, get software with the configuration "you" want, they are precompiled and the deployment and update is fast. And you can easily fix yourself some build scripts in your own local "portage" so that if you do decide to go away the next sys-admin should be able to just do the exact same consistent installs.
With gentoo I get a quite similar look and feel for all my different arch, ppc32 , ppc64, x86, alpha, sparc. And it does have some support for science applications.
Gentoo can become a good and easy to maintain system but the initial investment is long and hard.
Debian: I would see debian as an in between solution. And in my experience I always ended drying between wanting stable but could not support new/wierd hardware. Then the consistency between arch has always been rough. Yes I know, if they are not the same it should be filed as a bug in debian, I got shruged off when I tried file one and I would have had to file many... Then I have better things to do than filling bugs.
Linux From scratch, is the only way to start for really hard to tackle services or needs, but should be kept as a guide and learning tool. Far from being and overall usable distro, it is the best when it comes to embeded, single purposes boxes that gentoo cannot handle. If some new platform would be totally unsupported I would use that one. Cross compile it and give it a spin. Then I'd go to Gentoo and try to make a new profile.
Mandrake: each time I tough it looked great it left me down somewhere else, maybe better than it was last time I tried it.
Slackware and others, I am sorry I didn't install Slackware in a long long time, when gcc2.7.2 was the new thing and kernel 1.2 was still the stable thing. and I was too much of a newbie to say anything sensible.
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The easyones ... Redhat or Suse, trouble = call ...
... if all of your systems are quite similar, install gentoo(time consuming for the first one), make precompiled packaged that are good for the lowest common denominator(easy), and get yourself a mirror of portage(easy), then install all the distfiles and precompiled files somewhere easy to access(easy), write some good cron jobs(easy). Remove all the compilers stuff if needed (easy), make a liveCD (time consuming but easy)
Redhat has always been a bit more square feeling than Suse, for some reason Suse always seemed to be more finished Distro. But these 2 have also been my worst nightmares when it came to develop software. Something running on these 2 might not make it to other linux without trimming. But as Workstations they are great. They are a bit weak on the science tooling
Gentoo The hard one but good
You can write your own profiles, so let's say you have one for each situation, DMZ,local only servers, endusers, technical users.
That way, the company does not become a compile farm, get software with the configuration "you" want, they are precompiled and the deployment and update is fast. And you can easily fix yourself some build scripts in your own local "portage" so that if you do decide to go away the next sys-admin should be able to just do the exact same consistent installs.
With gentoo I get a quite similar look and feel for all my different arch, ppc32 , ppc64, x86, alpha, sparc. And it does have some support for science applications.
Gentoo can become a good and easy to maintain system but the initial investment is long and hard.
Debian: I would see debian as an in between solution. And in my experience I always ended drying between wanting stable but could not support new/wierd hardware. Then the consistency between arch has always been rough.
Yes I know, if they are not the same it should be filed as a bug in debian, I got shruged off when I tried file one and I would have had to file many... Then I have better things to do than filling bugs.
Linux From scratch, is the only way to start for really hard to tackle services or needs, but should be kept as a guide and learning tool. Far from being and overall usable distro, it is the best when it comes to embeded, single purposes boxes that gentoo cannot handle. If some new platform would be totally unsupported I would use that one. Cross compile it and give it a spin. Then I'd go to Gentoo and try to make a new profile.
Mandrake: each time I tough it looked great it left me down somewhere else, maybe better than it was last time I tried it.
Slackware and others, I am sorry I didn't install Slackware in a long long time, when gcc2.7.2 was the new thing and kernel 1.2 was still the stable thing. and I was too much of a newbie to say anything sensible.
Try a company name adtron for 3.5" Flash scsi drives and Sandisk has/had 2.5" and 3.5" ide flash drives...