From: Matt Lawrence <matt@...>
Date: 2007-09-10T11:33:54+09:00
Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Isn't Arch a Debian derivative? There are lots of Debian derivatives,
> but Ubuntu has somewhat eclipsed them by sheer marketing hype. But as
> far as I can tell, it's fairly easy to make a "pure Debian" system as
> fast and lean as any of the derivatives or any other distro.

All of my systems are CentOS, but if you don't care about long term (5+ 
years) stability, Ubuntu is probably a better choice.  With Ubuntu, I 
would plan on rebuilding the system to the latest release every 12-18 
months, but it is a much more friendly distro for the newcomer.

> The bridge you have to cross (eventually) is whether you ever want to do
> kernel builds or recompile packages from source. RHEL and its rebuilds
> actively *discourage* rebuilding the kernel. It's too easy to trash your
> system that way. But rebuilding packages from source is easy on all the
> major distros.

I routinely grab updated source RPMs and rebuild packages, but I also do 
Linux sysadmin full time for a living.  I haven't had any reason to do a 
kernel rebuild in a few years now, so I think that's far less of an issue 
these days (but monolithic kernel still suck!).

Also, with CentOS, I add the rpmforge package repository to the list of 
sources.  Lots of good stuff there.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.