From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-09-10T13:12:47+09:00
Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails

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Reid Thompson wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
>> Thanks!! If my day job ever decides to make me a .NET developer, I'll
>> keep "mono" in mind. Till then, there's Gentoo. ;)
> 
> I was running gentoo on a 700 mhz laptop til it died a couple of weeks
> ago.  I get a new PC at work tomorrow - dell 9200, dual core, 64bit,
> blah, blah.  Trying to decide whether to put straight gentoo or sabayon
> on it ( current work pc is ubuntu feisty ).  Have you ever looked at
> sabayon?  http://www.sabayonlinux.org/
> 
> 

Yeah, I've looked at Sabayon -- it's a Gentoo derivative. I'm not a big
fan of derivative distros. The big three full community distros --
Fedora, Debian and OpenSuSE -- are where I think the real action is,
with Gentoo nipping at their heels in some arenas but hopelessly out of
the running in others. For example, I can't imagine running a scientific
workstation with anything other than Gentoo or Debian, and I can't
imagine running a server on anything except CentOS/RHEL, Fedora or
Debian, although I'm sure OpenSuSE is fine for servers, as is its
commercial big brother from Novell.

Since the OP is interested in Ruby and Rails, and since Rails is a
server, I pointed him towards Fedora and CentOS because I think they're
better servers. Debian stable is also an excellent server, but there's a
lot more publicly-available information about administering the Red Hat
family than there is about Debian.

I don't think, for example, you can walk into a Barnes and Noble or
Borders and pick up a book on Debian system administration that's
current with "etch", but you can find oodles of books on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Of course, if you live in Portland, you can
walk down to Powell's Technical Books and get anything. ;)
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