From: Ezra Zygmuntowicz Date: 2007-09-11T04:30:41+09:00 Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails Hi~ On Sep 9, 2007, at 9:12 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > 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. ;) I have to step in here with a small data point about Gentoo on servers. If you know what you're doing then it can make some of the most stable fast servers around. I'm currently running just under 1000 gentoo servers all serving Rails and ruby apps and I love it. That said for learning linux and ror then probably ubuntu or fedora are your safest bets. Gentoo requires quite a but of tweaking to get right, but once you get it right it screams. Gentoo is like a meta-distro, in the fact that you can take it and bend it into your own targeted custom distros. Cheers- -- Ezra Zygmuntowicz -- Founder & Ruby Hacker -- ez@engineyard.com -- Engine Yard, Serious Rails Hosting -- (866) 518-YARD (9273)