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Red Hat Software Businesses

Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro 315

Posted by timothy from the playing-with-numbers dept.
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"
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Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro More

Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro

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  • I think part of it is (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:00AM (#9682859)
    That things like CPanel that are commonly used were up until recently only available on RedHat.
    • Good point. Not just cPanel, but Ensim too. I'm pretty sure Ensim still uses RedHat exclusively, too.
    • Gentoo had the fastest growth rate only becasue it went from .7 to 1.0 market share.
      SuSE however gained the most market share going from 10.9 to 11.8. It gained .9%, compared to the next highest Debian which gained only .4%.
      So it looks like SuSE picked up more RH defectors than any other distro.

  • Red Hat / Fedora (Score:3, Insightful)

    by x3ro ( 628101 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:00AM (#9682863) Homepage
    Is that Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora?
    • its all redhat distros , including fedora
      So means RH X , Redhat Enterprise X and Fedora X
      Where X is a version number

  • BSD? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:02AM (#9682878)
    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.
  • that's always saying BSD is dying? As a NetBSd user, I wouldn't consider them an reliable source. ;)*

    *winky provided for the sardonically challenged

  • Whatever it is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tbjw ( 760188 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:06AM (#9682900)
    I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

    • Re:Whatever it is... (Score:4, Informative)

      by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @01:27AM (#9683269)
      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.

      • Wow, what are your sources on that? It's been my impression that linux has been massively popular on servers, but is just now making inroads on the desktop. I'd be very surprised if linux was 3x as popular on the desktop as it is on the server.
        • I've known a lot of people who run Linux on workstations, mostly beginners trying it out, but heck, they're still users. But there are many *MANY* more hosting companies using it, which dramatically sway the numbers to servers. For example, where I am, there are about 6 workstations running Linux. But there are roughly 150 servers and network devices running Linux. Most of the people who I've known that consistantly run Linux either are or have been techs or admins.

          I'm starting to agree with Micro

          • Re:Whatever it is... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Feztaa ( 633745 )
            I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice.

            Actually, I thought that was the whole point of the new software economy created by open source... you get the software for free, and then you pay for support so that the developers can afford to create more software to give away for free.

            Anyway, I'm not really familiar with 64-bit distros, but I'm sure you could do a fedora install or something with a 64 bit yum repository, and then you wouldn't have to pay for software updates. I'm sure you could do som
            • From my experience the only usable gratis 64 bit distribution is Gentoo, which works really well.

              Debian 64 bit is plain unusable, and simply outpaced by Gentoo speedy tracking of new stuff.
          • Have you tried Gentoo? If you go through stages 1-3 (or 4), it will take some time (a few days at most) to compile and optimize; it does not sound like you have that kind of free computer time. You might want to use a Gentoo LiveCD. From here [gentoo.org]:

            "Portage will keep your Gentoo Linux system as "up-to-date" as you desire. And because of this, experienced Gentoo users don't pay too much attention to "new versions" of Gentoo Linux -- after all, the latest and greatest version of Gentoo Linux is always availab

            • Re:Whatever it is... (Score:5, Interesting)

              by M1FCJ ( 586251 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @07:15AM (#9684348) Homepage
              Gentoo is fun to tinker with.

              On the other hand I'm sick of wasting time on tuning my OS. I want it to work, out of the box, 100% of the time. Redhat&Suse work fine for that matter. If I want to run something on an obsolete box, Slackware is good enough and still takes less time to install and configure.

              Gentoo is fun but it has no place on my servers and desktops. I have one image on a spare disk and when I'm in the mood, I can screw my system as much as I like.

          • Re:Whatever it is... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by clymere ( 605769 )
            I'm running Slackware right now, and am much happier with it than RH.

            that said, Gentoo and SuSE both have 64-bit versions out right now, and you can get neccesary updates to either one free of charge. It sounds to me as if you are running Fedora, not true RH if you are supposedly being charged for updates. I can tell you that if you purcahsed RH's supported product, you would get free updates and still have spent considerably less on TCO than if you were running Windows. And while I am not been a RH us

          • Re:Whatever it is... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Odin's Raven ( 145278 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:06AM (#9685080)
            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:

            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.

        • everything is relative (Score:5, Insightful)

          by muyuubyou ( 621373 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @03:58AM (#9683777)
          HermanAB wrote:
          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.
          to which Feztaa replied:
          Wow, what are your sources on that? It's been my impression that linux has been massively popular on servers, but is just now making inroads on the desktop. I'd be very surprised if linux was 3x as popular on the desktop as it is on the server.

          Only a problem with that: 23 million desktops is by no means 3x as popular as 7 million servers. Considering the ammount of servers and desktops out there, 7 million servers is very popular while 23 million desktop is very unpopular. For servers, we've been there for a while. For desktops, we're definitely not there yet.
    • If by "desktop" you meant to say "server", then you would be correct in that cliche.
    • I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

      Lisa: "A gay Republican president by 2084?"
      Gay Republican: "We're realistic."

  • Come to Gentoo :) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rd4tech ( 711615 ) * on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:07AM (#9682904)
    Gentoo, 6-month Growth Rate, 49.5%.
    Seems like we have the biggest growth rate...
    C'mon geeks, show some backbone, come to Gentoo, our precious...:)

    And it isn't even hard to install. When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff, once KDE is up, the rest can follow safely. *Literary, the manual had a section where they didn't had an extra slash and that screwed me for half an hour:)

    • Re:Come to Gentoo :) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by foonf ( 447461 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:23AM (#9683011) Homepage
      When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff

      To put that in perspective, it took me about two hours to install Slackware 3.3 on my totally obsolete 386SX when I started using Linux. That was installing off of a parallel port Zip drive on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM. Even then, to install on that limited of a machine, you had to mount the root floppy directly rather than loading it into a ramdisk, and setup a swap partition before even being able to run the installer.

      24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.
      • 24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

        C'mon, you're accepting the "it takes 24 hours to install" idea from some guy that says "without no previous experience!"
    • Running Gentoo on a webserver? Come on, webservers are meant to run Apache and serve as many users as possible, they're not meant to be compiling all day.

    • Re:Come to Gentoo :) (Score:3, Interesting)

      by clymere ( 605769 )
      24 hours? I can get a Slackware install finished in 15 minutes.

      You would probably get a larger performance gain from ditching KDE then from any optimized compiling you did.

    • Re:Come to Gentoo :) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Etyenne ( 4915 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:42AM (#9685419)
      This post is symptomatic of all the reasons Gentoo is despised in a large segment of the Linux population. First, Gentoo users are overly evangelical to the point of being annoying. Gentoo is a nice toy, a real impressive hack but it is not the right tools for most situation. I have seen Gentoo advocate recommend it to complete newbie, saying "installing software is easy, you just type emerge blah blah blah...". Pathetic.

      Second, the vocal evangelist portion of the Gentoo community seem to be mostly beginner who just feel so empowered to be able to compile their own software. When you have been sysadmining professionnally for a while, compiling is not fun anymore, it become a chore you try to avoid. Binary packages, for all their imperfection, are convenient and predictable. And if you raise me an "emerge", I'll raise you an "apt", period.
  • There's another netcraft article tying cobalt gains to opening the ROM source. [netcraft.com]

    Especially interesting in the context of the fact the product was discontinued.

  • definately take with a grain of salt (Score:4, Insightful)

    by XMichael ( 563651 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:09AM (#9682920) Homepage Journal
    Lets see, NetCraft has successfully identified my exterior Linux Virtual Server boxes, RedHat; great. However they don't know that there are 90 systems running behind that LVS server, 20 of them are RedHat (as they were part of the origional deployment) the other 70 are Debian ... since the licensing change, we changed our corperate distro of choice.

    22 systems running RedHat 7.3 (All paid for)
    70 systems running Debian Woody (Company donated $6000) to the debian folks.

    All in all, netcraft see's two systems. Sweet.

    Priceless Photos [pricelessphotos.org]
    • Is there anything that suggests people using Debian would likely use RH externally, more than vice versa? Or that Debian users are more likely to disable version numbering?

      Unless there is, I don't see what the problem is with the figures.

      To paint a picture you have to use broad brush strokes.
      • My point is, in alot of corperate enviroments, they have already deployed there LVS load balancers / Firewalls, and will not be replacing these systems any time soon. I suspect there is a larger leaning towards having older RedHat systems being exposed to the world. The newer systems are likely just pieces of the cluster.

        Unforchutely given the tech. market I doubt there is nearly the ratio of NEW cluster deployments as we saw a few years ago.

        At my previous employeer we had a large we cluster (using LVS)

    • [OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes!? (Score:4, Funny)

      by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:22AM (#9683009)
      NetCraft "see's" (sic) two systems?

      Excuse me, but just when in the fuck did it become chic to pepper language with inappropriate and meaningless apostrophes? Lately, I've seen apostrophes misused in:

      The infamous "it's" instead of "its" (to show possessive, as in "the animal defended its home"-- most people nowadays would write "the animal defended it's (sic) home", which means "the animal defended it is home", which makes no sense)

      Plurals ("sunglass'" (sic), "pizza's" (sic), etc.)

      At the end of "its" (bizarrely)-- i.e. its' (sic), which is not a word at all and probably never was

      ...And now, I see you using it as part of a verb. "See's"? WTF up with that? "See is"?

      God, am I getting fucking sick of idiocy like this. Why the fuck do I even bother writing proper English any more, when even relatively intelligent people like you mangle the language like cheese through a grater? And if you're from a non-English-speaking nation: I apologize. Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America, and in fact from people born in America, who have been learning English all their lives. Go figure.

      Anyhow, I'm fucking sick of this. Who the fuck started this "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it" shit?

    • NetCraft has successfully identified my exterior Linux Virtual Server boxes, RedHat; great.

      Huh? It should see the real servers, that's what it's talking to. (The number will (probably) still be way off, but you probably make up for it in vhosts anyway.)

      But the OS of the LVS box shouldn't matter at all, exapt maybe if they do some kind of IP profiling, and even then it'd have to be something weird. It's just acting as a router after all.

      /August.

    • is www.completecctv your company?

      I really like that you said they donated $6000 to Debian, even though there was nothing forcing them too.

      I know that I would certainly go out of my way to do business with that kind of company.

      Someone ought to put together a highly public list of OSS supporting companies(unless someone already has, and i just don't know)

  • Red Hat internationally (Score:5, Informative)

    by davejenkins ( 99111 ) <slashdot@NOSPam.davejenkins.com> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:10AM (#9682930) Homepage
    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).

    • 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

    • 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.

      That makes sense, considering that RedHat is American, SuSE is German, and Mandrake is French (ie, all those governments would tend to prefer locally-produced software than foreign imports).

      The way I see it, though

  • More mportantly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:10AM (#9682933) Homepage
    More important in this piece is that all of them are growing in absolute terms, and growing quickly. 10-15% growth every six months is nothing to sneeze at. It would be interesting to see these figures for other OS:es.

  • fastest in terms of percentage? (Score:3, Informative)

    by alphan ( 774661 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:13AM (#9682952) Homepage
    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.

  • Two different worlds... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:14AM (#9682965)
    RedHat AS/ES or Suse for the enterprise. The logic being that Suse and RedHat invest a lot in the mid-range to high-end server market. Not only do they make sure their kernels take advantage of this hardware but they'll support them as well. RPM may have it's problems but a well trained admin should know how to avoid them.

    Gentoo's growth really shouldn't suprise anyone. The ideals behind Gentoo fit well with the entry-level sys admin / "hacker" types that run servers for most small companies.

    I think it's sad that Debian, which is one of the best (if not THE best) server distro, appears to be losing momentum. I'm sure that will change though. Who knows, these stats are merely an indication.

    Just my two cents on the matter. Heh, there goes the karma....

    • Debian Sarge (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JJahn ( 657100 )
      Expect to see more momentum when Debian Sarge finally becomes stable, replacing good ol' Woody. I love Debian, but for an increasing number of servers I find myself going to testing or unstable to grab packages when the Woody ones are just too old for my uses.

      Besides, the new debian-installer is actually quite nice. Still text based, but its fast and intuitive even at beta stage. Its a great improvement on boot-floppies, and the cross platform support is impressive to say the least.
    • Debians not totally dead - have just about completed migrating 20 production servers over and to be honest i have never been happier. Apt-get just works ! Used to be RedHat through and through -then went to Mandrake (work was a mandrake shop when i got there) and to be honest urpmi - although a refreshing change from RedHats incomplete package management system (granted this was RH 7.2-7.3 days) compared to apt-get, it is somewhat broken.

      Running Debian on my desktop at home - as for being out of date - ju

  • Probably still RH/Fedora... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) * on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:21AM (#9682999) Homepage

    So if all versions were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting?

    Probably still RedHat/Fedora [redhat.com]. It's quick, easy to set up, well supported, has decent-to-good administration tools, and gives good Karma to both you and your boss.

    We use Fedora for both our dedicated servers (to be leased/rented to clients) and for internal use. We theoretically offer FreeBSD installs as well, but no one has ever taken us up on that offer (I wonder why)...

    RH's kickstart and anaconda features are godsends, the text-only and curses utilities are more than adequate when needed, and with Yum [duke.edu] I know longer have to care about RPM dependancy hell.

    Gentoo? Give me my three days back, please.

    Debian? I suppose... but something smells "stagnant" to me and it's not just the water.

    *BSD? Too complex for most customers, and a headache I'd rather not have to deal with on our production machines. There's very little that the BSDs can offer me (for the time invested in learning all the "oddities" (from my perspective)) that's worth it for me to move over.

    Your mileage may vary, but mine stays pretty constant.

    • FYI on Debian:
      Yes and no.

      The "testing" setup is reasonably up to date.
      Right now I'm using it and the 2.4.25 kernel, and gcc hit 3.3.4 last weekend.

      The stable distro is seriously out of date in all reality. They are basically tied up in ideology....:(

      I'm glad to hear RH got the dependancy mess straightened out.

      enjoy !
    • There is nothing stagnant about Debian. If you're talking about Debian/stable being ancient you're only showing that you know nothing of the three different Debian distributions. HAND.
      • I wouldn't run unstable on a production server. I do run testing, but that requires careful monitoring, since security updates are not always as timely for unstable or testing. stable is by far the best to use on a server in terms ot stability and security, but it's so out of date it won't even install on most new hardware. This I believe was one of the main reasons that they've decided to go ahead with the release of sarge, despite the problems with non-free content. People like myself are getting frustrat

  • And in other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:27AM (#9683029)
    Windows still top desktop distro.

    All this proves is that the old maxim "there's no accounting for taste" is truly universal in its applicability. ;)

  • How about an anon survey? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fiz Ocelot ( 642698 ) <baelzharon.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:34AM (#9683056)
    I'd really be interested in numbers from an anonymous survey of top corporations on what OS they use and for what purpose.

    Why anon? I think that's obvious, I hope...

    I'm not really interested in what the current "popular" Distro is. I need to know what has a proven track record in very important areas.

    Anyone else's input is also appreciated.

  • "Gentoo is now the fastest growing" ... uh, no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chunderfest ( 755217 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:39AM (#9683084)
    Gentoo went from 0.7% to 1.0% share. SuSE went from 10.9% to 11.8%. i.e. SuSE's market share grew 3X as much as Gentoo's did.

    Don't be fooled by that last column. It's pretty much meaningless to compare the ratio "july/jan" for each distro; it's the tiny "jan" value for Gentoo what makes its "6-month Growth Rate" look impressive, which it's not (looked at on a number-of-installations basis).

    Basically RH lost a %, SuSE gained one, some others gained fractions of a %. Nothing terribly interesting.

  • Bah (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@gma i l .com> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:41AM (#9683095) Homepage
    Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare. If you end up taking this poll too seriously, think about how popular mcdonalds is.
    • Do you really think the apps you need to run a server result in "an rpm dependancy nightmare?" You may have rpm dependancy problems with your favorite desktop apps but for the server side Redhat ES runs fine with rpms readily available that install in a second.

    • Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Limburgher ( 523006 )
      Amen, sister. And the tiny amount of RAM the installer needs makes it the king of the minimalist distros, while still being full-featured and highly compatible. It's the backbone of my network, though I will admit to using Fedora for desktop. Slack is definately the king for servers.

    • Re:Bah (Score:3, Informative)

      by Etyenne ( 4915 )
      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.

  • And how would they determine distro? (Score:5, Informative)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @01:12AM (#9683206)
    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 [apache.org]. 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.
    • Linux is the kernel /me compares contents of kernel.org and linux.org, .com, and .net. /me then checks whether the Linux Standards Base refers to a kernel, or more than that /me then checks the usage of Linux by 99.9% of its users.

      'Linux' stopped being a kernel ages ago. Stop being a pedantic geek and correcting folk.

  • In other news... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ACLinux has a growth rate of inifinte percent. Installed server are currently at one computer, but with this growth rate ACLinux is certain to take over the Linux server market in a matter of seconds!
  • People keep arguing that Gentoo is for geeks, gentoo is time consuming, etc... Please, don't pretend you know it! Tell me if you know of any distribution that can install VMWare Workstation, Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, etc... with one (ONLY ONE) command: emerge XXX That saves me a LOT of time! Time you spend with instalation (it can be fast using stage3) is saved many times by Gentoo's excellent PORTAGE. Here in Brazil, Gentoo is becoming VERY popular. I use Gentoo on my desktop, I was a Red Hat user and m
    • Basically your right.
      I think that what makes Gentoo an excellent desktop OS (very uptodate - gnome 2.6, etc...) makes it a dangerous OS for a server.
      I installed gentoo on a old k6-200 as a homeserver an DynDNS webserver. Its running PhpBB2 on mysql and apache2, squirrelmail and a TeamSpeak-Server ans some other stuff. I wondered if gentoo was production ready (although this system is not critical at all ...) - it is. The only time I needed to do some serious reconfiguring was when gentoo moved the APACHE
    • ell me if you know of any distribution that can install VMWare Workstation, Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, etc... with one (ONLY ONE) command: emerge XXX

      Umm...Debian? apt-get install XXX

      Honestly, I'm in the process of moving from Gentoo to Debian, for both servers and desktops. Gentoo finally just pissed me off. From the package maintaner for bind just being a dork (refusing to deal with bind 9.2.3 for almost a year now), to random movements of config files in minor upgrades, to having to wrestle with pack

  • Many people had advised me against Gentoo on server machines due to the fact that it might be unstable. Everyone used to recommend Redhat for servers cuz it was supposed to be more stable.

    I have a server running on Gentoo, and another one on Redhat. Both on machine with exactly the same config, running same stuff (LAMP). The one with Gentoo is waaaay faster than the one with Redhat.

    Though neither of them crash!
    • Got a 2.6 kernel on the Gentoo box? it's probably the dependent-read disk scheduler that makes the difference.
    • The major problem I have with Gentoo on a server is that it's too dynamic. I mean, upgrading to new versions of software packages when you don't need new features or security updates is just asking for trouble.

      Look man, I love system administration as much as the next guy, but on a production machine you really don't want to risk anything breaking. Bleeding edge isn't exactly the way to go.
  • RedHat lost 1% marketshare, the biggest loss among Linux distributions. At the same time, SUSE gained 1%, again, the largest gain.

    Sure, RedHat could easily overlook SUSE, as it has roughly 5 times more (visible) websites out there, apparently, and the Asian market is still completely open for taking. But, at least game is not over, yet!
    • Red Hat still achieved a healthy net gain in the number of total machines running RH, so it's not exactly time to be panicking yet. I'm sure they knew some would turn to alternatives when the new support lifecycles/Fedora were announced.

      In fact I'm a bit suprised the aren't more switchers. I guess people don't just up and change distro that easily in a commercial setting. In the next fiscal quarter report it will be very interesting to see just how many more licenses RH is selling now compared to when they
  • I see alot of people touting there distro lately. But what matters to my boss (and therefor me) is what works, what works well, and how much overhead a system is avoiding.
    Any distro out of the box should be looked upon as all-for-one generic solution. I would not be caught dead putting an out of the box distro in production. Not even after a few hours customizing it.
    My point is yeah, I can install and get the latest apache running with one command on Gentoo, but will it be optimized. (No ofcourse I don'

  • only 26% of linux active servers have a known dist (Score:3, Informative)

    by xutopia ( 469129 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:07AM (#9685681) Homepage

    26% of Linux Active Servers have a known distribution according to Netcraft (2003) [netcraft.com]

    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.

  • I want to see (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BCW2 ( 168187 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @11:10AM (#9686364) Journal
    What Novell has coming with Suse. I have experience with Netware(4,5,6) and find it easy to use, reliable and secure. With Suse added to the mix it could become a real high end competitor to Red Hat Enterprise. Think about Cisco hardware with a Netware backend, all running on Suse, close to vault quality. I don't like everything that RH has done lately (dropping the desktop, bluecurve) but have to admit they are a big part of the push for corporate Linux. That is not a bad thing. I'll settle for Linux winning in the totals of all distro's.

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