dedazo's Journal: Goodbye RH

I've finally had it with RH-based distros. I used to swear by them but it seems they've gone down the crapper lately. I've been getting core dumps and mysterious errors on CentOS the past few weeks, and I'm done with all that.

So a few days ago I reformatted my Slicehost instances with Debian etch. Don't get me wrong, I've never liked Debian for what I use Linux for, because they're always two versions behind on everything and I just do not want to deal with "non-free" and "unstable" repo stupidities. But in this case, I needed Python 2.5.x and all the latest and greatest, so I had no choice (Slicehost offers Ubuntu as a server... right).

So after about a day or so, I have lighttpd, Postgres, Postfix, OpenAMQ and just about everything else working on my Slices.

I have to say something about RedHat though - you do get used to their admin tools. I found myself trying to figure out whether I hated RH more for making all those tools or Debian for not making them. Case in point? chkconfig and /sbin/service. Don't get me started on iptables, which are a proper service under RH but an afterthought on Debian - to the point that I had to go in and edit the /etc/network/interfaces to make sure my rules would survive a reboot. What the frak.

Anyway... everything seems to be working fine. I realize it's just that I'm used to a different environment, but it's still a pain.

As for the desktop, looks like I'm stuck with Fedora because I have no intention of going through another wipe-and-reload distro-of-the-day cycle, I just don't have time. Holy jesus, just installing the TTF fonts I need on Linux is an unbearable experience I don't want to repeat more than once every couple of years. For the time being though I'm warming up to Putty on Windows, which is not as flexible as a straight GNOME console with SSH, but acceptable for most quicky deals so I don't have to actually log in to Linux. It even comes with a half-acceptable SCP client.

Rant over.

Welcome to the dark side

[willyhill]

We have cookies over there, help yourself *grin*

Trust me, I've tried them all and in the end, there's no better Linux server platform than Debian. You'll see. Back in the day I fiddled with RH as well, but never really got cuddly with it. And SUSE is a pretty good desktop, though I must admit I've never installed it, I have two laptops that the DSS kids set up for me and I really like them.

Question - what do you use lighttpd for? It seems I had never heard of it, so I had to google it (the horror). It seems

Re:

[dedazo]

There's a really simple Python web framework called webpy, which works exceedingly well on lighttpd (through FastCGI). I have a few custom apps written for it. Django can also be made to run on top of it.

Beyond that, it's *really* fast for serving static content, without the Apache overhead. It also runs PHP (again through FastCGI), but that one's a little trickier. I don't know that I would recommend it unless you really know what you're doing. But for Python it's really sweet.

The community is OK I guess.