[Techtalk] Considering an OS change

[Charlotte Oliver]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 12:44:09PM -0400, Jennifer Davis wrote:
> 
> As much as I like ^H^H^H^H love Slackware, I find that I have less time to
> manage it and was thinking of running an easier OS for my router pc and
> maybe the desktop and also to see Linux done differently.  I was pondering
> Redhat 9 or Mandrake 9.1.  I guess I was wondering if there were things
> that I should know beforehand that will make a switchover easier.  I have
> always been iffy on using Mandrake as a server.  Are my feelings
> irrational?
> 
> I have 3 users inside the network and about 10 remotely and I plan to use
> the router to do masquerading, webserving, mail database, remote shell &
> ftp.

Hiya Jennifer --

I recently did a similiar sort of conversion - I was used to running
Slackware on all my systems, but wanted to give other flavors a try.  I
switched to FreeBSD for my server (/usr/ports is so awesome) and RedHat
for my desktop (yay bells and whistles!).

I think you can really use any distro you want for a server, as long as
you don't install things you don't need (and what that may be may vary
for you - for me it means things like no XWindows, no sound card, etc.).
But what I'd look at most intensively is what kind of package management
system is going to be on the new distro - do you want something that
will fetch new packages for you (apt-get or /usr/ports are examples)?  
Or do you jsut want something that will catalog things you install (RPM
is lovely for that)?

I won't ever go back to Slackware, I don't think.  Not unless they
develop a sane package management system!  I'm very spoiled now. 
But as Sonja once pointed out to me, 'sane' is in the eye of the
beholder. :)

Charlotte