Matthew Wakeling wrote:
For starters, FreeBSD isn't Linux at all. Secondly, the other three options you have listed are all Red Hat versions - not much variety there.
The main difference between those is that Fedora tries to be the latest and greatest. This implies that you must reinstall or update about every six months -- because if you do not wish to do that, you would be running a more stable distribution.
I know that some people swear by Red Hat, but I personally have had nothing but trouble from such installations,
I have no trouble with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or its equivalent, CentOS. However the following point is valid:
especially when trying to upgrade to a newer version of Postgres.
The theory with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution is that you run with what comes with it. All the stuff that comes with it is guaranteed to work together. Red Hat do not add features, change any interfaces, etc. Then they support it for 7 years. I.e., if it works for you at the beginning, it will work the entire 7 years if you wish. If you want newer features, you must upgrade, as with other distributions, but their upgrades come only about every year and a half, and if you do not need the new features, you just do not bother. I started with RHEL 3, skipped RHEL 4 (except I run CentOS 4 on my old machine), and am now running RHEL 5. Consequently, I am running postgresql-8.1.11-1.el5_1.1 and it works fine, as it did when I started. They fix only errors, not performance problems or new features.
We have just switched a machine from Red Hat to Debian because of this very problem. I can heartily recommend Debian, as it distributes new versions of Postgres very quickly and allows you to continuously upgrade without any problems. For comparison, with Red Hat, you will need to upgrade to a whole new distribution whenever you want updated software, which is a much bigger undertaking.
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