Re: what Linux to run

[Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/03/12 01:25, Ivan Voras wrote:

On 28/02/2012 18:17, Rich Shepard wrote:

On Tue, 28 Feb 2012, mgould@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

If we move to Linux, what is the preferred Linux for running Postgres
on. This machine would be dedicated to the database only.

Michael,

  There is no 'preferred' linux distribution; the flame wars on this topic
died out a decade or so ago.

  From what you write, I would suggest that you look at one of the Ubunutus
<http://www.ubuntu.org/>. Either the KDE or Gnome versions will appear
Microsoft-like; the Xfce version appears more like CDE. Download a bootable
.iso (a.k.a. 'live disk) and burn it to a cdrom and you can try it without
.installing it. If you do like it, install it from the same disk.

  The Ubuntus boot directly into the GUI and that tends to be more
comfortable for newly defenestrated users. If you like that, but want the
more open and readily-available equivalent, install Debian. The ubuntus are
derivatives of debian.

One interesting thing I've discovered recently is that there is a HUGE
difference in performance between CentOS 6.0 and Ubuntu Server 10.04
(LTS) in at least the memory allocator and possibly also multithreading
libraries (in favour of CentOS). PostgreSQL shouldn't be particularly
sensitive to either of these, but it makes me wonder what else is
suboptimal in Ubuntu.

I think if you are going to select a member of the Debian family, I would strongly recommend Debian itself. I have the impression that the Debian community is more serious about quality than Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu).

Given a choice between RHEL, Centos, and Ubuntu.  I would recommend either of RHE or, Centos - the former if you have the budget for the support & piece of mind.  Red Hat has won awards for its quality of User Service - and Red Hat contributes vastly more effort towards maintaining the Linux kernel than Canonical.

In a about a year I will be setting up a server for a JBoss/PostgreSQL based application. Currently I'm thinking of using either Centos (RHEL if we get sufficient budget) or Debian, but I will defer the actual decision to nearer the time. I use Fedora for my development box, and my current test server runs Ubuntu (not my choice, but I see no significant reasons for changing it at the moment, though I'm tempted).

Cheers,
Gavin