[ic] Interchange & linux distro

[Lyn St George]

On Tuesday 13 November 2012 16:54:59 marco wrote:
> After use of more debian distro the last IC installation was on ubuntu 
> 8.04 whit not threaded perl and without any problems in the time.
> 
> Now I must assemble a new virtualbox server and for more reasons 
> (privacy the first) I prefer change distro. Any hints ?

A linux distro is a bit like religion - we all have our pet preferences and 
some distros are flexible and accomodating, while others are rigid and 
dogmatic. My preference is for a source-based distro, Gentoo in particular, as 
it's built to work as a coherent whole. While I'm sure  binary distros like 
Redhat start life that way, I'm doubtful that they are still coherent when 
updated between releases - and my experience is that critical security updates 
are not sufficiently current to be considered truly secure. It sems that you 
have to reinstall a new distro release to get somewhere near current. Gentoo 
can be kept current all the time - it doesn't have a 'release' version (just 
the quarterly install version), so security is always kept tight. And it's 
very flexible in how you install and update things, eg to install perl modules 
that are not in portage (the management system) there is a tool which creates 
the build, installs what you want (along with all dependencies), and lists it 
in portage.

I find it simple to use, secure, and stress-free.

Doubtless others have other views ...

Lyn