I've postponed the purchase until Monday, so we can discuss this more
over the weekend.
Ivan Krstic wrote:
I apologize if this has been discussed, but is there a
compelling reason
to use a rpm-based distribution in the first place? I swear by Debian,
and for the high-performance needs that wikipedia has, even looking into
Gentoo would not be a bad idea. I'd be more than willing to lend a hand
with any aspect of either of these distributions that needs clarification.
It has been discussed in the past, but in the fast moving world of free
software, it's worth revisiting.
1. The last time I checked, Debian for AMD64 was not in existence.
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-amd64/
seems to indicate that things have not changed much.
2. For practical purposes, it's also a lot simpler to go with an OS
that's offered by SiliconMechanics -- they are offering for some
reason only SuSe Enterprise (mucho $$$) and Fedora Core 1 for AMD 64
(free). Could they install the less expensive SuSE? Yes, I think so,
after all they did it for us before. (It used to be an option in the
dropdown box. I haven't talked to anyone to see why not anymore.)
3. The existing systems are all RPM based, and all the developers are
familitar with that. I would imagine that all are also familiar enough
with .deb packages and apt-get, or that it's easy enough to learn. But
that's not really for me to say.
--Jimbo