A few weeks ago I got my Shuttle XPC back.
It is a nice machine, a P4 3ghz, with 1 GB RAM and 160GB HD in a very small compact form.
I have decided to install Linux on it. The only question is what flavour?
I had narrowed it down to
Ubuntu
A great Debian based distro with a wonderful user community and without the complexity of Debian itself.
Red Hat
Enterprise
Fedora
The enterprise version of Red Hat has two things wrong with it.
1. It costs money!
There are a few clones of the enterprise version of Red Hat, my favorite being CENTOS which lets you download the “offical” red hat updates for Free!. If I ever need to support Red Hat Enterprise this is what I will install.
But unfortunally it fails the second point.
2. Being an enterprise product it’s emphasis (rightly so) is stability
I am willing to trade stability for features, so that makes Fedora a better fit. Fedora is the testing bed for Red Hat Linux. Any features they like will get rolled over into the next version of the Enterprise product.
So after playing with Centos, Ubuntu 5.10, I have settled on (drum roll please ….) FEDORA Core 4
Why?
1. Free
2. Cutting Edge
3. Based on the most popular corporate Linux.
This means that binaries for the latest versions of apps should be easy to get.
4. The user community is wonderful.