Gentoo
Had some trouble getting Dark Horse CRM to work with Tomcat on Debian, I suspect it is because Tomcat is only at version 4 in sid. So I decided to try running it on Gentoo.
I’ve never run Gentoo before, and in fact since 1996 when it comes to Linux pretty much only run Debian. Like most people I started with Slackware, tried Red Hat, fiddled with Stampede and finally found Debian to the be all and end all.
Anyway it wasn’t to hard to get a Gentoo image running on my UML colo server. Simply matter of creating a loop-back filesystem, untaring a stage3 complete copy of gentoo (stage3-i686-2004.1.tar.bz2) then firing it up.
I mostly followed this reference when I was doing the inital upgrade.
At this point in time, debian is still my favourite distribution. I can’t see it changing. Source compiles my be good for desktops, but I think for servers it leaves the possible issue of a easy access compiler. Better not to make things easy for a hacker. Plus the /usr/portage files take up a lot of room. At the moment the smallest I can get gentoo is 1.1G. With debian its down at 150Mb.
Regards its doing the job for me now, Dark Horse CRM deployed without a hitch onto Tomcat5 running on Gentoo. I’ll probably keep it running on this, even if I find a way to get it running on Debian. Its always good to learn new environments.
Its possible I might look at a desktop based on gentoo. I certainly see the benefits of its cut-edge package management for getting the most of your system. I’m not talking about better performance, but an easy way to have the latest packages compiled with the options you want.