Monthly Archives: July 2010
Ubuntu
With so many Linux distributions out there it gets tricky to know which is the best one to use. Of course “the best” depends on what you are looking for, but in our case ten years ago we were looking for a stable server platform which really didn’t change much, so we chose Red Hat Enterprise. However about four years ago when Red Hat was becoming expensive to maintain and painful to update we moved to CentOS.
It seemed perfect at the time. However, these days I am working on a few more technologies that have changed frequently in the last 3 years (including Django and Python) so having a system that appears to be almost always 2-3 years out of date was painful. You’d find yourself constantly hunting down packages that you have to build yourself or from repositories that are questionable. Which of course starts to defeat the point of having a stable distribution.
I recently switched to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and I now can pretty much get all that I need from the main distribution. The “LTS” in the name is important and it stands for “Long Term Support”, and versions are supported for a full three years after they come out. The tools are a bit different, but it is really refreshing to be able to use the system without constantly having to go off to the internet to find some recent patch.