Picking an Operating System, enter CentOS

Seeing as I want to use this almost entirely as a server, I was pretty sure that I would be using some flavor of linux as the operating system.  Given the price advantage to anything Windows based, especially any of the Windows server offerings, Windows was a non-starter.

I did briefly entertain the idea of using openSolaris, but decided I wanted to go with an operating system that had a large active community.  Not sure if openSolaris is there yet, and didn’t want to spend/have the time to spend trying to get it to work.  I wanted to be able to Google and find answers.

Initially I was leaning towards using Ubuntu.  It is the most popular distro according to distrowatch and has a large community.  Another priority of mine for the OS was that it have a long support window, I don’t want it to be at End Of Life in 6 months.  I’d like to be able to the server up and running and not have to worry about upgrading the OS to the latest bleeding edge.  Ubuntu met this requirement in that certain releases are marked as Long Supported versions.

However, while performing additional research on the various linux distros, I happened upon CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System).  CentOS is created from the source of a “prominent north american enterprise linux vendor”.  In other words, CentOS is almost an exact copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  The major difference being that all the Red Hat logos are replaced with with CentOS logos because Red Hat does not allow for the logos to be redistributed. According to distrowatch, CentOS is the 8th most popular flavor of linux.  Big enough to allow me to find answers to various issues.  And according to Wikipedia, CentOS is the most popular of the rebranded RHEL versions.

For me, the identical binary nature of CentOS to RHEL has a distinct advantage.  Since professionally I work almost exclusively with IBM WebSphere software, specifically Portal, and IBM certifies WebSphere to run on RHEL.  With CentOS I should run into fewer issues setting up test instances of IBM software.  This was a big enough of an advantage that I went with CentOS 5.2.

With CentOS I get php 5.1.6, mySql 5.0.22, apache 2.2.3, tomcat 5.5.23.  All reasonably current.  The only one that causes me some concern is the level of php.  It looks like there are some php apps that require php 5.2, we shall see if that causes me any problems.

I was able to get it set up with out any issues whatsoever.  Things are much easier than they were 7 years ago, the first time I messed around with linux.  Even the software Raid was a breeze.

Next steps, more config and getting some software installed.