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Most secure, stable, efficient, and user-friendly linux distro?

G

GD695372

Senior member
I'm going to be setting up a *nix box soon, and am wondering what distro would be the best-suited for use in a 24/7 environment where stability is paramount followed by efficiency(performance), and finally somewhat user-friendly if possible. I'd also like to use fvwm95, to provide a windoze-user-friendly aspect to it. I really don't know too much about the individual linux distros and would greatly appreciate any and all help i can get with this.
 

honestly, they are all about the same. what a distro really is is just a nice installer, with some default configuration options (x workstation, network server, etc) you can choose during install.

if you are going to customize it at all, it really doesnt matter (ie take fine grained control of what is installed and running on it, and do alot of post installation configuration).

redhat has nice support if you want to pay for it (like if this is a corporate machine that will be running production servers) and is an easy install.

in the end (generally), linux is linux.
 
If you want stability, security and flexibility out of the box, check out slackware. The install is not as flashy as RH or Mandrake, and you have to manually configure a few more things. However, in the long run I have found it much easier to administrate and configure. Mandrake is the easiest install I have found, but I always have headaches trying to do things like recompile the kernal or get compile software not included. If you wnat a nice wm that behaves similarly to win 9x you might also want to check out icewm. I have gotten KDE 2 running on my slack box, and I really like it in terms of user friendly. Debian I have heard is the easiest to admin because of its apt-get feature and is very stable as well, but I think the install is probably not geared towards newbies.
Check out slck for a server, I don't think you will have any problems with the install if you just follow the directions.
my $0.02
 
No distro can give you what you're asking for. Linux may be stable, but X certainly isn't...which is why I don't recommend Linux as a desktop OS.
 
The latest Debian is quite nice. I've switched over two of my machines to it now. A fairly friendly install, and quite stable and secure.
 
1.Most secure - Enirely up to you to configure your security. How you plan using it in the LAN/WAN will decide what methods to implement.

2.Most stable - As long as its not a beta release it should be stable no matter what distro you decide on. Now that isnt to say that you might have problems with X or netscape etc.... it means that your OS should be able to run 24/7 for about 2 years before you need to re-boot, maybe. 🙂

3.Most efficient - We are talking about Linux here so again that is up to you, optimizing your HDD's and configuring the whole system will allow you to make whichever app's you need to run to your liking.

4.Most user-friendly - RH, Mandrake.


My personal preferance is Mandrake, been running Mandrake ever since 6.0, before that I was dedicated to RH, well basically RH 5.2. 🙂


SHUX
 
Thanks for the input. I think I'm gonna go with mandrake, although I'm gonna look into slackware. I'd use RH, but I bought version 6.1 or 6.2(not sure which), and had a lot of problems with it(as far as x-windows anyway). Apparently it didn't natively support KDE, alternatively offering support through gnome, which seems to be what caused most of the problems. Oh yeah and it somehow killed the I/O controller on my 486 DX4.

Are there any particular issues regarding compatibility, drivers, performance, etc with the following setup that I should be aware of?

Thunderbird 1-1.25ghz
Abit KT7-RAID
IBM GXP 75 20/30gb
Kingston 10/100TX nic
US Robotics 56k v90(hardmodem)
(And the stuff in my signature -the cray)
 
Remember that when you recommend Mandrake, you are recommending modified redhat version something.or.other
 
I'm a mandrake boy myself, but like FUBAR said it started as red hat so they are pretty similar (the reason i chose mandrake was because at the time you would download .iso of mandrake and red hat you just had to downlaod a wad of files, I think that's changed now so it's a moot point..but I'm still with mandrake)

Slackware is nice, very tweakable but hard for a first time user, not friendly at all.

Debian is always out there for the traditionalists 😉 Supposedly it behaves more like Unix of old, or so I've been told, never ran it personally though so I could easily be wrong.

I'd say Mandrake if you are looking for easy setup and user-friendliness (as far as linux has such a thing) or Slackware if you are into super-tweaky-ness

You want stability, that's easy don't run X and your box will run for years 😉 and even if X crashes the OS usually won't you'll just get back to a command prompt.
 
Mandrake 7.2, its way better than 7.1, its the only one i have used but it is really really really easy to use! try it man
 
I am really a dumb a$$, but after booting into Mandrake 7.1 I can't get a GUI up. Tried online help, but that's not help.

Am I missing a GUI interface or something else.
 
enter my vote for mandrake 7.2 as well. great distro for the beginner (like me). it went easier than any of my windows installs before and quicker as well. autodetected almost all of my hardware except the usb cd-rw and set it up flawlessly. i really like kde2 as well, approaching the windows gui in usability and surpassing in several ways. konqueror is a great browser.
 
Thanks everyone. I've been using mandrake 7.2 for about 4 days now and it's incredible. I must say that linux definitely is a lot better and faster than windows. thanks for all the help.😀
 
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