[Asterisk-Users] Linux Distribution for Asterisk server use

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 10:43:24PM -0400, Jeff Heath wrote:

> Anyway, at the user's group meetings their existed a "friendly rivalry"
> between the RedHat crowd and the Debian crowd, so I decided to try
> Debian.  Couldn't get it to install.  I really tried, even got some help
> from the Debian guys on the list, but I just couldn't do it.  Now, I'm
> not a Linux guru, but I can follow instructions, but I just couldn't get
> it to go.

Note that Debian's installer has improved from being "horrible" to being
"quite usable by a newbie" from 3.0 (Woody) to 3.1 (Sarge). In fact,
when we decided on what version if debian to base our distro on, that
installer was a very important factor.

> 
> For what you're going to do with Asterisk, I don't think there are huge
> technical differences between the distributions, so the main
> consideration ought to be "which one can I install and learn the
> fastest" and not "which one will support the most clients, or have the
> most uptime".  Having said that, there is one caveat - I would stay away
> from Fedora Core 3 or Debian unstable or whatever newest release of any
> version.  Also keep in mind that Asterisk runs just fine on Linux kernel
> 2.4.x.  You don't need 2.6.x. 

Specifically I'd say that 2.6 has matured enough by now. It has a number
of important atvantages (preemption, mainly). 

As for the more general point: Fedora is indeed a sort of "beta of RHEL".
Debian/unstable and Debian/testing are actually not that unstable as
their name hints (they are being used by many), their main disatvantage
is being a "moving target". Kind of like working with the HEAD version of
Asterisk. Even though you have snapshots.debian.org to go back to a
specific day/version, it still takes much more monitoring of the base
system.

However, if you don't use the latest Fedora, do you rely on Fedora
Legacy for updates?

Check it yourself. The updates of FedoraLegacy for FC1:

  http://fedoralegacy.org/updates/FC1/

LWN's vulnurabilities database lists quite a few newer problems. A
number of them probably affects FC1 as well:

  http://lwn.net/Vulnerabilities/

If you really care about this, you should probably be able to contribute
from your time/money/whatever to improve this. But the OP asked about a
dependable system.

The above refers to RH9 and Fedora, and not to RHEL and its clones (such as
CentOS).

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