[Mapserver-users] Preferred Linux distro? (ease of upkeep)

[Erich Schroeder]

Hi all,
  One of the problems that I've had with mapserver has to be with the 
general maintainence of the server itself. For other server applications 
I've pretty much settled on RedHat (about 9 different servers doing 
different things) with the new addition of the apt port for rpm. This has 
made general upgrades really easy, as long as I stay away from 
hand-compiled applications. Major upgrades can still be painful, of 
course.

  After my first few applications in the mapsever 2.something range, I 
have tended to make the mapserver server a separate specalized machine. 
Still, it would be great if the general upkeep remained as easy as 
possible. Given that, what has been the experience of list members on the 
comparative ease of installation, deployment, and maintainence of 
different linux flavors? 

  My current experiment has been my first ever debian installation, and I
have managed to follow (with some changes) the debian mapserver
information on the mapserver wiki, along with editing the easymapsever
script to get a compiled version of mapserver 40b along with php-cgi etc.
This still has a hand-built feel about it, and would be pretty awful for
an ISP who might want to provide mapserver as a feature.

Erich


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Erich Schroeder                    Phone: (217)785-0033
Curator, Information Technologies  FAX:   (217)785-2857
Illinois State Museum GIS Lab      email:erich(at)illinois.state.museum
                 http://illinois.state.museum/
---------------------------------------------------------------------