which "flavor" of linux is best for MS?

[Homme Zwaagstra]

I thought I'd mention Gentoo (www.gentoo.org)...

As a Linux newbie it's probably not the distribution you want to start
off with, but I find it great for application development; it's a
source based distribution with a highly configurable package manager
(portage) which lets you tweak packages to your heart's content. If a
package doesn't exist for Gentoo then it's not too difficult to create
a shell script based file (an ebuild) describing how portage should
install the package.

I find a big benefit of having portage do your ./configure && make
install is that when you uninstall/upgrade/rebuild you won't find any
old files lying around on your system confusing things!

There are plenty of interesting and useful ebuilds related to the GIS
field making their way into the official package tree. Mapserver
itself isn't officially there yet but I use a modified ebuild from
<http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69417>.

I'm currently running the latest versions of the complex web of
dependencies that mapserver (4.6.1) relies on. Thanks to portage
changing a configure-time option in one of these dependencies is a
simple matter (e.g. enabling GEOS support in GDAL). 

It works for me; perhaps it could work for you. Anyway, another
distribution and choice to consider in the heterogenous world that is
GNU/Linux!

Enjoy your deliberations,

Homme Zwaagstra.

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 11:53:20AM -0500, Sergio Lopez wrote:
> Hello:
> I´m a Windows user who wants to move to the Linux world. I want to install
> linux in a box in order to use it in mapserver applications development,
> but I know there´s a lot of versions of Linux around (Debian, Fedora,
> SUSE, etc)
> By checking this list I´ve seen most popular flavors would be Debian and
> Fedora, but I want to know from your experience which one do you recommend
> to use as server for Mapserver applications.
> By the way, I already have SUSE 9.2 installation CDs, so this would be my
> first choice, but I want to hear from you before to proceed.
> Thanks in advance.