On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:08:12 -0600
"Thomas T. Veldhouse" <veldy at veldy.net> wrote:

> I have a gateway/firewall/you-name-it server that has just been
> giving me performance trouble.  I have been running FreeBSD 5x (now
> 5.3-RC2) faithfully on it, hoping for better days.  Well, the
> performance just isn't there (it is a rather old machine with 288MB
> RAM / P2-333).  I put Gentoo on it and it performed well.  However,
> I now find Gentoo lacking in several areas.  One is that MySQL is
> not up-to-date (I actually prefer postgresql), even in the unstable
> branch.  OpenLDAP is not up-to-date either.  <snip>

I like to compile stuff like MySQL/PostgreSQL from source for this
reason.  I usually pick a distro like Debian/SuSE/Slackware whatever
and use the underlying package manager to deal with the libs and basic
software, desktop/X etc.  Anything I want to keep up to date
(PhP/Apache/etc) I build on my own.  It's worked very well for a
while, though it takes dedicated maintenance.

> I prefer the 2.6 kernel as performance seems to be best with it.
> 
> Should I consider Debian with versions of unstable packages?
> Should I consider Fedora?
> Anything else I should consider for leading edge and up-to-date [I
> don't want to necessarily bleed, although I can deal with some blood
> loss].

I cannot speak for Fedora as I no longer run RPM based distros. 
Debian unstable I have heard can actually be quite stable if you do it
"right".  Personally, Slackware 10 has a 2.6 kernel (not enabled by
default, but easy to install from one of the CD's) and so far slack 10
is a rock solid distro.  

As for performance, I put Slack on a PII 233 labtop with Gnome 2.6 and
it wasn't just crazy blazing, but the performance was surprizingly
decent given the age of the hardware.  Then the LCD went bad on me. 
Again...  :(  I have Debian stable running on a 486 for a
firewall/gateway and it's quite nice.  No X installed of course.

Josh

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