Re: what Linux to run

On 03/03/12 23:33, Leif Biberg Kristensen wrote:
> Lørdag 3. mars 2012 01.43.29 skrev Gavin Flower :
>
>> I think if you are going to select a member of the Debian family, I
>> would strongly recommend Debian itself. I have the impression that the
>> Debian community is more serious about quality than Canonical (the
>> company behind Ubuntu).
> I haven't run Debian for ten years, when I had a headless old PC running with
> a LAMP stack. Since I discovered Gentoo, that has been my preferred distro.
> However, I'm currently in the process of setting up a dedicated Web server
> with Debian as it may one day be another person's responsibility to admin this
> box, and I would consider it cruel to leave a Gentoo box to anyone but the
> most devoted Linux fans.
>
> My current gripe is this: The «stable» version of Postgres on Debian is 8.4.
> In order to install 9.1, I added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
>
> deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
>
> Then I did an apt-get update and
>
> apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-client-9.1
>
> Finally I commented out the added line of /etc/apt/sources.list.
>
> This seems a rather roundabout way, is there a better one?
>
> regards, Leif
>

To be honest I got into Linux in 1994 when a friend set me up with
Debian, the first distribution I installed myself was Red Hat. Though I
had previous experience with mainframes and minicomputers, starting in
the mid 1970's - COBOL & FORTRAN era. (There is a distant possibility I
may get back into FORTRAN, as that is run on the HPC's at the University
where I now work!!!).

My knowledge of Debian is via friend's (an extremely competent and
experienced Unix guy who got me into Linux & who still runs Debian)
comments and what I've noticed on the web. For a Desktop development
machine, I currently prefer Fedora, but for a server I need to be more
conservative. One place I worked used Ubuntu, but I quickly switched my
machine to Fedora, when I found Ubuntu lacked the desktop things I
relied on!

So I would interested in the answers, also I would need to be able to
install JDK7.

Cheers,
Gavin