[Classiccity-pm] Mod Perl Question

[Mark Hazen]

> I was wanting to tinker with ModPerl on a local machine.

Woo, you asked a holy-war kind of question... "what distro should I use?" :)

It really boils down to how much you *want* to learna about linux, and if
you do want to learn about linux, how much you want your distro to be close
to the heart of what makes up linux, versus how customized it is for a
particular distro.

Beyond this, if you think you might need to customize Apache or mod_perl at
all, you'll likely to need to compile it yourself eventually. Otherwise,
for learning purposes, you'll probably like the convenience of something
with *both* good management tools and precompiled packages.a

Oversimplifying here, but this leaves out both Gentoo and Debian. 

Gentoo is generally a compile things yourself distro, and yes, while the
compile process is painless (it's wrappered under their package management
system), it's still compiling, and that can be quite intimidating for people
who are new to Linux. I have had much better success getting things to work
as desired under Gentoo than most distros, but it's a thumbs down as far as
"plug it in and go".

Debian has very good packages with pretty sane defaults, but is pretty
atrocious when it comes to mixing in prepackaged items and compiling and
installing applications from source... Also, the versions of softwar ethey
use are, for the sake of sticking to the tried and true, pretty far back in
history for a lot of things.

IMO you have to know a lot more about how Debian works under the hood before
you will feel comfy there... you can easily get into what people used to
call "RPM Hell" under Redhat, which means you have a mix of precompiled and
custom compiled code, and have to do a lot of juggling to get things to work
seamlessly).

Mandrake's very good on the pointy-clicky management, but it's got a ton of
stuff piled on top... because it's primarily a desktop distro. I've not used
the new RedHat versions, but I've heard pretty decent things about them, so
that really seems to be the best choice here, because when you buy RedHat,
you are really paying for their top-notch support.

Debian is, if you don't mind a good bit of "uh, okay, sure, use the defaults
and I will figure it out later" a great choice if you want to install a free
distribution now just to try something out. The installation is a nightmare
though because there's no official "download and boot ths disc" to get
things rolling, you're a little bit on your own. See if a friend has the
Lord Sutch netinstall CD (I have one somewhere I think) and borrow that from
'em... I've never gotten Debian's CD-building tool (jigdo) to give me a
working install CD, out of four or five attempts.

O'course, I say that, not having used Redhat since RH8, and not having used
it as my core distro since 7.2 or so... :)  All of this is opinion, if you
hadn't noticed. Everyone seems to have their favorites, and I've had
different good and bad experiences with different distros from everyone
else. YMMV... :)

-mh.
----
   . _+m"m+_"+_    Mark Hazen
 d' Jp     qh qh
Jp  O       O  O
Yb  Yb     dY dY
 O   "Y5m2Y"  "  even the mightiest wave starts out as a ripple.
  "Y_            why make waves when it's easier to nurture ripples?