[Classiccity-pm] Re: Classiccity-pm Digest, Vol 10, Issue 2

Sam Feltus clmf8 at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 7 12:38:07 CDT 2004


PS, I am not against using a CLI, just prefer to avoid it when possible.  Guess that's the slcker in me.
 
sam

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Mod Perl Question (Darrell Golliher)
2. Re: Mod Perl Question (Mark Hazen)
3. Re: Mod Perl Question (Shawn Boyette)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 13:07:53 -0400
From: Darrell Golliher 
Subject: Re: [Classiccity-pm] Mod Perl Question
To: "All purpose mailing list for Athens, Ga Perl Mongers"

Message-ID: <20040406170753.GA23496 at golliher.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 09:59:30AM -0700, Sam Feltus wrote:
> Hey ya'll.
> 
> I was wanting to tinker with ModPerl on a local machine.
> 
> Was thinking of getting RedHat 9.0, since hosting company is a RedHat shop.
> 
> I have only really used SuSe 8, so am spoiled with a nice GUI to install packages for me, so I can remain Happily Lazy and Ignorant of the CLI install process whenever possible.
> 
> Choices
> RedHat 9.0 
> RedHat Fedora Core 1 
> SuSe Pro 9 Upgrade 
> Something else ya'll suggest 
> 
> Obviously all are so dirt cheap price is irrelevant.
> 
> I really like SuSe due to it doing alot of dirty work for me.
> 
> Sam the Perl Gardener
> 

I'm out of tune with all distros that don't happen to be debian.
Debian however isn't for the CLI adverse. Sorry, can't be much
help there.

Before you go too far, have you checked to make sure your hosting
company provides a mod_perl environment? If you're co-locating
a server you should be in good shape, but I'd be surprised if a regular
shared hosting company allowed mod_perl.

-d

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 15:39:59 -0400
From: Mark Hazen 
Subject: Re: [Classiccity-pm] Mod Perl Question
To: "All purpose mailing list for Athens, Ga Perl Mongers"

Message-ID: <20040406193959.GA32284 at archon.thehazens.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


> 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?

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 20:18:47 -0400
From: Shawn Boyette 
Subject: Re: [Classiccity-pm] Mod Perl Question
To: "All purpose mailing list for Athens, Ga Perl Mongers"

Message-ID: <20040407001847.GB26899 at fornax.collapsar.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 03:39:59PM -0400, Mark Hazen wrote:

> 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... 

I found rather the opposite to be true: one big reason I abandoned
RedHat all those years ago was that I found *it* very bad at handling
handbuilt things, multiple versions of libs, and the like (note: I'm
talking about redhat 5 here), while it's never been an issue with
Debian.

> 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.

This is only true if you're using the Stable distro. And when Debian
says "Stable", they don't mean "Not Broken", they mean "Guaranteed
Never To Change Except For The Most Important Security Patches And
Bugfixes". Stable, in a nutshell, is for building business apps on top
of. Most rational desktop users should use the Testing distro, which
gives you all the up-to-date goodness of the Unstable (Development)
distro, but with a 10 day no-bugs-filed delay on packages. It really
is the best of both worlds. All my servers actually run Testing.

As something of an aside, I never had anything but the worst of luck
with distro-supplied Apaches, especially complicated ones like mod_*
variants; I always build Apache by hand. so I was initially pretty
confused by this question. As in "What the hell Apache gots to do with
your distro?"

-- 
Shawn Boyette
mdxi at collapsar.net

------------------------------

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