Tainok

Heya,

Going to be getting a VPS soon for SSH tunneling out of secure locations. (From behind restrictive firewalls for gaming, mostly - no heavy downloading. Browsing the web, no youtube/hulu or streaming etc) MIGHT be inclined later on to host a very small website or two, but that's REALLY secondary.

40GB Disk Space
640MB RAM
300GB Bandwidth/Month
HyperVM Management Console
2 IP Addresses
$24/month

Ping to the server is 3ms solid from where I will be using it. Download test downloaded the 11mb test file faster than I could read the speed, but it was VERY fast.


Now I have the option of a distro:

CentOS 5.2
Fedora 7
Fedore 9
Debian 4
Ubuntu 8
Gentoo

Not entirely sure which one I should go with. Preferably something simple to use, I'm fairly familiar with ksh, although not completely proficient. Don't need much fancy, but the option to do extra stuff if I wanted to later without a ton of hassle would be nice.

Any opinions?

SilentPixel

if you using ssh to access it then I suppose all the distros will be fairly similar. just depends what package manager you want on it.

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Tainok

Thanks for replying.

Well, I know it's not the 'Linux mentality', but what would be the most common? The most used, and so the one with the most information.

I just want the least amount of hassle possible.

loony

Ubuntu would be best i reckon. I currently use it as a file sharer for my house network and use ssh with it perfectly.

SilentPixel

yeah, I guess go with Ubuntu, its got a good backing for it with http://www.ubuntuforums.org

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bourne-no longer

I would personally say go with Fedora 10/11 (11 comes out in 8 days I think).

I have done lots of ssh and web server stuff with it and it is super easy to use and configure. I prefer the package manager in fedora (YUM) over ubuntu's (apt-get) as I find it way easier to use.. that is just my personal opinion though.
CentOS is pretty much Fedora but with a different name so thats another solid OS to go with.

I will have to agree with the other guys though that Ubuntu is probably the most widely used with probably the one of the biggest communities to get help from. Although fedora's isn't exactly small either, with sites like linuxquestions.org and fedoraforums.org you can find answers to most your questions

just my opinion though


Cheers

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kyotejones

I'd go Debian or Fedora. Ubuntu strikes me as more of a desktop distro than a server one.

EDIT:
forgot to mention Debian has a much longer release cycle so you would find yourself in less work for the next 32 months or so. Since Debian 5 just came out you could ask for that.

Apt Quadruped

I would go with Debian or Gentoo. You would probably like Debian better since it's fairly easy to use. I would highly recommend Gentoo. Gentoo's package manager (Portage) is amazing. However, if it's your first time with Gentoo I would have to say go Debian.

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Tainok

Thanks guys. Will check out Debian 5 perhaps, I'll ask them if they can install that instead.. if not, probably just Ubuntu since there are so many end users for that distro.


Another question - hostname for a Linux VPS - does this need to be a FQDN? (They're cheap as hell right now, so that's no big deal)

gonX

This. Gentoo is the absolutely lightest distro for anything I know. You don't get any unneccesary crap that loads on startup preinstalled, not to mention modules in the kernel that you don't need.
Compiling the sources with the package manager for your exact system might prove faster too, not to mention that Ubuntu is only i486 (edit: It's actually i386) while Gentoo also is i686 compatible.

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