Recommend a Server Distro to a Linux Noob

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agent420

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I'm curious to take the Linux plunge to see how nix works and performs as a fileserver in a multi-user environment. I done a small bit of Googling, and so far RedHat and SuSe server editions appear to be relatively user-friendly. What distro do you guys recommend that strikes a good balance between ease of use and performance? Or do all nix distros perform similarly? How do the server distros differ from the standard releases - do they utilize different kernels or is it more just configuration?

Also, I've been trying to get up to speed about Samba. Do these distros include Samba, or is that an additional step?

Any good links related to this would be appreciated if you have them bookmarked; as you can imagine Google returns a myriad of results regarding Linux, and that's a lot to sift through.
 
RedHat Enterprise is not Free first of all.

As for a distro basically any distro can be a server OS if you know what your doing. Most of them also have a packaged samba install.

Personally for a server I would stay away from the Mandrake,RedHat crowd due to the fact that your going to get more than you need.

You shouldnt need a GUI on your server box nor half the other crap.

One distro suposidly built for a server os and hardened to handle its job is Trustix Security Linux. Never used it myself though.

Really theres not much between distros. If you know one you know 99% of another.

Try linuxhelp.ca tldp.org & justlinux.com

All have good info
 
I recommend slackware for a home server. It's solid and lean. It's user-friendly and easy to know if you know basically what you are doing(but that's how it is for any linux distribution). Samba should be included. It's not a point-and-click setup, but there are very well commented configuration files. I think the difference between server versions and regular versions is just the default configurations and the default packages. Any OS can be a server if you configure it to be a server. Like skitlz said, don't install x or kde or gnome or any of that fluff. It is unnecessary for a server and often a security risk.
 
I personally like Debian as far as a server goes. It's small, and the 'apt' tool is VERY cool. It seriously eases the install of software.

For example, 'apt-get update' gets the latest list of any new or updated packages. 'apt-get upgrade' gets all the newest versions of what i currently have installed, including security fixes. 'apt-get install program-name' installs program and all dependencies. Very cool system.

and SKiTLz is right... a GUI should be un-necessary on a server.

You will pretty much be able to run anything on any distro. If there isn't a packaged version specifically for your distro, there's always the source which can be customized and compiled.
 
I also like Debian for servers.
I haven't found a distro that can compare to Debian in ease of maintenence and stability.

This is both for Debian stable, and--in the case I need packages not yet available in stable--Debian testing.
As an aside, I've never encountered a problem with Debian testing; it's been more reliable than any other distros I've used (excluding Debian stable of course). ;)
 
Thanks for the replies.

I had not heard of Trustix before, that actually looks like it would work well for my needs, but as I'm new to linux I'll have to give it a spin on the test box to see if I can get it going.

I also plan on test driving slackware and debian just to get some experiance with the more popular flavors.
 
If you play with debian and slackware you will learn alot quicker than the folks playing with redhat and their gui.

Your starting in the right place..
 
It all depends on how complicated you wanna get.
Redhat/mandrake --> Slackware/etc --> Debain/Gentoo --> BSDs
 
Well, I'm a Gentoo fan but in a server environment Gentoo would take too damn long to update (not to mention it would eat too many CPU cycles during those updates). I'm going to have to go with Debian.
 
I agree, Gentoo is a GREAT operating system, but its true that the updates do take quite a bit of processing power.
 
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