Heartland

I'm running an old box at home as a linux machine mainly for use as a web dev patform with Apache / PHP / Perl / MySql but also for mail/newsgroup use as its less susceptible to attacks than my main XP box.

I've tried TurboLinux, Mandrake and Mandriva and also Fedora Core 3 in the last month or so.

I really liked Fedora for the ease of use in setting up SAMBA mounts, virtual hosts etc but unfortunately the only RPM's I could get were for older versions of PHP amd MySQL. Any attempts to get the current versions buggered things up completely.

Mandriva LE2005 comes with the lastest 'secure' point versions but the user interface requires a bit more command line work than I'm comfortable with and I still can't figure out how to edit read-only files as root when logged in with a standard user account which is pissing me off mightily.

Can anyone recommend a different Linux distro or possibly some kind of simple config tools that will work either in Gnome or KDE?

Ta muchly,

Mik

Debian. We run all our servers on it and it's very good, but the slow to release. Generally I find we run a mix of the testing and stable releases on servers.

For my desktop I did hard disk install of the Knoppix Live CD. Knoppix is just a tweaked version of Debian but uses a lot of testing stuff. It makes for a very good desktop machine and comes with server software too, such as samba, apache, Mysql, squid etc, etc. Very easy to install too, once it gets going.

My boss is trying out Ubuntu on his home machine and now swears by it, says it's easy enough to install and use but still has all the geekyness of Debian underneath if you need it.

mik wrote:I'm running an old box at home as a linux machine mainly for use as a web dev patform with Apache / PHP / Perl / MySql but also for mail/newsgroup use as its less susceptible to attacks than my main XP box.

I've tried TurboLinux, Mandrake and Mandriva and also Fedora Core 3 in the last month or so.

I really liked Fedora for the ease of use in setting up SAMBA mounts, virtual hosts etc but unfortunately the only RPM's I could get were for older versions of PHP amd MySQL. Any attempts to get the current versions buggered things up completely.

Mandriva LE2005 comes with the lastest 'secure' point versions but the user interface requires a bit more command line work than I'm comfortable with and I still can't figure out how to edit read-only files as root when logged in with a standard user account which is pissing me off mightily.

Can anyone recommend a different Linux distro or possibly some kind of simple config tools that will work either in Gnome or KDE?

Ta muchly,

Mik

With Fedora Core 3 you need to install the development packages for the latest version of MySQL before installing PHP 5 - apparently this includes a necessary file which is needed to get the latest versions of PHP & MySQL working together.