Brand spanking new to linode and linux/all flavors. Trying to decide btwn deploying ubuntu 8.04 and 9.10. What would help is knowing about how long after release does a version finally settle down and become more stable than right-at-release. Leaning towards the October 2009 release; 9 months.. but swaying....

Any insights please?

8.04 is the second newest LTS release, and support for it expires in April 2013.

9.10 is a somewhat old non-LTS release which expires in April 2011 (less than a year from now).

IMO, it doesn't make any sense to use 9.10; either 8.04 LTS or 10.04 LTS are preferable, but it's up to you. Keep in mind that if you install 9.10, you'll be forced to upgrade to 10.04 in ~9 months, so it doesn't make much sense, in my mind, to start on 9.10.

If you want to be cautious, you can install 8.04 and upgrade directly to 10.04 at some later date, as updates directly between LTS releases is supported by Ubuntu.

As Guspaz said, definitely go with an lts release. Personally I've been using 10.04 since release and it's had zero problems hosting all of my sites.

You could try debian if you're concerned about stability, it has longer release cycles. If you're wanting to use ubuntu go for one of the LTS, if you need new and shiny software (aka php5.3, python 3) then you'll need 10.04, if you want something more stable use 8.04

Hey cool...fast responses. V. nice. Given the input, I'm going go with 8 and upgrade later. Just can't bring myself to doing that 10; needs more dust for me.

Wish there was a "noob" section to this forum. Hate to stick my inexperienced words into the middle of what seems like sophisticated (pat on your backs) chatter everywhere.

I'm sick to death of shared hosting and mastered screaming learning Drupal, so figured I might as well get some real pain and come here. Glutton. And booming deadlines on top of it. Ah heck why not..

I should probably mention that LTS stands for "long-term support", if it wasn't clear. Every two years, Ubuntu releases a new LTS release that will be supported for quite some time.

Wikipedia has a nice little grid of the current releases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ub ... se_history

Yep, I got that -- although I spent some antsy time googling for LTS to learn what the heck it meant.

OK..off and running.. hope my brain doesn't regret this...

might be biting off more than ..well you know..

10.04 has worked well for me.

James

Because I have used 8.04 since it's release, I am very comfortable with it. I know where issues exist within the services/applications I use so I know how to work around them or correct them; in addition, problems are well documented and easy to research. I have found it to be a very stable product.

For these reasons, I will probably not move to 10.04 until it is at least 1 year old (late Apr 2011), or possibly even closer to the 8.04 end of life (Apr 2013).

If you're planning to host Drupal 6.x based sites on your Linode, I'd suggest sticking with Ubuntu 8.04 since 10.04 has php 5.3.x by default and Drupal (and a lot of its contrib modules) has hard time with php 5.3 at the moment. Core itself is supposed to work out of the box but some related issues have just been resolved (e.g. no stable release has the fix yet).

I'd suggest you to investigate on what the software requirements are for the projects' websites you're planning to deploy. Check for compatibility issues before piling up issues on your production system.

Yep. agreed. And already went with 8.04. You're right about Drupal and php. In fact, there are even hiccups in latest v of Views with 5.3.