being a fedora user, which distro would you recommend for putting on my linode? plan is setting up a regular LAMP + mail setup.

strictly talking about performance/security, is fedora good for that kind of environment or should i better go CentOS? or debian? or arch?

thanks,

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contraculto.com
estudiosiete.com

i wouldn't use fedora for any server you wish to have running for an extended amount of time. i love fedora too, but i only use it for test servers or on my notebook.

they update too quick and stop support (ie. security patches) too quick. so, unless you like to be fighting with yum trying to update your vps every year, i'd go for something like centos.

i only recommend centos because if you're comfy in fedora, you'll feel right at home with centos (since it is, in all essence, rhel). there's long term support for each version of centos (following rhel's long term support), so you really don't have to worry about support running out.

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http://ultramookie.com/

Personally I recommend Debian for pretty much any purpose, especially the kind of server you're looking at configuring, contraculto. So if you feel like making this a learning experience, I'd recommend that.

But if you just want your server to work, then you're looking to stick with something you know, in which case ultramookie's recommendation against Fedora and for CentOS is right on.

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu LTS for servers.

With Distros, its all personal choice. In general, you want something with long term support, which is why Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, etc, are all good ideas, and why Fedora and non-LTS Ubuntu might not be good ideas.

Debian for nine years now, plus playing around with others out of curiosity.

Nice and simple to pull down the source of a package, change any annoying bits and recompile:

apt-get source <package>
apt-get build-dep <package>

 ~ edit sources 'til broken ~

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b

Et voila, new .deb package.