Ubuntu Server - To GUI or not to GUI

Izi

Izi

Izi

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That is the question!

Just getting stuck in to linux properly, need it for a small web server at work. Do you guys install the GUI or just use the cmd prompt?
 
A gui on a server? What on earth for?

edit: on second thoughts...
Ubuntu on a server? What on earth for?

edit2: In an attempt to be helpful, you don't want a gui on a server. You don't want ubuntu either, centos & debian stable are the more obvious choices.
 
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Which one of the following OSs would you suggest for a noob who simply wants to run a Git/Mercurial server?

Fedora 14
Arch 2010.05
CentOS 5.4
CentOS 5.5
CentOS 5.6
Debian 5.0 (lenny)
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
Fedora 13 (Goddard)
Fedora 15
Gentoo 10.1
Oracle EL JeOS Release 5 Update 3
Oracle EL Server Release 5 Update 4
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid)
Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick)
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)
Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS (hardy)
Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)
 
Depending on noobness levels, Ubuntu Server is the easiest and quickest to get on with.

Debian is a rock solid server OS and would probably make the best long term choice. It's essentially Ubuntu Server but with less, older and more stable packages.

Doesn't really matter though unless your doing a major production system which I'm guessing you aren't.
 
If it's your first time playing with linux, I'd recommend virtualbox. Then run whichever distribution you've chosen (or several) as a virtual machine within windows. Being able to save the state of the machine and revert when it goes wrong is lovely. When something breaks, you haven't just locked yourself out of a server. I've locked myself out of a computer sat on my desk, and had to pull the hard drive out and reformat to get it running again. Embarrassing.

Aside from that. they all look fairly similar over ssh. The differences lie in how frequently they update themselves, and general philosophy regarding stability vs having the latest code. Arch and gentoo are likely to change daily. Both are lovely distributions, but as the former is simplicity taken to brutal extremes and the latter involves a hell of a lot of compiling (followed by debugging, and trying to work out which errors matter), neither is a great choice here.

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) will be unchanged for quite literally years, it's "finished" in a sense. So if you get debian working today, you can come back in a years time and it'll be running exactly as well as when you abandoned it. It also has an excellent package management system, "apt-get install git mercurial" is probably all you'd need to type to install both.

Centos / Redhat are the same source. The latter is supported by a company, the former is a group of people taking the red hat code, removing the branding pictures, and recompiling. They should behave identially.

Fedora is red hat testing / unstable. It'll have newer code, and it'll break more often.

Ubuntu is debian testing, patched by the ubuntu devs for a couple of weeks, then released. The end result should be more stable than debian's testing distribution (7.0 / wheezy) but in my experience is not. It has extensive, friendly, and (imo) rather ignorant forums.

I think Oracle is unix, but it's beyond my knowledge.

I'd still vote for either centos or debian. Personally, I'd use debian. I started on ubuntu, lost patience with it breaking all the time, and debian stable was the obvious choice. If starting afresh, I'd have gone with centos as I'd like to have some of the red hat qualifications on my cv.
 
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Izi said:
Which one of the following OSs would you suggest for a noob who simply wants to run a Git/Mercurial server?

Fedora 14
Arch 2010.05
CentOS 5.4
CentOS 5.5
CentOS 5.6
Debian 5.0 (lenny)
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
Fedora 13 (Goddard)
Fedora 15
Gentoo 10.1
Oracle EL JeOS Release 5 Update 3
Oracle EL Server Release 5 Update 4
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid)
Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick)
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)
Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS (hardy)
Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)
Click to expand...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 (as a fully patched 5.4 or 5.5 will be at that anyway)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1
CentOS 5.6 (if you don't want to pay for the above)
Oracle EL Server 5 update 7 (other than the kernel this is Red Hat based anyway)
SUSE Enterprise Linux 11

Debian would be probably be an acceptable option but I wouldn't use it personally. The rest no.

If it's a server you want it to be stable and have patches released over a long period so you don't need to do distro upgrades every 6 months
 
I am using rackspace cloud servers so I can rebuild the instance with any version I want. There is also daily snap shot backups, so not worrying too much about messing up.

I did install a VM of ubuntu before getting a live server to get a feel for the cmd line. Managed to get FTP/MySQL/Apache set up + firewall with out too many problems.

Most of you have mentioned CentOS or Debian, for a simple source control server will it really matter which one? Which one is the most stripped back, that is probably most ideal.

Thanks for helping a nub :)
 
I HAVE to install a gui on my server as it sometimes gets used by the wife and/or son and so needs to be able to do stuff on via gui. However, it's only a dually atom box under the tv so it's fine...however, if you were doing it "properly" a gui isn't needed...
 
3dcandy said:
I HAVE to install a gui on my server as it sometimes gets used by the wife and/or son and so needs to be able to do stuff on via gui. However, it's only a dually atom box under the tv so it's fine...however, if you were doing it "properly" a gui isn't needed...
Click to expand...

yeah, I'm not using one.

The only reason I asked is because coming from a Windows background things are easier through GUI, I.E IIS 7 (inetmgr) vs command line and Apache2, imo.
 
yeah, I don't actually notice much of a performance hit on mine. I also use Ubuntu tweaked to look a little like Windows. Means for the occasional use it gets as a pc (showing relatives photo's etc. on a 32" tv..) it does a pretty good job of covering both bases. I'm not really in a position to have a htpc and a server at moment..
 
I run RHEL and SLES servers on the CLI only a lot. Used ubuntu server a while back and it was about 2 days before I installed the GUI, kept getting my configurations shot by demons with no clear configuration files of their own.
 
My favourite setup for servers is to run xvncserver (with like 1024x700 virtual screen, so I can see it full on the iPad), and run a few status apps in there to monitor the machine. You can VNC in whenever you like via ssh tunnel for example. You can run the bare minimum GUI stuff (LXDE) in there.
 
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