I don't know what your level of expertise is. Please accept my apology if you already know this.
The two particular distributions you mentioned are pretty different. Debian basically started as its own branch of distribtuion, and other distributions like Ubuntu and Mepis are derived from it. CentOS is derivative of RedHat. Most disributions come from one of these two branches. For me, the top virtue of Debian is that it gives you a very basic install. You get the command line and a few packages. Then, you have to add everything else. What this means is that the latest version of Debian will actually work pretty well on a machine that has only 512 MB of memory. Package managers are different on both. CentOS uses the RPM (Redhat Package Manager), while Debian uses APT. I think APT works much better. Debian definitely resolves dependencies much better than others. One other person mentioned Gentoo. It's got a very good reputation for being lean and efficient. Gentoo users love Gentoo. The downside is that the install compiles from source and take a long time. I don't have personal experience with Gentoo. If you are an experienced Linux user, go ahead and try Gentoo. If you are a beginning Linux user, I don't recommend it. More and more, it seems like trying on Linux distributions is like trying on new suits. Some fit for some people, others fit for other people. Chris Baker -- [email protected] systems administrator INTERA -- 512-425-2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
