Open Source Solutions

I’ve spent the last few weeks working with CentOS v5.4, which bills itself as an “Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor”. My curiosity was peaked, as I had heard about CentOS from a couple of sysadmins and had also read a couple of good reviews of the O/S.

My CentOS project consisted of configuring a CentOS-based server from scratch as a JIRA application server. My hardware server was a 4-year old custom built AMD-based server, configured with 1GB RAM and a nVidia Geoforce 9600 video adapter.

Being a relatively new Linux distribution as compared to other distro’s such as Debian and Red Hat Linux, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the distribution, the level of support offered by the user community, and the quality of the documentation.

Respective of my JIRA on Linux configuration project, I had successfully configured JIRA on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, so I had a baseline to which I could compare my JIRA on CentOS installation and configuration experience.

All-in-all, my experience configuring CentOS as a JIRA application server was a positive one. In fact, CentOS is now my Linux operating system of choice for my development projects. Here’s a review by an industry trade magazine if you want to learn more about the CentOS distro.

I’d be interested in hearing from other IT Pro’s that have chosen a particular Linux distribution for their application development projects. What Linux distribution(s) do you prefer and why?