bhat.log() > web

Don’t get me wrong, I have been a user of Linux for past 10-11 years. I started of with one of the Slackware editions during late ‘95. And I was one of the early guys in Bangalore who had SVGA version of X running. I don’t know why, but many of the people here (at least I knew of, were struggling to get that running

Anyways, I had Win3.1 and Slackware dual booting on my home machine back then. Once Win95 came into the picture, I ended up upgrading the 486 box to Pentium and 1GB hdd!
I still remmeber spending 45-50 minutes on the kernel compiles during those days! Maan were they slow.

Then work took over all my time and never really worked on linux for some time, till I changed jobs. In the new job, we were unix all over. We had a Solaris ultra Sparc-III boxes with Solaris 8 (later I ended upgrading it to Solaris 9). Few of our servers (mail, firewall etc were on Redhat linux). I had one test machine on Redhat, another on FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x. I still remmeber cross compiling the source on all these machines and maan was it a pain. If my memory serves me right we were using 2.9.x gcc compiler to all our work in these machines. Except for WinNT where we were using MS Visual Studio 6.a. I just can’t remmeber the compiler version though

Anyways, I left my job again and was out of linux world for past couple of years. And I have left job (again!) and started a new team. Well as of now we are a small team based in Bangalore, Geneva and Sweden (really distributed). To save costs we are all working from home and I am currently hosting the development servers from my home. (We are truly a garage operation as of now).

I just bought a AMD Athlon 64 based machine and I am planning to host gForge on this machine. Also as this will be our mail, SVN and project daily build machine for now, I was wondering what linux distribution to use. All of them seem to have some pros and cons and I am not sure what is good for me.
Anyways, the basic requirement:

• Should be light on hardware. Is that possible?
• Should allow me to load the server with all the services we need as a small dev team.
• Should be easy to maintain, update and configure. We don’t have any dedicated IT team here, and I don’t want to end up spending large amount of time maintaing it.
• It will be nice and geeky if it supports pure 64bit environment. I want to avoid doing chroot all the time.

Unfortunately there are no good recommendations out there. Looks like no one wants to stick there neck out and start a flame war. Well, I am currently trying out few of these distributions …