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Help me to decide..

 
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Hi all.
I have a little experience with linux OS (Redhat 7.2), and I want to use Linux.
I want you to help me in deciding which version should I go for.
my choices are :
Suse 9.1 Pro.
RedHat.
AFAIK, RH 9 is the last version and a new generation has came, and the new generation is so expensive (more than 3k $).
I don't want to go for mendrak or gentoo, I like RH and Suse...
so please, spend some time and try to give me your answer :
1. is true, that during the installation of Suse, some problems will appear ?
2. which version of RH you recommend to use ?
3. which distribution is better for Java development ?
thanks..
 
Hussein Baghdadi
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I heard also that Suse will try to format the hard disk to NFS during installation and it will try to partition the hard disk, is it true ?
 
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All Linux installations will format and partition your drive. Many will give you options to influence the process.

AFAIK neither RH nor SuSe come with a Java environment preinstalled. You'll need the Sun version for that.
There's no real difference between distributions as to using Java.

I recommend you stay far away from RH. It's a Man Drake and like all firebreathing animals best left to its own devices.

SuSe is now owned by Novel, customer service seems to have gone out the window and is now available to people who pay for a support contract (the same is true for RedHat I believe).

Personally I'm partial to Debian based distributions. They tend to be the most stable even if not always having the latest and greatest versions of packages (which is one reason they're more stable, they're not so quick to incorporate packages that haven't been thoroughly tested for stability).
At the moment I run Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) on a laptop where it's highly stable. Installation was a breeze, requiring only minor tweaking to get it to work on the hardware (quite a feat on a laptop).
 
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RedHat 9 is has passed end of life. Your RedHat options these days consist of Fedora (Core 2 or 3 - Core 1 is also eol) or one of their commercial versions. I think their new workstation version may be about $150. Their cheapest server version is slightly over $400. There's also some non-supported versions from places like whitebox.com. I'm too cheap to pay $400 for personal use myself - especially since I really don't need the support services that come with the package.

I work with both Red Hat and Debian. My own considered opinion is that if you're into personal use, Debian is good because you get new goodies quicker. However, for business use, we don't always need the latest and greatest and we do want to avoid upgrading too often, since upgrades often have unexpected side-effects. Also, Red Hat has spent a lot of time setting up a consistent and standardized way of controlling resources, which makes it somewhat easier to deploy and manage large diverse installations.

It's also psychologically easier to sell a platform to business management when you don't have to tell them that they need to be running the "Unstable" version.
 
Hussein Baghdadi
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Thank you alot for responses Ranchers...
but why you don't nominated Suse ? I heared that it is good and easy except that it may cause some problems during installation.
I am using FAT 32 and I don't want to change it to NTFS, can I install Linux in this situation ?
can I use Debian for my Java development (IntelliJ, Tomcat, JBoss ...)
thanks alot..
 
Jeroen Wenting
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Linux doesn't use NTFS (though there is an optional package that can read (not write) the filesystem.

You cannot install Linux on FAT32 AFAIK, you need a Linux specific filesystem for that.

SuSe has much the same problems as Redhat. They're now fully commercialised and no longer freely available in the latest versions.

Debian is great if you can get it working (it's one of the trickiest to install).

Why would you NOT be able to use your software on Debian if it runs on Redhat? There's no generic difference between them once installed that would prevent you (no matter how much Redhat Inc. would have you believe otherwise).
 
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