[clug] Linux trial

[Rainer Klein]

Dear Ben,

Regarding your interests in Open Source Software (OSS), you may find a great 
list of different products you can choose from. 

I've compiled a list of software tools for you. It contains a great variety of 
packages, I've come across within the last five years. It may be biased and 
definitely not comprehensive and may omit likewise strong other tools. Just 
use it as a starter, or may I say teaser:

Distributions:

 - Those days, hardware manufacturers like IBM, HP or Dell have preconfigured 
system using either a RedHat or SuSE edition. I suggest you check with them 
for their of technical support available. 

 - For commercial distributions, RedHat and SuSE are the most respected ones 
in their field. I personally use SuSE since several years and like their 
stable products and user friendly configuration/management. - Now, after SuSE 
has been bought by Novell, one can assume to have their vast network of 
service offices avaliable for support.

- Last but not least, the OS community itself has powerfull distribution 
contenders with the Debian or Gentoo project groups.


Server software:

Beyond standard compliant tools for DNS, DHCP or mail services, you may find 
for all different categories multiple products on offer:

- Database:

	Commercial Vendors: 	Oracle DB or IBM DB2.

	OSS products like MySQL,	Posrgres or Firebird


- Web/Application Server:

	Commercial Vendors IBM WebSpere or Oracle

	OSS products:	Apache, Tomcat, Zope

	
- Programming languages / tools:

	C/C++, Java, Perl, Php, Python

When you search trough the net, you may find quit often people favoring the 
LAMP combination (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for web server development. 

My personal preference goes for Zope, a web-/application server tool written 
in Python, with many pre-developed modules to choose from. 

- For web-portals, Plone is a ready to go Zope application available at: 		
	http://www.plone.org

- Or for a Content Management System (CMS), Silva another Zope application at: 	
	http://www.infrae.com/products/silva
 


On the Desktop, you also have multiple choices for:

	- windows like GUIs, there is Gnome or KDE

	- MS-Office like tools, there is OpenOffice, or the KDE-Office Package

	- Desptop Publishing, there is Scribus

	- Graphic, picture and photo manipulation, there is Gimp

	- Standards compliant web browsers with enhanced security features are:

		 Mozilla/Firefox
		KDE-Konqueror

	- Mail-Clients like Evolution and KMail

	- IRC tools like Gaim or Kopete

	and many, many more

My personal preference goes for SuSE again, which I'm using since 1999.

Enough for a jump start. 


Regards,

Rainer


I prefer SuSE for its easy and convenient way to install and manage

> Hey y'all,
> My work place, which is a long time dedicated winXX and Lotus Notes based
> environment, is about to launch a mini-project into looking at the
> viability of open source alternatives to proprietary software (for
> everything from the desktop to servers). Obviously, linux will feature
> heavily in our trials. What I want is some recommendations for flavours to
> use in building an App/Database/Web server - something robust. What is the
> current feeling towards the Redhat enterprise product? Is this still
> considered open source?
> Thanks, Ben
>