Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Debian VS CentOS - Page 3
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Debian VS CentOS

13»

Comments

  • RensRens Member
    edited November 2011

    @longshot said: I've upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze successfully on more than one >VPS (including 123Systems):

    >

    Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
    Change "lenny" to "squeeze" and save.
    apt-get update
    apt-get dist-upgrade

    Don't forget to remove the chainload to grub2. Also some users try this with debian 6 and it can also create big problems because of grub. Often you need to run "apt-get remove grub-legacy grub-common" before upgrading. I would recommend to contact your host before running any of these upgrade commands with Debian.

    These kind of things and the bad Xen support with Debian in general makes me prefer CentOS. Never managed to convince a true Debian supporter though :)

    I do understand that people here like Debian because it doesn't use much RAM. You can tune CentOS 5 to use much less as well though. Also glad to see there now is a minimal install CD for CentOS 6 again.

  • @Aldryic said: I wasn't aware CentOS had a dist-upgrade, to be perfectly honest.

    :)

    The inability to upgrade a CentOS 5 box to CentOS 6, along with the memory-sucking habits of yum, are my two major gripes about CentOS. I have a dozen or so minor grips as well :)

  • @LivingSouL said: The problem with 123Systems is that, their Arch ISO is 2010 and the kernel is too old and you can't upgrade kernels on OpenVZ right?

    Sadly no :(. I forgot we were talking about OpenVZ here.

    I have no experience with it, but I hear good things about Scientific Linux, I'm going to have to try it out soon and see if it's noticeably better than CentOS.

  • Somebody still using Slackware? That was my initial linux distro I was using before switching to Debian.

    Thanked by 1TheLinuxBug
  • lowendnewbielowendnewbie Member
    edited February 2012

    Being an RHCE and using RHEL every day for the last 6 years and 2 years of application packaging using RPM + some bespoke server automation kit.

    It does leave me a bit of a Red Fedora fanboi, and cursing Debian's non-sensical file structure.

    That said I'm sure Debian fans are the same about RHEL/CentOS and it's all much of a muchness.

    Use what you want and most importantly use what you're most comfortable with.

    Setting up a red hat based box and securing it from remote attack is a piece of pie for me. Give me debian and i'm man -k'ing or slocating all over the place trying to find the configuration files.

    One thing I do love about YUM based package management is that it's trivial to create a yum repository, literally any kind of file sharing service (http/ftp/nfs...) and an autogenerated catalog and you're away when i've tried the same on debian a long long time ago it resulted in a bit of facedesking.

  • Some folks might be interested to know about CentOS in the enterprise. If you have a RedHat 'supported' machine, the vendor will typically make support tools available. For instance, HP makes the ProLiant support pack. These are packaged for Redhat and go in easily on CentOS. Actually I think CentOS is a supported OS now as well. But yeah, you want to know if a fan or power supply dies, and you want it reported to a large systems monitoring package like Insight Manager, so folks get paged and what not, you use an enterprise class OS. Of course there are ways to do it yourself, but when you by a 30,000 dollar server (or dozens of them), you put a supported OS on it, as much as Admins might like debian at home or whatever, at work, well you get what I'
    m saying.

  • @kylix: nice sig you got there hehe. Writing this from my MacBook Pro though ;)
    (PS: I'm male and straight, so no nail painting for me)

  • @Daniel hear, hear ... !

    imho and as some others have pointed out too pkg mgmt gets sketchy

    yum can be relatively painless but in the enterprise arena it is warped

    ie lots of noobs start building from source breaking plesk, xinet oh my

    it's not a good excuse but for lots of small to mid range sites I'd rather argue with auditors over a back port fix ...

    i don't think CentOS always got a fair shake though because a good admin would slim down on her first ...

  • @LongShot another good point ... to save my self from my own comments I've been one of the rooks i just condemned ...

    I think it's for reasons like that I grew to learn auditor social skills and to shy away from source if I could help it, just my two ...

    I would still never wish to talk down on a solid, long lasting CentOS install, whether managed or not it still has my respect ...

  • While Debian is nice for lower-memory boxes, I prefer CentOS because I <3 Yum.

  • Generally CentOS for me.

  • Centos for me too, got used to redhat based distro's from Redhat 7

    Try not to use anything else unless I have to.

  • prometeusprometeus Member, Host Rep

    Debian is my cup of tea, but most of my work is on redhat and derivatives...

  • I prefer CentOS not a big fan of debian

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    CentOS for me, but Debian does just fine too. I am starting to like Debian more though.

  • necsnecs Member

    sorry to sit on the fence,,, i like both Debian and CentOS

  • I've enjoyed using arch before. It can be made very small. When I was using it though their package system made it very easy to break your install. Wouldn't recommend it for OpenVZ unless that's changed.

  • exussumexussum Member

    yum works fine on 128, Just disable the fastest mirror plugin and its perfect

  • yomeroyomero Member

    Necromancers...

  • @yomero Whoops, didn't notice that.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I prefer CentOS but often use Debian.

    CentOS is very useful as a free RHEL clone. In $DAYJOB we frequently use it in labs for that very purpose.

    I often use Debian on LEBs for these reasons:

    • as mentioned, it is slightly less RAM-hungry (I think this is often exaggerated though)
    • it's easier to run cutting-edge stuff. For Debian, for example, if you want to run nginx + php-fpm + xcache, it's just adding dotdeb and away you go. For CentOS, I think maybe now they have a single repo now that has that, but for a while it was picking and choosing. Debian has a lot more packages and it's often easier to find FOSS stuff pre-built.
    • I prefer its apache setup (sites-available/sites-enabled, etc. - though on LEBs I use nginx)

    Debian feels like a distro built by a smart college kid who didn't have a lot of experience when he set it up, so he kind of made it up as he went along.

    Examples:

    • seems like half the time when you install something, Debian wants to start it immediately. There was something I installed on a VPS other day that had samba as a dependency, and sure enough during the apt-get, samba started up, all the rc.d links were created, etc. WTF. I suppose perhaps there's some apt-get flag to prevent that but why is it a default?
    • debian doesn't have a way to restore iptables rules automatically atboot. Every time I setup Debian, have to go into pre-if and drop in a small iptables-restore script. (Possible I haven't found it but I have searched and that's the answer I get).
    • debian seems to go out of its way to be all custom and different. Setting the timezone in CentOS is just changing the /etc/localtime link. In Debian, it's "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata". Gaah. And even that doesn't work! Long-standing bug - go change your timezone, and cron will still act like it's under the old timezone. You have to bounce cron. Not a big deal, but seriously, if this grand Debian command doesn't think out how its affects core system services, what is the benefit?
    • when I setup CentOS, it works out of the box. With Debian, there are always lots of extra steps - like setting up locales. Fresh CentOS, I can yum install things with no problem because it comes with reasonable defaults. Fresh Debian, apt-get installing gives you all kinds of perl locale messages until you do some dpkg command I have squirreled away on my personal debian notes wiki...
    • update-rc.d is not as nice as chkconfig. And I've found that upgrades sometimes recreate rc.d links - bad. I might want binaries installed to fulfill some dependencies but that doesn't mean I want the package to start on boot. In general, I find managing rc.d really easy with CentOS and much more manual with debian.
    • apt-get, apt-cache, aptitude, dpkg, dselect, dpkg-reconfigure...seriously?

    That said, once you've used it a while and get used to all of its quirks and have it configured properly, it runs as well as any other distro.

    At $DAYJOB I get to use HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, and a host of other proprietary operating systems - I still will take any Linux distro over any of those.

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • @exussum said: yum works fine on 128, Just disable the fastest mirror plugin and its perfect

    Yum works fine on my 64mb Xen VPS.

  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @raindog308 - did CentOS ever fix the ls -hlFb --color=auto --group-directories-first issue? :3

  • @Aldryic is this what you'd expect to see?
    image

  • AldryicAldryic Member

    Oh, nice. I used to mess with Fran constantly about that... the last time I used CentOS was about a year or so ago, and --group-directories-first would always make it go "wat" :P

  • On CentOS 5, --group-directories-first doesn't work.

  • AlexBarakovAlexBarakov Patron Provider, Veteran

    I personally prefer CentOS over Debian.. But most likely because I am used to it.

  • Mon5t3rMon5t3r Member

    I prefer TXZ over DEB and/or RPM. :P

    but in the real world i use Debian for my primary website + secondary DNS, and CentOS for cPanel + VPS management (Solus/Virtualizor)

Sign In or Register to comment.