[H-GEN] Linux Distribution for A Dell Poweredge 840?

[Anthony Irwin]

Adrian Sutton wrote:

> We've just taken ownership of a new Dell Poweredge 840 that we'll be 
> running VMWare on to provide various demo servers (IWWCM, Confluence, 
> Vignette and pretty much every other CMS you can imagine on various 
> OS's, all on VMs). We figured Linux would be a less resource hungry host 
> OS and should provide better memory management, but we're stuck on 
> deciding which distro to use.
> 

Debian will certainly let you run a less resource hungry host by 
allowing you to install just want you want and not a ton of other 
stuff you don't need.

You can grab a stable netinstall disk and then do a base install which 
gives you a base working system and then you can install other stuff 
as you need it.

> The new server does have SATA2 which I believe Debian stable doesn't 
> support out of the box.
> 

Not sure if the the debian stable kernel supports sata2

> Dell officially support SUSE and RedHat, but have reports of success 
> running Debian on various PowerEdge servers listed on their website.
> 

Generally speaking if something works on one linux distro it will work 
on all as it is just the kernel drivers which everyone has access to. 
Sometimes certain raid cards and other high end proprietary hardware 
will write their own drivers and tend to support specific versions of 
redhat and suse enterprise but I don't think that will be the case 
with a laptop.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin