I have been a devout Gentoo fan for the last two or three years. I have used it personally on my laptop as well as on nearly every server I manage. While I loved the ability to tweak every aspect of the software I was using, I dreaded the unexpected reinstall because a laptop hard drive went bad. It could literally take three days to bring my laptop back to the way I wanted it. I recently gave Ubuntu a shot and was really impressed. Coming from an RPM based backend in the beginning, I really took to the way Ubuntu's Synaptic package management system worked. I also never liked the way Fedora required half a dozen CD's or a DVD to perform the install so I gave Ubuntu a try on the recommendation of a colleague.
I was astonished after the install that I had my laptop back up and running in about thirty minutes. There were other packages in needed to install to get me back to 100%, but I could get on the internet, check email and open my beloved terminals. And this install went onto a really new HP laptop, dual-core amd64 processor with all the gadgets like Bluetooth. Again to my amazment, everything worked from the minute I booted it up, even the Bluetooth. I did have to install the proprietary NVidia driver, but Ubuntu even made that a simple point and click operation. I used to have to recompile the NVidia module every time I made a change to kernel.
After having great success with Ubuntu on my laptop, I decided to give Ubuntu Server a try on a new piece of equipment. The installation was all text based, but went smooth from beginning to end. And the best part was
Open-ISCSI worked right from the go!!
I have migrated all but a few services from Gentoo to Ubuntu with very few issues, and those all due to differences in the versions of software and not because of the OS.
Check back regularly as I will be posting some detailed information on how I migrated Cyrus IMAP, PostgreSql, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, Radius, etc...
Craig Deering
Network Engineer
Astro Shapes, Inc. -
Aluminum ExtrusionsWebsite -
http://www.astroshapes.com
