Debian vs Ubuntu

Ubuntu has 'do-release-upgrade' which can simplify moving between revisions during upgrades. It will solve may of the upgrade issues that you would encounter such as missing packages and/or broken dependencies. Also, Ubuntu's default shell adds some things which are useful to noobs, like typing a command, and if it is not found then tells you what package to install. You can shut that off if you want though. There are many advantages. Also, Canonical provides support – so if you ever have an Ubuntu problem that the community can't solve, then you can ask them to figure it out. I don't know if the Debian support options are even semi-official…

I'd be rather interested to know how Debian/Ubuntu performance rates against Gentoo.

I know that when I changed from a current SuSE to Gentoo on my previous (and ancient) laptop just over two years ago, I saw a HUGE improvement in performance. (Actually SuSE nearly killed the poor thing.)

As I build all my LAMPP components from source, for my production servers, I don't know if there is really any advantage to using a Gentoo base system over a binary distribution (I do NOT want to go back to rpms).

If anyone has been able to make any comparisons, it would be interesting to hear of them.

Sorry to partially hijack the thread, but I consider this relevant as the o/p is considering a Gentoo to .deb move.

@smiffy:

I'd be rather interested to know how Debian/Ubuntu performance rates against Gentoo.

I know that when I changed from a current SuSE to Gentoo on my previous (and ancient) laptop just over two years ago, I saw a HUGE improvement in performance. (Actually SuSE nearly killed the poor thing.)

As I build all my LAMPP components from source, for my production servers, I don't know if there is really any advantage to using a Gentoo base system over a binary distribution (I do NOT want to go back to rpms).

If anyone has been able to make any comparisons, it would be interesting to hear of them.

Sorry to partially hijack the thread, but I consider this relevant as the o/p is considering a Gentoo to .deb move.

I was a pre-1.0 (2001?) user of Gentoo for many years before I switched to Ubuntu and have stayed. Let's be honest. If you want performance if your binaries during run time, go with Gentoo. Just remember that you pay for that performance gain with a long-time to compile. I got sick of recompiling Gnome on the Desktop (~6 hours) and switched to Ubuntu Warty in 2004. If you are running a production server that needs support – then I would never use Gentoo. The problem is that if you need to get something installed immediately in the case of an emergency, then you're screwed if that package is not available in binary form via emerge -k option. And this happens sometimes. However, I love the control that Gentoo offers you, especially when it comes to USE flags and defining exactly hat you want in your binaries. And optimizing the builds for your CPU arch is a huge plus. But, again if you don't want to get yourself stuck in a hole when you b0rked your Gentoo, then stick with Ubuntu. It's all Linux in the end, right? Do what works for you…

I used to run Gentoo on my Linode. It sucked. The portage tree changes way too much. When a minor update to PHP makes you recompile 50 packages then hoses your server, life is not good. Gentoo is a great system for developers, but it has no business being anywhere near a server. After fighting Gentoo for about a year, I switched to Ubuntu because of the LTS server edition. I haven't needed to get support yet, but I like that it's an option for a long time.

That's my $0.02

I will re-stress that all my LAMPP environment, at least Apache2, MySQL, Perl and PHP I am building myself from source. The performance of these components is critical - however, I'm not sure that the base OS really is.

Does not having the base OS optimised impact the overall performance in any significant way? I'd guess not.

All my updates get done first on my backup Linode - nothing gets applied to the main production server until this has proved good for a couple of days.

I am am really starting to feel that, in this environment, Gentoo is doing me no real favours.

When I build myself a new office server in a year or so, it will be running Solaris (so I can get RAID-Z). For the time being, I will leave my Linodes alone due to the time involved in migrating. However, when the time comes, my Linodes will probably be going Ubuntu.

To explain the possible non-sequitur in my last paragraph regarding Solaris - I should have said before:

I re-evaluate my infrastructure on a regular (annual-ish) basis; the last evaluation showed…

kali25,

I'm in exactly the same situation as you - had Gentoo at home and on my Linode, switched to Ubuntu at home and am considering switching my server.

Please let us know how you get on. I was thinking I would have to rent another Linode, set that up, move the DNS, then cancel the original Linode. Was that the approach you are going to take?

My $0.02 for Debian or Ubuntu is that it makes sense for your live server to have the same distro as you development (home) box.

Thanks,

Graham

Graham,

I switched to Linode since they offered Gentoo. I have been on the same Gentoo since, upgrading over the past few years. My previous migration was easy as I only had a few sites AND I bought a new domain name to be the primary domain on the Linode.

I have been kicking around the idea of moving to another OS like Ubuntu for over a year now, but I am scared of the migration. I am fine with moving Websites, but the mail is still a mystery to me. MX records and tricky Mail Server configs have been keeping me stay put.

For example I have domain.com on gentoo. But I want to move it to Ubuntu/Debian, do I set up the new server with domain.com also? Then how can I test the mail is working, I would need to do server2.domain.com or something like that. I would also want to only move a few of the 20 or so domains hosted to make sure they work fine. I guess changing the MX for just those domains. but I still think it is tricky since I do not fully understand how mail is routed.

All my sites are friends and family. A few of the family use the sites for small "mom-n-pop" businesses, but I still do not want to loose any of their mail.

I figure when I finally get the guts and the time to do it I will write up everything I did and share it.

Oh and yes my plan was to buy another Linode and set it all up and have it running side by side for about a month to make sure everything works then migrate my 10 users over to it. Then shut off the old one.

I follow up after I do it.

@khermans:

Ubuntu has 'do-release-upgrade' which can simplify moving between revisions during upgrades. It will solve may of the upgrade issues that you would encounter such as missing packages and/or broken dependencies.

apt-get dist-upgrade

> Also, Ubuntu's default shell adds some things which are useful to noobs, like typing a command, and if it is not found then tells you what package to install.

I'm sure there's a shell/package for this in debian but is not enabled by default

> You can shut that off if you want though. There are many advantages. Also, Canonical provides support – so if you ever have an Ubuntu problem that the community can't solve, then you can ask them to figure it out. I don't know if the Debian support options are even semi-official…

Debian is by the people, for the people, so there is no company backing it, as such, no 'Official' support. There are the mailing lists, forums, IRC, or a paid Consultant.

I use Debian for my home servers and on my linode. My workstation runs Ubuntu 7.10, but I run several Debian VPS nodes under VMWare for development purposes. I prefer the rock-solid stability of Debian over bleeding-edge distros, but your needs may not match mine. I'll put it this way: Debian has yet to let me down over the last five years.

@smiffy:

Does not having the base OS optimised impact the overall performance in any significant way? I'd guess not.

Let's see: what base OS component does every single application use? That's right, glibc. Hmmm.

Going back to the original question of Debian vs. Ubuntu: On my linode, I use Debian stable, plus a few backports. If I were recommending a distribution for someone new to install on their desktop, I'd probably go Ubuntu. For servers, I don't see much reason to select Ubuntu over Debian, and I'd guess that the backport situation is better on Debian.

Now, I've been using Debian at home and various works since 0.90, so I'm probably biased. But along way I've done a LOT of upgrades, and while this has necessitated some config file editing, I've NEVER had a broken system. It's always been far smoother than any other OS upgrades I've done.

As far as I know, ubuntu packages are somewhere between debian testing and unstable.

Recently I tried arch linux, the package management seems somewhat rudimentary. But overall the system is very lean and clean.

Hello. I just completed my migration and shut down the old Gentoo server today.

I went with Ubuntu in the end, I have been using linux for over a decade but still consider myself a noob. I run Ubuntu as my file server at home, so I can play around in there if I need to.

The Migrate was only mildly painful, it would have been easier if I did not have about 6 users I needed to move. Mail, websites etc.

I used the same IMAP server Courier, but I moved from Qmail to Postfix for the MTA. Learning how to configure Postix was the biggest challenge. I also setup Spam Assassin since my users were beggin for spam filtering. I used it years ago, but found it was hogging all the memory on my Linode 128 at the time. So I switched over to Thunderbird Spam filtering but I guess no one else did. One guy stopped using it since he got 1000 spam to every 1 real message. Well Spam Assassin is working great, that was trick to configure as there is not just open way to do it, I have to search around for various recipes.

I also switch from my own Self-signed CA to using CACert.org for all my Certificate needs. All login methods to my server use SSL, no passwords in the clear.

Funny thing is, the Ubuntu server gets a lot less updates then the Gentoo Server did. I run apt-get update && apt-get install once a week and there are not nearly the updates Gentoo had. I also really hated Gentoo messing up or almost messing up my configs. About twice a year I blew it and screwed up a config. I will see how Ubuntu does. I also like the way Apache works with the a2ensite command.

I was on monthly on the new server until today when I transferred the remainder of my annual plan to the new server and killed the old one. Good luck with your migration. Those MX records are a pain!

On the performance issue:

Compiling LAMP from source will not have anywhere near the performance affect 1 bad SQL query on a heavily trafficed page will.

People like to think compiling from source gives you some sort of magical performance boost compared to using binary packages.

Spend your time learning how to properly configure the software you have installed, not messing with gcc flags.

I agree with the performance. I did not see a lot with compiling everything in Gentoo, heck I did not even know if I had my flags set right for optimal performance. I went to Gentoo because I liked that I could configure everything as I wanted. At the time I was dealing with the likes of Redhat, but Ubuntu serve me just fine and the updates and installs take seconds.

@schmichael:

On the performance issue:

People like to think compiling from source gives you some sort of magical performance boost compared to using binary packages.

I speak from the result of much testing on a Xen 4-way Xeon server, the precompiled SSE instruction set linear algebra routines in Ubuntu are fairly close in performance to the natively compiled version.

I used to think there would be performance boosts for floating-point math libraries, since they would be most sensitive to compiler options.

Gentoo was just too painful to maintain for what small improvements in speed that I received. On the other hance, converting my code to use the parallel processors on the Xen servers is giving dramatic performance improvements. Hopefully in the next few years we will have more SMP cores per server, heh heh.

James