Debian 5 or Ubuntu 9.10 for Mercury?

Go for debian, ubuntu 9.10 support ends in april.

You could also go for ubuntu 8.04 which is supported until 2013 and has php5.2.4, debian has 5.2.6.

Thanks for that info. have you seen any performance benefit of the 64-bit distros? I've got a site that will be at about 10,000 users doing a lot of searching within the site. Hence the reason for mercury.

Go with 32bit (most likely). And search :) Some questions have been asked many times :)

http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=6355

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/s … -vs-linode">http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=5063

thanks! i did search here and drupal and google. but i posted the question too hoping to get the info.

for anyone else reading this, the 32-bit version seems to be the ticket unless you have a server with a ton of RAM, etc. each apache instance gulps more memory in the 64-bit version and benchmarks are showing the 64-bit OS to not be that much different which is odd.

Our hardware is way more advaned than the applications we have. Such a shame.

I would go with Debian Squeeze- it's going to be stable shortly, and will save you from having to upgrade in a bit anyway.

I see that there isn't a prebuilt option from Linode- so I would install Debian 5, then do a dist upgrade to testing (squeeze).

@bryantrv:

I would go with Debian Squeeze- it's going to be stable shortly, and will save you from having to upgrade in a bit anyway.

I see that there isn't a prebuilt option from Linode- so I would install Debian 5, then do a dist upgrade to testing (squeeze).
The OP says he needs PHP 5.2.