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Slavo Furman wrote:
> Thanks for all answers... :)
> 
> 
> On 9/10/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
> Yes. This is where I am now. But majority of new developments and all
> hostings I found are on Linux/Unix so ...

Yes ... I guess I would pick the distro that "most" of the hostings use.
I haven't done any analysis of that, but my gut feel is that most of the
*enterprise-grade* servers in the USA are using Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, probably RHEL 3 or 4, because upgrading is a pain for a server.

Of the ones that aren't using RHEL, I'd guess that most of them are
using Fedora because of its Red Hat compatibility. Ubuntu and Gentoo
aren't really known as server distros, and the RHEL rebuilds like CentOS
aren't nearly as popular as Fedora.

> No. I really do not like to mess with Java stuff again (have a awful
> experience with enterprise Java with which I have to interop with in one of
> our apps I developed in my work. Never more!). But I really looking forward
> to spent some time with IronRuby (http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/) when it
> will be more complete.

Well, both the jRuby and IronRuby developers frequent this list, so I'll
let them answer questions about them.

> Well, for now I like to learn how to install Linux and apps I needed to be
> productive with developing web applications using Ruby on Rails. I do not
> looking forward to using Linux as my primary platform for now.

In that case, I'd recommend either CentOS 5 or Fedora 7. Both are as
"easy to use" as Red Hat. CentOS 5 lags RHEL 5 updates by at most a day
or two, and it is for the most part stable and easy to work with.

What you *don't* want to do with CentOS is try to manage packages that
aren't part of the distro, *including* more recent versions of Ruby and
your database of choice (MySQL and PostgreSQL are the two big ones).
That way lies madness and spending time on stuff you don't want to learn
rather than on Ruby, Rails and web application development. If you want
to stay current with Ruby, Rails and the databases, go with Fedora.

One other note: most Linux distros now include something called "mono".
I don't know the details, since I'm not a .NET person, but it is an open
source ".NET-like" platform of some sort.
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