On 23 May 2008, at 06:59, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
I would like to try LedgerSMB for, well, a small business.I don't know what the line of least resistance is (I don't want to employmy usual tactic: looking for the line of greatest resistance). I would welcome advice. Linux distros that seem plausible: ... I'm trying to figure out PostgreSQL versions as a factor in the choice - Centos 5.1 has 8.1.11 - Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has 8.3.1 - Fedora 9 has 8.3.1 - Debian seems to be heading towards 8.3 (based on something said on this list)
Hi there,It's interesting you should ask this. What distro do you use at the moment?
The reason I make that reply is that I'd imagine most folks would just use the distro they're most comfortable with.
If you're new to Linux then my standard advice is to try several of them - the "best" Linux distro simply seems to be a matter of which "suits" you, and it seems to all come down to a matter of personality & preference.
If you're new to Linux then it's a bit of a step from Windows. I think that, for a lot of people, moving from Windows 2000 to XP, or XP to to Vista is a bit of a change. The jump from Windows to Linux is several times as surprising and confusing - even if you do _everything_ from the GUI. And long term you probably _don't_ want to do everything from the GUI - maybe I'm just an old fogey, but I find teh powah of teh Lunix to be in the command line. I'm sure you don't want to immediately start using the terminal exclusively, so when dipping into that it's useful to have a GUI environment that you're comfortable with.
My advice is to try several distros and see which you get along with best. Download Centos and Ubunutu and install them in turn on an old Pentium III (or I guess these days older, low-end Pentium 4s are probably cheap enough, a tenner at the local tip?). Don't be afraid to wipe each and start again with a different distro - iniially the whole point should be to learn. If the install process goes smoothly then I guess you'd find that reassuring, but also try all the usual stuff like changing the default web-browser, installing the extra codecs & stuff so that the machine plays video files, setting up Samba so you can easily transfer files from your Windows box, getting a printer working. This may not seem strictly relevant - in fact, playing videos may seem quite *irrelevant* - to a machine which is supposed to run LedgerSMB, but IMO you won't really learn whether you get along with a distro until you've had to struggle with it a bit, or at least done something non-trivial. At that point you discover how good the documentation is, the community support, the package- manager and whether you like the decisions made by the distros developers.
I would imagine that most people went through a number of distros before settling upon the one that's right for them - I've now been using Gentoo for several years, and am so comfortable with it that I could no longer possibly use any other.
I would say that any of the distros you mention are quite suitable for you, although I see no reason to choose Debian over Ubuntu (the latter is derived from the former, is basically a flashier-packaged version of Debian and much more up to date; people who use Ubuntu *love* it). I'd also add Suse to your list, but from a LedgeSMB point of view I'd imagine there to be little difference between them, and any that are currently using an older version of PostgreSQL may well come up to date in the 6 months it takes you to get completely comfortable with Linux & LedgerSMB, comfortable enough to deploy it as your main accounting system. Besides all that, once you're comfortable enough with the command line it's trivial to transfer your LedgerSMB installation from one machine or distro to another (don't forget to backup your customised invoice templates!!).
You might find better answers to this question on the -users list. Stroller.