On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Ken Fuchs wrote: > Perhaps a more specialized Linux distribution would be more suitable > like ... > > https://www.scientificlinux.org/ > http://bioinformatics.org/biobrew/ > http://dnalinux.com/ That's some pretty neat stuff, but my needs are a little different from those of the developers of those packages. I'd still have to install almost everything I need, so I think I'll go with a more standard distro and install my genetics programs from source. > One good reason to choose Debian over all others is the huge number of > well supported packages available for it, the deb package format and > apt-get. I also use Fedora Core 4, but there aren't nearly as many > packages for it, the packages are in rpm format which is considered by > many to be inferior to deb and yum doesn't seem to work as well as > apt-get. SUSE is also an excellent distribution and will get much > better do to the recent announcement of http://www.openSUSE.org/. I'm also leaning toward Debian right now. I've always heard good things about apt-get. I also hear good things about Gentoo's package management. Can Debian automatically find and download updates to packages when they become available? I think Gentoo does that. >> So what are the biggest differences between these distros for a server >> class machine? Would these differences affect users much or mostly >> just administrators? > > The most important difference is how difficult it will be to install > missing software and configure the Linux distribution to do what you > need it to do. That's what I was thinking. Thanks. Mike