[sf-lug] Ubuntu vs. Mandriva

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Ward (dssstrkl at gmail.com):

> I'm aware that any distro can do what I  want, I guess I just wanted
> to know if there were any real differences  between a current champ
> and an old friend.

You can certainly do a NAS / SMTP / IP-port filter / MythTV box using
just about any arbitrary Linux or BSD flavour, and the deciding factor
might end up being what you're comfortable with administering.  Be sure
to check that candidate distributions have all the maintained packages
you need in the desired versions.  (For a while, for example, there was
no *buntu package for Lighttpd, which was a surprising hole in *buntu's
software coverage.  I had to fetch source tarballs, add a /debian tree
of build instructions adapted from the Debian source package, and
construct Ubuntu .deb packages locally.)

You'll also have to decide on your own security policy, but I personally
avoid running X11, let alone desktop environments, on headless servers.