I should realize the futility in ever thinking I'll get a server configured as I think a server should be configured and learn to love how those jokers at Red Hat or Suse or Debian deem it best to run a server, and oh, by the way, hope you like the Upgrade Dance™ because you'll be doing it for the rest of your life because Red Hat or Suse or Debian say so. So there.

I would have thought that by now, the major Linux distributions, or at least some offshoot of one of the major or even minor Linux distributions, would have targetted LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl|Python|PHP). Really, at this stage of the game, all I really want in a distribution is a base system loaded with the development packages. Most of the servers I'm installing these days (and over the past month I've done quite a few) are doing nothing more than web serving and forwarding email and that's it.

So basically, all I need is a distribution that includes:

• The Linux kernel and the base operating system, stuff that you would normally find in /bin/, /sbin/, /usr/bin/ and /usr/sbin/.
• A development system. At the least, this includes GCC (GNU Compiler Compiler) [1] and the various P-languages (Perl [2], Python [3], PHP [4]). Oh, and maybe a debugger [5].
• Apache [6], ideally installed such that ./configure; make; make install right from the tarball installs over the previous version. If I have to upgrade Apache due to a security flaw, the last two things I want to do is wait for the distribution to provide a package and have to think Okay, what parameters to configure did this distribution use?
• MySQL [7], ideally installed such that ./configure; make; make install right from the tarball installs over the previous version. If I have to upgrade MySQL due to a security flaw, the last two things I want to do is wait for the distribution to provide a package and have to think Okay, what parameters to configure did this distribution use?
• No package manager. This is non-negotiable! I haven't had luck with any of the package managers; not yum, not emerge, not apt-get, not a single one. Sure, they may work. When they're not overwriting your existing configuration (are you listening G? If it ain't broke, don't fix it!). Or including X Windows [8], not because you need it (for you don't, not for a server) but just because (and because of X Windows, you now get Gnome [9] and KDE [10], because … well … why the XXXX not?). But what about a year from now? They've moved the repositories and no longer support your “older than the ancient Greeks but in reality it's only two weeks old” version of the distribution (and it should be noted—I don't play that “continuous upgrade just because it's new” game; unless there's a security hole or a feature I just can't live without, I won't upgrade).

Yes, there are ways of taming some of the distributions to only include what you want, but it's quite a bit of work for something that I'm surprised hasn't been done already (or is everyone being lazy and waiting on the Lazy Web [11] to do it?). And what some of these distributions consider “bare bones” I consider “about as bloated as Windows.”

Sheesh.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/

[2] http://www.perl.org/

[3] http://www.python.org/

[4] http://www.php.net/

[5] http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/

[6] http://httpd.apache.org/

[7] http://www.mysql.com/

[8] http://www.x.org/

[9] http://www.gnome.org/

[10] http://www.kde.org/

[11] http://www.lazyweb.org/

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