One of my earliest memories of Linux was of slackware. The hardcore distro, the most unix-like Linux of all Linuxes, it enshrined my geekyness. Our revered maestro is Pat Volkerding.

Linux is widespread now mainly because of Canonical’s ubuntu. It’s ease of use, it just ‘works’.

This establishes a 2-tier system of Linux that only previously existed in basement-source forum arguments. RPM versus source distributions.

If you’re not too familiar with this, RPM is so named after the RedHat Package Manager system. It provides generic packages of applications and daemons that can work out of the box. Coupled with a package manager such as yum or apt-get, it can be an effective tool to get a Linux installation on its feet quickly and without much effort.

‘yum install httpd php php-mysql mysql-server perl’ is a common command for a RPM source distro admin. It resolves everything and ‘just works’.

Source is a bit different. But it has the alluring draw that it can be faster, more secure, totally customised. It requires more work than RPM distributions for obvious reason. Rather than automatic package dependency resolution, it needs building to work with each package that you choose to install.

It doesn’t half teach you about Linux though.

3dpixel.net has been running RPM based, CentOS for several years. Mainly because of the compatibility with the Plesk control panel. Plesk is rpm based and has no source package installation.

We’ve decided now to switch to a self-built slackware based control panel for two reasons.

1. Plesk costs an absolute fortune and is perpetual. We’re leasing this software and so are our customers.
2. We’ve discovered a few major bugs in the plesk control panel that we won’t share here, but plesk are not forthcoming with any fixes. As they lock down their control panel we cannot effectively close these holes without major software edits.

I’ll post some in-development blog posts over the coming weeks on our experiences on building a source based control panel.

Our customers, prepare for an upgrade you won’t believe!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.