Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Is Getting There
by on May.11, 2010, under Server Maintenance
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server is Getting There (Page 1 of 2 )Canonical’s Ubuntu Server hasn’t yet caught up to the progress that’s been made in Linux desktops, but it offers a serviceable alternative to server offerings from other Linux vendors and from Microsoft.
Canonical and the Ubuntu Project have done great things tohelp bring Linux to the mainstream desktop. But what about the server edition?if Ubuntu can bring the same level of polish to its server offerings, it shouldbe a formidable competitor to Microsoft and other Linux vendors. Looking at UbuntuServer 10.04, aka “Lucid Lynx,” there’s a lot to like and also somedisappointments.
Is Ubuntu Server as polished as its desktop cousin? in aword, no. the software is solid, and the package selection for Ubuntu Server isfairly deep and comprehensive. For organizations looking for a Debian-like OSwith a much more predictable life cycle and the option of support, Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Long Term Support) may be a good choice.All things being equal, I’d probably choose Ubuntu Server over anothercommunity server distribution like CentOS, but I prefer Debian-like systems forservers.
Ubuntu doesn’t offer the same kind of management tools thatyou’ll find with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Anaconda and other tools) or SUSELinux Enterprise Server (YaST). if the options are RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu LTS,the choice is a bit tougher. the documentation and management tools, barringLandscape, aren’t yet on par with the other enterprise counterparts.
Once set up, Ubuntu LTSis a solid system. It’s an especially good choice for Web servers, mail serversand so on. I like the depth of packages that are offered via the Universerepositories, but I’d like to see better management tools in future releases.
Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition is available for free download. Canonical offers paidsupport for the distribution, priced at $750 per system per year for 9/5support, and $1,200 per system per year for 24/7 support.
Getting started
Installation is fairly bare-bones, with a text-modeinstaller that offers two main choices: Ubuntu LTSServer or the cloud edition of Ubuntu Server. For the most part the installeris simple enough to use, but has a few rough edges. This is especially truewhen it comes to partitioning. the text-based partitioner is a bit confusing touse and doesn’t handle nonstandard partitioning schemes as well as it could.Lynx also lacks a good option for automated installation, though it’s possibleto use FAI (Fully Automatic Installation).
To put Ubuntu Server through its paces, I installed it onseveral systems, from a dual-Xeon machine with 8GB of RAMto a Atom-based netbook with 1GB of RAM.though the netbook isn’t suitable for any mission-critical deployments, you canactually run a decent LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl) systemfor a local network off a netbook with 1GB of RAM.I do like the preconfigured selection of software. Ubuntu LTSoffers nine software collections, including DNS (Domain name System) server,LAMP, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH server (which should be installed anyway), Tomcat andSamba. It’s also possible to select software manually during the server installation,if you need to.
It’s worth noting that this is the first LTSto offer the option of encrypting the partitions and home directories forusers. I tried Lynx with and without disk encryption and didn’t notice asignificant performance hit with encryption.
