Re: what Linux to run

On 03/03/12 23:33, Leif Biberg Kristensen wrote:

 Lørdag 3. mars 2012 01.43.29 skrev Gavin Flower :

I think if you are going to select a member of the Debian family, I
would strongly recommend Debian itself. I have the impression that the
Debian community is more serious about quality than Canonical (the
company behind Ubuntu).

I haven't run Debian for ten years, when I had a headless old PC running with 
a LAMP stack. Since I discovered Gentoo, that has been my preferred distro. 
However, I'm currently in the process of setting up a dedicated Web server 
with Debian as it may one day be another person's responsibility to admin this 
box, and I would consider it cruel to leave a Gentoo box to anyone but the 
most devoted Linux fans.

My current gripe is this: The «stable» version of Postgres on Debian is 8.4. 
In order to install 9.1, I added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

Then I did an apt-get update and 

apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-client-9.1

Finally I commented out the added line of /etc/apt/sources.list.

This seems a rather roundabout way, is there a better one?

regards, Leif

To be honest I got into Linux in 1994 when a friend set me up with Debian, the first distribution I installed myself was Red Hat.  Though I had previous experience with mainframes and minicomputers, starting in the mid 1970's - COBOL & FORTRAN era.  (There is a distant possibility I may get back into FORTRAN, as that is run on the HPC's at the University where I now work!!!).

My knowledge of Debian is via friend's (an extremely competent and experienced Unix guy who got me into Linux & who still runs Debian) comments and what I've noticed on the web.  For a Desktop development machine, I currently prefer Fedora, but for a server I need to be more conservative.  One place I worked used Ubuntu, but I quickly switched my machine to Fedora, when I found Ubuntu lacked the desktop things I relied on!

So I would interested in the answers, also I would need to be able to install JDK7.

Cheers,
Gavin