[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] What is the best OS for installing Evergreen-ILS?

[Sharp, Chris]

Hi Wolf, 

> I understand Evergreen has been tested on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and RHEL. From your experience 
> what are the hurdles or the differences in using one over another. Presume equal skill in all of 
> these Distros. Are there other distros that work easier, more dependably? Have you gotten EG to 
> work on Puppy Linux, Slackware, Gentoo, Absolute Linux, BSD, AIX, Solaris... 

Here's my take:

1) Debian:

advantages:

- the best-tested and most-used platform for Evergreen (as far as I'm aware)
- (corollary to above) used in PINES production, which has (one of?) the largest transaction load(s) of all the Evergreen implementations
- long release cycle, large base of stable packages

disadvantages:

- release cycle is long, but it is also unpredictable, as is the EOL schedule for "oldstable" versions
- packages are out of date compared to other distros, which is a problem when, say, the supported version of PostgreSQL changes to something not in the standard release repos
- no official support vendor (the degree to which this is actually a disadvantage depends on the skill of your in-house/contractor system administrators)

2) Ubuntu (note that the Evergreen community only supports LTS releases):

advantages:

- based on Debian testing, so most assumptions about Debian are true of Ubuntu (10.04 and Debian "squeeze" are about the same "age")
- known to be used/tested in live Evergreen production settings
- timed 5-year release cycle - allows for long-range upgrade planning
- (mostly) newer packages (at least at the beginning of the release cycle)
- possibility for official vendor support via Canonical

disadvantages:

- as you mention, the LTS's age quickly, which means dependency on PPAs (personal package archives - which are not even recommended for production environments by the Ubuntu support community) for newer versions of Evergreen dependencies

Fedora's short release cycle doesn't lend itself well to live production environments, but would have the advantage of eventually becoming a RHEL release(?).  I'm sure Dan Scott has further thoughts on this (not to put you on the spot, Dan ;-) ).

I don't have any experience with RHEL, but I know that at least one or two live Evergreen implementations are running it - hopefully they will speak up ;-).

Others:

- Gentoo was the original development platform for Evergreen (back in 2005 - 2006).  I don't know the rationale for moving to Debian, but I imagine that the system administrators on the development team supported the move.

- Bill Erickson of Equinox just posted some installation notes he put together while porting Evergreen to FreeBSD: http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/2011-November/007744.html

I haven't seen any serious discussion of the other platforms you mention.

> I am considering Debian for reasons of the long life of major versions. Ubuntu LTS versions start 
> to feel their age toward the middle of their lifespan, if 10.04 is any indicator. I never ran EG 
> on Ubuntu 8.4, so I don't have firsthand knowledge of your experience with that. 

That was the rationale we had for going with Debian in our new implementation (going live in January).  We have some dedicated Ubuntu server fans on our staff, and we like the timed release cycle of LTS, but in the end, we want to use what is the most-used and best-tested, and that leads back to Debian.

(others' answers to this came through as I was typing, so there will be duplications ;-) ).

Chris

-- 
Chris Sharp 
PINES Program Manager 
Georgia Public Library Service 
1800 Century Place, Suite 150 
Atlanta, Georgia 30345 
(404) 235-7147 
csharp at georgialibraries.org 
http://pines.georgialibraries.org/