SliceHost 3-Way-Handshake Podcast Episode 8 — over 80% of Slice at SliceHost runs on Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu), verses around 5.5% for Gentoo. RPM-based distributions (CentOS, Fedora, etc) is a bit bigger but simply does not compare with overwhelming domination of Debian-based distributions.
Over the last 3-4 months I have also gradually moved my Gentoo based servers to either Ubuntu or Debian (prefer the latest Ubuntu if available). In fact I have just deleted my 18 month old Gentoo slice at SliceHost, and moved all content to a new slice running Ubuntu 7.10 last month. Now I am happy to say that all of my live servers/VPS are now running either Ubuntu or Debian, and it has changed my Monday morning (my usual mass-update morning) from:
# emerge --sync# emerge -avD world- Starring at compilation messages scrolling across the screen.
- Trying to figure out why some packages are blocking, some packages do not emerge, and why some packages I upgraded last week is now down-grading again.
- … 20 minutes later I finally got my root prompt back!
- Restart all services that I have emerged, finger crossed hoping that nothing breaks, otherwise
revdep-rebuildwhile reading special upgrading instruction on PAM, MySQL, or OpenSSL at Gentoo.org.
To:
# apt-get update# apt-get upgrade
Upgrading all the packages in the Gentoo Portage system can be very time consuming, and it gets worse when you have quite a few servers to upgrade!