Helen Borrie wrote:

>>Which Linux versions are supported by Firebird?
>
> Theoretically, all. Practically, if you are something of a bunny with
> Linux, stick with a distro that supports rpm installers - Red Hat/Fedora,
> Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSe, amongst several others.

I hate to admit, but this is really true. You can also run Firebird on
Slackware without much problems (installer spits some errors, but
everything works). It should also work on Gentoo without much hassle,
but Gentoo is definitely not for beginners (some may argue the same for
Slackware too).

> My personal preference is
> Mandriva, not because of Firebird, but because it is just very, very good
> at recognising and configuring your hardware. That doesn't mean all of the
> others do it badly, just that Mandriva "just works", no hassles. The
> Mandriva folk are also making the effort to include Firebird in their distros.

True. From top three .rpm based distributions I give Mandriva the
advantage, especially if you are a beginner (RedHat and SuSE being the
second). Newer versions (SuSE 9.3 and Fedora 4) seem to be very stable
and work nice, but still.

> Debian has a following here, as well. My own experience with Debian is
> that it doesn't work "out of the box" (it's not designed to) and uses a
> totally different packaging scheme than the mainline Linuxen do. That
> shouldn't be a problem for you if you are already well-acquainted with
> Debian but I'd suggest that it wouldn't be the best starting point if you
> are new to both Linux and Firebird.

This sentence explains about all. Debian takes more time to learn,
although it can pay off in the long run. If you could take some time to
first to learn Debian and then use Firebird on it, it may also turn out
alright. There are also many Debian-based distributions around, with
Ubuntu being extremely popular. However, most of them target desktop,
not the server, so I don't recommend it.

BTW, if you plan to run Firebird on an older machine (Pentium 2 or
older), then Slackware might be the best choice. You won't be able to
run latest versions of SuSE, Mdr or RH smoothly, but Slackware would
just fly (I even have few 486 boxes running FB 1.0).

To sum up: if you have modern hardware, the best thing is to try out at
least 3 distributions and see whichever suits you best. The one you find
easiest to setup and maintain is The Best for you. It takes time to
learn Linux, so in few years you'll test some distros again and only
then you'll be able to pick The Right One(tm).

--
Milan Babuskov
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net
http://www.flamerobin.org