Nick wrote:

> Along with Fedora Core 1 & 2. I have a client currently using firebird 1.5
> on RH9, I need to make a reccomendation about the platform he should move
> to.

As you're used to RedHat, I'd recommend CentOS. That is exactly same as
RHEL, just packed by independent group.

As firebird is almost the only thing running on the machine I thought

> that the best unix flavour should be the base one used for firebird testing
> and development although I don't know what that is.
>
> So I'm asking:
> A) what is the base unix flavour used for firebird

There is no "best". The best is what suits you best, the one you're
"best" familiar with, etc.

> B) is there something better that the answer to A for a live, small, system

First define what do you consider "small" (hardware requirements) and
what do you consider "system" (required tools/programs).

I have FB running on a modified MoviX (http://movix.sourceforge.net)
distribution. If runs FB and two ncurses applications off a CD, all
working on 486 machine with 16MB of RAM. The database is stored on hard
disk. It has consoles and busybox tools. Probably not what you need. ;)

You can also boot a live Slax Linux system from USB stick and keep the
app and the database on it. It has X-Windows, Firefox and what-not (see
their website for details). 512MB stick does the job perfectly (unless
you're on for a bigger database).

Basically, you can take FB files from .tar.gz installation kit and copy
those to appropriate files on any Linux system. With a little bit of
messing with permissions, everything should work. Variants are many, so
you need to first define what exactly do you need.


P.S. I myself am using Slackware, but I would only recommend it to an
experienced Linux user.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://swoes.blogspot.com/
http://www.flamerobin.org