Which Linux varient has "best" support for SBS (will be running as VM instance)

[rcstevensonaz]

For many years, I've run Squeezebox Server on a Windows machine (XP, Vista, Windows 7) sitting in a closet of the house.

I am now moving to a home-built VMware machine (VSphere ESXi 5.0) and I want to shift my SBS over to a Linux-based virtual machine.

This is NOT meant to start any religious wars...!!!...

But, since I no prior investment in any of the various Unix/Linux variants, I'm wondering what would be the best package to run for this use case (i.e. headless virtual machine running SBS only).

My primary criteria are:

1) Stable release of OS and SBS that are well supported today and for the coming future
2) Installation of SBS package "just works"
3) Upgrades to future stable release OS and to SBS packages "just work"

Thanks for your insight.

-- Craig

[Mnyb]

i say that the rpm build has almost no issues . The debian repo can be somewhat unorganised .

[paulster]

Debian is a great server OS though, and I've run SBS on it for years with no problems. I don't run the betas though, and I know they've had some issues with the repository for these.

[SuperQ]

Anything Debian based. Ubuntu LTS releases are a good choice, although you may want to start with 11.10 and upgrade to 12.04 LTS when it's ready. The won't be substantially different compared to going from 10.04 to 12.04.

[aubuti]

I've been plenty happy with Ubuntu and Debian, although it's true that the naming on the repos (stable/testing/unstable) is sometimes wrong. Also consider Vortexbox, which is based on Fedora. If the VM's sole purpose is to run SBS, then there is no other solution that is better at "just works out of the box."

Note that Vortexbox (the Fedora-based Linux distro for SBS) should not be confused with "Vortexbox Appliance", which is server hardware that runs Vortexbox.

[Ron Olsen]

I've been plenty happy with Ubuntu and Debian, although it's true that the naming on the repos (stable/testing/unstable) is sometimes wrong. Also consider Vortexbox, which is based on Fedora. If the VM's sole purpose is to run SBS, then there is no other solution that is better at "just works out of the box."

I've set up VortexBox VMs using Parallels on Mac OS X and they work well. I'm currently running a VortexBox 1.10 (Fedora 14) VM and a VortexBox 2.0 Beta (Fedora 16 Beta) VM on my Mac. The final VortexBox 2.0 ISO should be released in about a week. You can run SBS 7.6.1 or LMS 7.7.0 on VB 1.10; LMS 7.7.0 is standard on VB 2.0, but you could downgrade to SBS 7.6.1 if you wanted to.

Dan Gravell, the bliss developer, has set up a VortexBox VM using VMware:

http://www.blisshq.com/music-library...-installation/

[epoch1970]

My vote goes to debian stable (+slimdevices stable).
I run mostly Lenny (oldstable) with backports or Squeeze (stable) machines in kvm-qemu. The host is a Lenny machine with backports.

[pski]

+1 for VortexBox in a VM.

I've moved to this from a WinVista of similar processing power.

On Workstation 6.5, I'm running VBox in 512MB of memory and it's still 50% faster than WinVista with 3 Gigs. All the music is on a NAS in both cases.

Even with that small amount of memory allocated, the only time it goes to swap is when I'm running a full clear and scan. That run time stays about the same no matter now much memory I throw at the VM.

P