Submitted by Locutus on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 12:20
I hope this is not a stupid question or one of the "has been asked and answered 1000 times" type. :)
Is there, among the Grade A Supported Systems, a recommended one? CentOS is listed first, but for reasons of "what I'm used to using", I have Ubuntu 10.04 currently, which is listed last.
Are there any noteworthy disadvantages when using Ubuntu with VM as opposed to CentOS?
Many thanks in advance for advise!
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Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 12:28 Comment #1
Howdy! Don't forget that the Support area here is a service we provide for Virtualmin Pro customers... while we don't mind fielding bug reports, users of Virtualmin GPL should put general support queries in the forums :-)
To answer your question though -- distro choice really comes down to personal preference.
If you have a preferred distro within CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu, I'd recommend using that.
CentOS is the most commonly used distro for Virtualmin, so it tends to get a lot of testing, moreso than other distributions.
However, Debian and Ubuntu work quite well, and I happen to be an Ubuntu fan myself :-)
Submitted by Locutus on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 12:55 Comment #2
Thanks for your reply, even more so since my request was "unauthorized"! I'll stay with Ubuntu then. :)
And I apologize about the GPL-vs-Pro thing, I wasn't aware of that. Since the system allowed me to post a support request here, I though why the heck not. ;) But it sure makes sense, considering (at least I suppose that's the case?) only the development team itself replies to issues posted here.
I'll stick with bug reports from now on (if you don't mind - but I suppose you appreciate the free help? ;) ), and direct support requests to the forum.
Edit: After reading through the "Support" page, I see now that I should have been aware of the forum-vs-issue tracker thing. Sorry again!
Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 13:07 Comment #3
No worries... we appreciate your involvement in the community, and you saved me a ton of time today with your responses in the forums :-)
And absolutely, if you run into bugs, let us know! Jamie is a bug fixing machine.
Lastly -- yeah, I'd stick with Ubuntu :-)
The only thing I'd suggest watching out for is that some web apps don't seem to handle PHP 5.3 that well yet. I personally am going to wait a bit before upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 until those kinks have been worked out.
The "Support" page (linked in the top menu on every page) covers the recommended ways to get help and report bugs, and our policy on what goes where.
Yes, bugs should always go into the ticket tracker, regardless of GPL or Pro. We need to be able to track when they're fixed.
Support for GPL happens in the forums.
It's a little clunky, I know...I've been working on a Drupal module that puts customers into a specific role, but the issue tracker doesn't allow us to restrict it to some types of issue for specific roles. So, even once I get paying customers flagged as paying customers so it's easy to see, we won't be able to prevent filing of issues by non-paying customers. Life is hard sometimes. ;-)
We've always just let it slide until a couple of days ago, when it began to be apparent that our available resources (three guys!) just weren't up to the task of supporting both our paying customers and our Open Source users (millions of them) this way. We're learning as we go. Anyway, when things happen in the forums, they happen for the world to see and benefit from (tickets are not indexed by search engines), and there are a few thousand members there who can help us field the simple questions.
Submitted by Locutus on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 03:58 Comment #5
@Andrey:
About involvement and bug reports: You're very welcome! Since the pricing of the Pro version is, at least currently and for my present requirements, unfortunately out of my league (while I'm sure not saying that your work isn't worth the price!), I'll gladly give some other contribution, where I can. I must say, Virtualmin GPL is, among the web hosting panels I tested (so far Plesk, Confixx, SysCP, Froxlor) the most feature-complete one, definitely among the free ones. At least three thumbs up for that!
Good point about the PHP version. Hadn't even noticed so far that Ubuntu 10 uses 5.3 meanwhile. Since I'm still in the testing phase (primarily using manually-managed Windows servers at the time), I'll check out "stepping back" to Ubuntu 8 as well and see if any of my websites work there and not under 10.
@Joe:
Concerning support requests, I can totally understand you! It's amazing that you're managing all this with just three people, especially considering that you're involving yourselves in the forums too. Another three thumbs up! :)