Choosing a distro for Zimbra

[TechSupp]

Sorry to jump onto this thread but if I decided to set up Zimbra in school what Linux would people suggest is best to install first, Red Hat, Unbutu, suze ?

 

or

 

Does anyone know if its available as a vmware virtual package ready to run. I found one on vmware but it seems to be the paid version :-(

[kestrel1]

I would go for Ubuntu, been the best Linux experience I have had so far. There is a server version available, if you want a server setup.

[webman]

A few of us on here use Zimbra - one I know of uses Ubuntu, another uses CentOS (free version of RedHat). We're testing (and plan to use) Ubuntu too.

[CyberNerd]

another uses CentOS

ooh, thats me. I've had no problem with Centos and its a great enterprise class OS. Personally I find ubuntu better for the cutting edge stuff - and Ubuntu is a lot better on the desktop. It is probably a matter of perception, but I just get the feeling that Centos/RHEL is better tested for mission critical appliances, I don't worry so much that a feature of Centos will get dropped in a later version - but Ubuntu is much more community driven and using things from universe/multiverse means there is no guarantee (example: I had a home machine suddenly not boot after Ubuntu dropped EVMS). Centos gives a good migration path to supported RHEL. Payed support is available from canonical for Ubuntu server. Probably you'll just be using zimbra as an appliance, so turn off the fancy repos, install a base system and either will be fine Wink The install is dead easy so it shouldn't take long to put a virtual server together (use LVM to take advantage of lvm snapshots).

 

The main thing is that zimbra support whatever you choose.

[Joedetic]

There was talk on a forum a while back of porting it to FreeBSD (Which isn't Linux but a BSD variant). I don't know if anything came of this though. Where servers are concerned I feel a lot more at home with FreeBSD than something like Ubuntu these days for some reason.

[Geoff]

I'm running Zimbra in anger on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

[TechSupp]

All I want to do is to run Zimbra for a couple of classes for interna only email on the network. Should I go for Ubuntu Serer or Desktop edition?

[webman]

Server. No point wasting resources on the GUI

[Joedetic]

Exactly what webman said. CLI is always best

[TechSupp]

Thanks

[ITWombat]

Exactly what webman said. CLI is always best

 

While it is a good idea to become familiar with the command line in the long term, it might be overkill here if the OP just needs a quick and dirty demo server.

 

For the kind of load they'd be running a GUI wouldn't be that much of an overhead. Anyway, you'd still have gnome-terminal for all the fiddly bits.

 

You could also try alonebfg's Ubuntu Server with Webmin, which me a good compromise