Best OS for an old PE2550?

[Sam Flory]

Brian Hughes wrote:
> New guy here,
> 
> I'm a broadcast engineer at Napa Valley College; supporting the  
> broadcast engineering program.  We've just received a few PowerEdge  
> 2550s, dual Pentium III 1GHz 1GB with PERC 3/Di controller.  We get a  
> lot of donations, some useful, some not so much.  We also received  
> about 1.5 TB of fibre channel storage in the form of many SGI  
> PowerVault (Clariion FC5400) units, just wish I knew what to do with  
> them.
> 
> But about the PE2550s, we'd like to use one of these for a light-duty  
> webserver, the other for a training test-bed for networking and such  
> for students.  We'd like to run the usual for the webserver, PHP,  
> Apache, MySQL, etc.
> 
> My question is what is the best and latest OS that will run on these  
> units?

  With linux there rarely is any need to run older releases.  Unless you
have fairly rare hardware once it works it stays working.  Unlike
windows newer releases don't have greater hardware needs.  Unless you
are talking desktops where default eye candy, and features in many
distros sucks down a lot of memory and cpu.  (Of course there are modern
distros like puppy linux design for older under powered systems.)  My
advice is to go with the latest release of the linux distro you prefer.
 Also with dell hardware I'd advise stay with a distro with a large
customer base of corporate customers (ie dell users).  Both Red Hat, and
Suse have been supporting Dell server hardware for a long time.  Ubunutu
is a bit of a new comer, but benefits from Red Hat, and Suse kernel
work.  Honestly 2550s are old enough, and common enough that any modern
distro should just work.

Advice-
- RHEL 4.5 (RHEL 4  release 5) Good solid, stable, should just work.
- RHEL 5 New, and shiny, with lots of cool features. Personally for
mission critical stuff I generally wait for the 1st update release.
(Note if you have an active RHEL 4 contract you can download the latest
release 4.5, or 5.0.)

-Centos 4.5/5.0 A free rebranded RHEL.  Good community support.

-SLES Suse enterprise Linux 10 SP1 Much newer than RHEL 4, but it's had
at least one SP release to things out.  I find Suse's yast to be a
better tool for confiration.
-Open Suse 10.2 Generally intended for developers, but includes all the
latest server utils.  Just be careful what you select when you install.
Suse will happily install 10G of everything linuxish, and include the
kitchen sink.  Free download.

-Ubuntu The new hotness for desktop linux, but includes a server
release.  It's built on debian which many old hands consider the best
linux server distro.  (Of course they are wrong in my IMNSHO;-)