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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Debian and Arch are my two favorite Linux distributions. If only Debian distributed a version compiled for an i686 also. I know it probably wont make a huge difference for most programs. But it niggles at my sensibilities that I am not using the architecture to its full. Arch is pretty awesome in that field, but I would be wary of running it on production servers. For me Debian testing has been the best compromise, and I have never faced stability issues with that.

Edit: corrected by removing "and x86-64"

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> If only Debian also distributed a version compiled for an i686 and x86-64. I know it probably wont make a huge difference for most programs. But it niggles at my sensibilities that I am not using the architecture to its full.

Um, I think they do have a x64 version...

    $ cat /etc/debian_version 
    6.0

    $ file /bin/bash
    /bin/bash: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically link
    ed (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped

    $ file /lib/libc-2.11.2.so 
    /lib/libc-2.11.2.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dyn
    amically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped

You lucky 64-bit people:

  * cat /etc/debian_version
  6.0
  * file /bin/bash
  /bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped
  * file /lib/libc-2.11.2.so 
 /lib/libc-2.11.2.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped
  * grep name /proc/cpuinfo 
  model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
  *

This used to bother me, but now that a Pentium 4 seems nearly as archaic as an 80386, I guess it's not so much of an issue.

Oops my bad. I know, 'cause I am running one. What the hell was I thinking.

I've always used Debian on my servers, but like you, I also really like Arch Linux. So last year, I decided just to see what it would be like to run an Arch server. I installed it on a VPS using kernel26-lts, and besides having to do some diffs between new and old configs when updating packages, it really hasn't been that bad. I've never had the problem where a program would be completely broken when updating.

Only since last month, Arch includes glibc 2.12.2. Unfortunately, my VPS host only gives a CentOS 5.4 recovery image using kernel 2.6.18, meaning that since the newer glibc requires kernel 2.6.27, I'm unable to chroot into my install if I ever needed to.

Debian and Arch are my favorite too. I just wish Debian had a bit shorter release cycle. But it's a trade off, longer release cycle == stable release.

I use Arch on my workstations. They don't need as stable a platform as my server. And any downtime would be minimal and easy to schedule around.

Until this weekend I was also using Debian on my servers and Arch on my workstation. Recently I've started to manage my servers with Puppet. Since Puppet don't support pacman, I installed Squeeze on my workstation and I'm now managing it with Puppet. I might have to follow testing on my workstation, but the advantage of sharing parts of the configuration with my servers has been huge.

I'm sure I read an article where the author used git as a configuration management tool.

Now that would be fun.

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