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ANSWERED: See below, but feel free to add comments, or give your own answer too.

QUESTION/PROBLEM:

CentOS is a project requirement, and I'm trying to roll out a Drupal build asap, so I can focus on building out Drupal; which doesn't care what distro of Linux (or win) it's on. Problem is all the "good" guides are for ubuntu, and all the guides I've found for CentOS are not as good as the ubuntu ones. So... when I finally do the CentOS build, what are the differences "likely" going to be? (for example: package install CMDs, package availability/location, directories, etc.)

THANK YOU!!

Just in case anyone is interested, these are the three pretty good "how to guides" I found:

And one on configs to make LAMP a little more lightweight:

Community
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blunders
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  • This is a pretty good walkthrough: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-centos-5.3-x86_64-ispconfig-3. If you don't use ISPConfig then just skip the configurations that are specific to it. Since you are familiar with Ubuntu, you may wish to compare to their Ubuntu walkthrough to get a better idea of what you can skip. – daemonofchaos Oct 13 '10 at 04:19

2 Answers2

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The biggest differences you'll see are package manager, and package age.

Configuration files for apache, mysql/postgresql, php, etc are going to be in pretty much the same place, and as easy to find in either distro. There isn't crazy-customization in either ubuntu/debian or CentOS's config files for these things.

What will be different..

Package managers: Ubuntu & Debian use apt-get and dpkg. CentOS/RHEL uses yum and rpm.

Package age: Ubuntu is going to have the newest packages. Risk averse sysadmins often avoid it for that reason.

CentOS/RHEL has older, but very solid packages. Never bleeding edge, but rarely moldy.

Debian is going to have really old packages. Risk averse sysadmins often love it, because it's really, really, stable.

Even if the ubuntu tutorials will be for a different version of a package your using, you should still be able to follow it, just keeping in mind to replace "apt-get install php" with "yum install php", and things like that.

Kyle__
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Also, be aware that Debian/Ubuntu handle virtual host configurations via the sites-available/sites-enabled directories. They handle modules in the same way (modules-available/modules-enabled).

Red Hat-based distributions like CentOS and Fedora toss most of the module definitions into the main httpd.conf and they add in some extras into the conf.d/ directory. Managing the organization of the virtual hosts is completely up to you.

Also, Red Hat-base distributions call apache "httpd". Debian/Ubuntu call it "apache2". This can sometimes be an annoyance if you have to work with both distributions regularly as you have to remember what apache is called on each server. ;-)

majorhayden
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