What's the best Linux distribution for Tomcat?

August 1, 2005 6:16 AM

What's the best Linux distribution for deploying Tomcat applications?

I'm part of a small company, and we have two x86 towers on which we would like to install a Linux distribution and Tomcat.

My first choice for that Linux distribution was Fedora Core, because of its relatively recent package versions and good GUI administration tools. Unfortunately, Fedora now seems to ship with gcj, which means we end up with a mess of packages compiled for gcj (from Fedora) and ones ready to rock on Sun's JVM (from everywhere else). To boot, the JPackage version of Tomcat isn't terribly up-to-date.

So, should we slog through the Fortress of Fedora, or is there a distribution out there that will make it easier and faster (and less frustrating) to get Sun's JDK + Tomcat up-and-running?

posted by esd to computers & internet (2 comments total)

you can just uncompress the Tomcat download to a directory and run it directly from there, no additional setup necessary. Any linux distro with a working JRE should suffice.

If you are going to be changing the settings (maybe setting up a passthrough from Apache), you probably don't want the package system to do something you're not aware of anyway.
posted by sandking at 10:09 AM on August 1, 2005

I'm a BSD advocate, so I'd push you towards http://www.freebsd.org/java/install.html, first of all, but I realize this isn't always an option (if you really want to get tricky, NetBSD *should* support it, but a much older version is on the pkgsrc tree)

If you want to stick with linux, my distribution of choice is Debian. I don't like their new installer, so I always install via a 3.0 release CD & distupgrade up. Debian's apt tree isn't great if you're needing cutting edge software, but the general idea is, debian stable is *stable.* The stuff in there has been tested and tested and it works.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:22 AM on August 1, 2005