Best Linux Distro for Rails App?

After a bad experience trying to get even the simplest Rails application running at Lunarpages, I'm moving to Slicehost. Does anyone have an opinion as to which of their Linux distros to use for a fairly high-traffic Rails site? They offer CentOS, Debian 5, Fedora (10 to 12), Gentoo, Red Hat EL 5, and Ubuntu (8 and 9).

While we're on the subject, does anyone have any opinions as to the relative merits of Slicehost versus Amazon WS?

Thanks!

Robert wrote:


After a bad experience trying to get even the simplest Rails
application running at Lunarpages, I'm moving to Slicehost. Does
anyone have an opinion as to which of their Linux distros to use for a
fairly high-traffic Rails site? They offer CentOS, Debian 5, Fedora
(10 to 12), Gentoo, Red Hat EL 5, and Ubuntu (8 and 9).
While we're on the subject, does anyone have any opinions as to the
relative merits of Slicehost versus Amazon WS?
Thanks!

I would choose based on my own knowledge and experience with the various distributions. You will be managing it yourself so you will have to know how the system handles things and this range of systems have a variety of ways of configuring subsystems managing the details of a computer. Personally I would probably go with Ubuntu but that is because I have more documentation on that system and a fair amount of experience with the management of those systems.

The kernel and most of the utilities will be about the same but how system admin works is a big variable.

Hi Robert,

I use two separate distros at slicehost for my sites. I use CentOS and Ubuntu. I found their documentation and setup procedures for Ubuntu easiest to deal with and preferred Ubuntu because I like using apt-get versus yum. It really comes down to what distro you are more familiar with. CentOS is great for people that use RedHat and Ubuntu is great for people that aren't all that familiar with linux and need more step-by-step guides.

You can't go wrong with either though and slicehost is a great provider. If you don't like slicehost, you could go to heroku which has a beta cloud setup now where you can build your app in the cloud or import your app into the cloud. I'm still not happy with the beta app for heroku although it has a lot of promise in the future.