“We took a close look at several commercial Linux distros
targeted towards stand-alone, enterprise server installations to
assess whether companies selling this packaged open source code are
coupling it with the tools and services necessary for enterprise
server use. Several organizations declined to participate, either
because they “weren’t ready yet” or because they target small
server, OEM or desktop environments with their distributions.”
“Of the distros tested, we have no qualms recommending
either Caldera OpenLinux eServer 2.3 or Red Hat Deluxe 6.2 to an
organization that has not yet used Linux in an enterprise server
context. Both products are well aware of their environments,
with a slight edge to Caldera eServer’s configuration sensing
capabilities. Caldera eServer further gained our confidence – and
the Network World Blue Ribbon award – by offering a lot of
installation time network alternatives for Samba and NetWare. The
TurboLinux Server 6.0, however, gets kudos for offering symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) kernels that no other distro tested in this
review did.”
“SuSE Linux 6.4 had weak support practices for its retail
package, but otherwise is a worthy competitor. Newcomer Storm
Linux 2000 Deluxe, like SuSE, has great new-user support but wasn’t
quite focused toward enterprise server use.”