recommendations for a lightweight linux distribution for a test server

Posted by Jack on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jack
Published on 2010-12-15T21:14:26Z Indexed on 2011/01/16 16:54 UTC
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operating-system

I'm planning on setting up a test server to experiment with some application servers (tomcat/jboss/...) and with some portals. Now the machine I've set aside for this is lightweight CPU/GPU wise(Atom D510, 4 gigabyte ram, 500 GiB hdd, onboard GPU).

But it should suffice for most things, I'm more interested in the stability of JBoss/Tomcat for my purposes than the stability.

However I'm having a bit of trouble picking an appropriate distribution size/performance/setup time wise/security wise since it seems I can't sneeze without another distribution popping up.

I've been thinking about going for Fedora since I've read that that distribution has been optimized for Atom, but I'm not really familiar with it.

My experience with Linux has mostly been limited to Ubuntu and some tinkering with puppylinux.

I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty using the command line.

I'm not planning on starting a discussion per se, mostly the pros/cons that people have encountered with some distributions

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