# The best open source OS for Rails? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [February 28, 2006, 12:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/the-best-open-source-os-for-rails/74453 "2006-02-28T00:04:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/davidstokar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2006, 12:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/the-best-open-source-os-for-rails/74453/1 "2006-02-28T00:04:20Z")
I’m rigging up some virtual machines in VMware to test out a new production configuration. Up till now I’ve been using Ubuntu Breezy Server distribution pre- installed on dedicated boxes by the hosting company, but in this scenario I am free to choose whatever OS I want. I’ve had some problems with Ubuntu Breezy (likes to call fastgi - fcgid etc.) and a low (1.8.2?) pre-packaged version of Ruby. What do people suggest for OS? Any of the Signals feel like sharing the OS their apps run on? 🙂 David S. w: [http://davidsmalley.com/blog](http://davidsmalley.com/blog) ---
**Author:** ![davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/davidstokar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2006, 1:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/the-best-open-source-os-for-rails/74453/2 "2006-02-28T01:30:57Z")
Pretty sure most of the developers are using Macs - not 100% sure, but that’s certainly the impression I’ve had to date. As far as FOSS goes, although I personally would recommend Gentoo or Debian Linux, I’d go with whatever you’ve got the most sysadmin expertise in. If you’ve got a FreeBSD sysadmin guy who knows his stuff, use FreeBSD. There’s lots of Rails production systems running on Macs. If it’s Windows, umm, well, I guess you could do that also, but you want FOSS so I guess you’re probably choosing between \*BSD and various flavours of Linux. Really, I don’t think there’s much to choose between any of the OS variants as a Rails hosting platform; I like Gentoo because I’m familiar with it and it consumes the least amount of my time per box to keep it secure and current. Other people like Debian for pretty much the same reason - they’re more expert than me with Debian, and I’m possibly more expert with Gentoo. Have you got a compelling reason to move away from Ubuntu? You’ve found a few challenges with it, but you’ve presumably worked around those problems to some extent and already invested something in it to date as a Rails platform, so I’d put it at the top of the list unless you’re already more expert with something else. All platforms have limitations; at least you know what they are with Ubuntu already. Regards Dave M. ---
**Author:** ![davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/davidstokar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2006, 1:55am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/the-best-open-source-os-for-rails/74453/3 "2006-02-28T01:55:37Z")
> What do people suggest for OS? FreeBSD 6 It has the best Rails support with the rubygem-rails port and integrated dependencies. You get Rails with several native DB-bindings, Lighttpd+FastCGI, and memcache-client up and running with two or three commands. Installing Rails 1.0 / Ruby 1.8.4 on FreeBSD: # cd /usr/ports/www/rubygem-rails # make install clean And you can choose support for all the above from a ncurses menu. After that it will compile everything for you and you’re done. Greets, Jonathan ---
**Author:** ![davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@davidstokar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/davidstokar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2006, 8:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/the-best-open-source-os-for-rails/74453/4 "2006-02-28T08:43:59Z")
David M. wrote: > Have you got a compelling reason to move away from Ubuntu? You’ve > found a few challenges with it, but you’ve presumably worked around > those problems to some extent and already invested something in it to > date as a Rails platform, so I’d put it at the top of the list unless > you’re already more expert with something else. All platforms have > limitations; at least you know what they are with Ubuntu already. I’ve been using Debian for almost 10 years, and Ubuntu is the first thing that has come along that I have found to be a convincing alternative. Keep in mind that a new Ubuntu release is coming out soon (something that we haven’t done so well in Debian as of late), so perhaps that will have improved Ruby and Rails support. If you want to be sure, you could always give them a hand and test the betas:-) – David N. Welton - [David N. Welton](http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/) Linux, Open Source Consulting - [http://www.dedasys.com/](http://www.dedasys.com/)