Total Newbie Question

[markdrabble]

I am looking at alternative email solutions for use in a school I work at and scalix seem to be an ideal choice, but before I go ahead and jump in with both feet I have a question to ask.

I am totally new to linux and scalix, which version of linux would I be best installing. I need a version that will integrate into Active Directory (Win2k3).

I'm not after a war on this version is better that version. I just need a version that that is easy to install (for a total newbie) and one that will do the job.

Many thanks

[kanderson]

My Personal preference is Suse.

If you're a total newbie, and distro doesn't matter, then choose Red Hat. It's much more common in North America. It will be easier for you to find support for it when you google for help. Scalix seems slightly closer to RH than Suse, though they do support both (seems, that may not be the case internally, but it seems so from the outside).

Overall, I'd say that as long as you choose either Suse or Red Hat, you're making a good choice. I know Ubuntu has great mind share right now, as did Gentoo before it, but the reality is the community distros are moving targets, and it would be a mistake to tie yourself to one.

[florian]

Also, if you can spend a couple hundred Dollars per year, your best bet is to go with one of the Enterprise Distros (Novel/SuSE SLES or RHEL). Not only will this give you a formal support contract, but they will also give you structured updates and patches, not too much of any, etc, in case of doubt being more conservative.

The more community oriented distros like suse 10.1 or Fedora Core, etc., will give you lots of material (packages) to work with, however, for a dedicated mail server, that's probably not really needed.

As for active directory integration, the question is, what do you want to do. If this is only to manage your Scalix eMail users, distro doesn't matter - however you'll need Scalix Small Business edition as this contains a proper AD plugin. If you want full integration of the Distro, you might want to have a look at the Xandros server which provides exactly this and also a very Window-like admin experience. Xandros server contains Scalix Server Enterprise Edition for 5 premium and unlimited standard users by default (even gets installed almost automatically) and can then be extended by further user packs.

Cheers,
Florian.

[markdrabble]

Many thanks for the replies.

Florian you seemed to answer all my questions and made me think.

Full AD integration isnt really needed as I just wanted to be able to manage the mail account via AD, but this isnt essential as they could be done at the server.

I have very little budget and to be able to use anything other than the system that has been forced upon us by education bosses will be a bonus.

I downloaded suse enterprise server 10 and when I tried to install scalix, scalix told me it could not run on this platform.

As I said before I am a total newbie to linux so any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

[florian]

ouch... ok... sorry, so which scalix version did you download? SLES10 is supported from Scalix 11 onwards, which is currently in Beta. I was probably silently assuming that you were trying on the Scalix 11 version as the final release will be coming out pretty soon, in December....... Scalix 10 supports SuSE 10.0 OSS, SLES9, Fedora Core 4 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4. Scalix 11 supports SuSE 10.1, SLES9, SLES10, Fedora Core 5 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4.

Cheers,
Florian.

[markdrabble]

Thanks florian, it would of helped if I actually read the platform information, lol

So...downloading scalix 11

Thanks