Last update 15-Mar-2000

Linux Distributions.

Linux is available in several distributions, they all have advantages and disadvantages for bbs use. Which distribution to pick is very personal. You should also consider the fact if the bbs machine is the same machine on which you do your daily work on or if you use a seperate system for the bbs. I will describe the distributions below for use on dedicated bbs computers, that means you don't do daily work on them and don't use them to play games. Most important is that this is my personal view.

I tested MBSE BBS on Slackware 3.2 and Slackware 4.0. If you use a Slackware CD from Walnut Creek then there is a small installation manual included. Minimal installation you need (84 MBytes): 

A series:	aaa_base aoutlibs bash bin bsdlpr bzip2 cpio devs e2fsbn 
		elflibs elvis etc fileutils find fsmods gpm glibc1 glibc2
		grep gzip hdsetup ldso less lilo loadlin minicom modules
		modutils procps sysklogd sysvinit sh_utils shadow tar
		txtutils util zoneinfo
		Depending on your hardware you may need: kbd pciutils pcmcia
		pnp, and ide or scsi with scsimods.
AP series:	apsfilt diff groff manpages mc mt_st
D series:	automake binutils bison byacc flex gcc gdb gmake libc m4
K series:	linuxinc
N series:	apache bind elm inn lynx mailx netmods ppp procmail sendmail
		smailcfg tcpip1 tcpip2 tin uucp
This will give you enough to install and compile the bbs and run a webserver on it. Not included is the mgetty package. Also no graphic utilities are installed.

I write this as if these are the same which isn't true of course. From MBSE BBS's point of view they are almost the same, so that's why I treat them as the same distributions. For people with little Linux experience these distributions are a good choice if you can spare the diskspace. I haven't found a simple dedicated setup for the bbs, so the safest way is to install allmost everything, which is quite simple. This will cost you about 1200 Megs. Maybe that someone more experienced with these distro's can give more details on how to build a small server. Please note that from RedHat 6.1 and up the startup script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/mbsed) is different than before. Maybe this is needed for Mandrake 6.1 and up too.

I made some adjustments to the installation script from information I got from a SuSe user. I have no information if these changes do work.

The installation works on a Debian 2.1 distribution without any problems. How to build an optimized Debian system is not tested by me.

I don't have the diskspace for all kinds of Linux distributions to install at the same time, with the current size of Linux, I only have 2 versions installed. Also, I don't buy every new distro that's available. If you have a problem with that, just send me the new distro to test and the needed harddisk space (SCSI).

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