[Solved] Which desktop for a Mageia Server?

[NickC]

Can anyone suggest which desktop is leanest to use on a Mageia Storage server (Raid storage & iSCSI target)? Preferably something complete that doesn't have any important functionality missing but without unnecessary bells and whistles.

[doktor5000]

What does important functionality mean to you? Good window manager, taskbar ... ?
You may want to check my comment on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8475

You can easily get away with one of those window managers, say fluxbox or openbox. Depends what you actually want.

[NickC]

For the sake of a small amount of overhead I don't want to use a cut-down desktop and find something important is missing like a fully functioning disk & RAID manager. Equally I don't want to install loads of bloat if it is not necessary.

Once configured and running I would expect this to run most of the time in text mode with startx graphics mode only being loaded when I need to look at something.

[doktor5000]

You still didn't answer the question. What does cut-down mean to you?
And as none of the desktop environments themselves provides something like a "fully functioning disk & RAID manager" that would rule all all of the desktops. GNOME provides gnome-disks, gparted and diskdrake are available in repositories and for some desktops preinstalled. But none of them provides that functionality.

In any case, you can run any X application under any desktop, not sure what your RAID manager has to do with the desktop choice.

[NickC]

To me cut-down means not having any office type applications or such like but including things like disk manager, gparted, diskdrake etc.

Basically all the tools that might be needed on a server with none of the workstation bloat.

[NickC]

For the moment I have gone with a minimal gnome workstation. It is only going to be used rarely anyway.

[doktor5000]

Huh? You can install libreoffice, calligra or abiword or whatever you want to use under every desktop environment. Same for disk managers etc.
How does that relate to the choice of the desktop environment?

Anyways, please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks

[wintpe]

personally, my preference is to use mageia for what its best at, ie a desktop.

thats not meant to be a critique of mageia whatsoever, I for one promote its use widely.

But working in an organisation that uses linux, (aprox 8000 servers), a centos/redhat/scientific distro
is more suited to a server role.

now that centos 7 is out, it also is much like mageia, versions wise.

also, since its a server presumably you dont want to be doing major version upgrades every year
just to keep errata fixes comming, like you do with mageia, fedora, etc.

centos/redhat/scientifics lifetime, is 5-10 years

and frankly you dont need any of what you refer to as bloat, we do not install desktop
or X based software on any of ours unless its a dependency of something we install.

we certainly dont make it run as a service.

regards peter

[NickC]

Hi Peter, thanks for you informed comments on the subject. I did in the end decide to go with CentOS 7 for this server, as you have pointed out Mageia is just too workstation oriented to be particularly suitable for server use.

Just noticed your location, I am not too far away in Romford.