Linux "equivalent" to freebsd

[Rick Apichairuk]

>Hi,
 
>Sorry this question is a little off-topic...
 
>We've been using Freebsd for many years and all of our servers are running
freebsd.
 
>The only thing that is a pain with freebsd, is poor commercial support :(
 
>We are running in a situation where a customer needs Zend platform 3
>(http://www.zend.com/products/zend_platform) which won't be available for
>freebsd until the end of the year...
 
>So I will need to setup a machine with linux.
 
>I don't know much about linux distributions, could someone recommend one to
>me please.
 
>We are looking for a platform that will support amd64 extensions, will act
>as a console only server and that has a good way to install ports and
>upgrade. We want something secure and stable. We don't wanna go with Redhat
>or any commercial distribution.
 
>I really like the cvsup/make install/portupgrade way of dealing with
>software installation and updates and I am looking for something equivalent
>on a linux distribution.
 
>Could you recommend a distribution you are using in production, we've check
>ubuntu, fedora and Debian, but I wonder what freebsd users recommend...
 
>Thanks 
 
I recommend Gentoo or Slackware. I feel that these are most similar to FreeBSD
in organization, configuration and third party software management. Personally,
I use Gentoo when I can't use FreeBSD. With Gentoo, you can compile everything
to be optimized for your specific processor if you want to do so.
 
Best Regards,
 
Rick Apichairuk