Most marketable LAMP distro?

I'm going to build a new VM to lab some LAMP stuff, and I'd like to select the distro that'll give me experience most applicable to a typical real-world scenario. I'm looking for a distro that'll start me down the road to employment-relevant knowledge and certs. Free only, please.

Ideas?

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Comments

santaowns

Centos is most like Redhat, which is used in the majority of bigger enterprise environments, and so is SuSe Debian and I am seeing Mint a lot now. I say Centos because Redhat is the certification to get for Linux. Where you will find differences is the mail and web services. Apache etc etc. Create at least two to three variants.

pram

RHEL and any of its derivatives (centos, scientific, oracle)

Why would anyone run Mint on a server

ratbuddy

Well, I set up CentOS and Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu took about 10 minutes. CentOS took over an hour. There were so many more things to consider on CentOS! Firewall on by default, tight default phpmyadmin config, etc etc. Finally figured it all out, and now I have two more playgrounds

TLeTourneau

+1 on CentOS, besides its compatibility with RHEL for learning it is widely used for web hosting systems. As also mentioned Scientific and Oracle are also good choices.

W Stewart

I work in a web hosting company and mostly work with rhel centos and ubuntu server for dedicated customers. A lot of our internal servers are ubuntu server as well. It seems to be gaining in market share.

slotzero

I agree with CentOS and Ubuntu Server. Throw plain old Debian in there, as well as BSD if you have time. BSD is surprisingly popular out on teh internets.

In the commercial environments I have worked in, RHEL, CentOS, and Sun/Oracle have been king.

Also along with your normal LAMP stack, if you can play with and learn about Tomcat you'll have a leg up on the competition, in my opinion.

W Stewart

Yeah forgot BSD as well. We've got some customers running OpenBSD firewalls. It's not really LAMP though. I guess it would be BAMP?