CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I will hopefully have the chance to take an old server that nobody's using right now and set it up for CiviCRM. The server has no operating system installed right now. I have no plans to use the server for anything except CiviCRM (with Drupal installed just for use with CiviCRM). Our organization will be moving to a Drupal based web site hosted by an outside company but that won't happen for a number of months. In the mean time I'd like to be testing and/or using CiviCRM live on the web.

I know almost nothing about the pro's and con's of running windows or linux on the machine and the particular versions of each. I'm much more comfortable with windows in general but I've never actually worked with windows server operating systems. From my very brief experience with Linux i'd expect it to be less likely to slow down due to shortages of memory or processor speed, but I imagine there are other details I should consider.

What OS would you recommend for the server, and why?

In my opinion, it is better to use the operating system which you are comfortable with. Of course Linux is much better for any AMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP) based applications and that is why majority of people use Linux.

If you are going to learn Microsoft Server you should better go for Linux. Go for Microsoft only if you know it already.

Another vote for Ubuntu.