rickstoc wrote on Monday, August 12, 2013:
Summary:
Mageia-3 is an RPM Distro, similar to CentOS or Red Hat - but more manageable, and built with more recent software Versions.
Background:
This RPM-based Distro forked from ‘Mandriva’ a couple of years ago. This recent Release is from May, 2013. It provides a similar “Control Center”, called “MCC”, for managment of daemon Services, software, users, and so on. IMO Much more friendly and manageable than Centos (also RPM-based), or Ubuntu. (You don’t need to know the names of Services in advance of controlling them, it lists ALL of them for you.) The only disadvantage which I see is the lack of ‘LTS’ Release; Mageia-3 is supported until Late 2014. But unlike Fedora, your system isn’t being subjected to bleeding edge sofware manangement - and the Upgrades (Mageia-2 to Mageia3, for example) are very well tested and smooth. In contrast to fedup. And unlike CentOS/Red Hat/Ubuntu, you get ‘MCC’.
The Advantages:
(1) There is exactly one prerequisite to install OpenEMR: The package “task-lamp” brings in everything you need. It does include several ‘Developer oriented’ RPM packages which you might not want on a Production Server. You can use the list of packages whcih is included by 'task-lamp to choose a smaller subset, if you like. Or, you can disable Services which were installed, but not needed.
(2) Maria-DB replaces now-proprietized MySQL, and appears to be completely sufficient for OpenEMR. The Red/Hat CentOS installation code works perfectly, AFAICT. If you prefer to use Open Software, guaranteed Open in the future, this is a nice change.
(3) It’s like CentOS, but a much more modern system - with all the advantages which the more recent software content provides. (It does, however, require the OpenEMR patch for PHP > 5.4, or a recent OpenEMR build). Note: The web root is /var/www/html , not var/www.