Help Testing Zimbra with Red Hat Enterprise

[jherington]

Hello,

I am new to Linux and will be running Zimbra inside vmware on top of a new Dell 32bit workstation (2Gb Ram) WindowsXP SP2 OS. My question is regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux; as I look at the redhat.com site I see two products: Server and Desktop. The desktop retails for ~$80 and the server for ~$1400.

Question - Can I use the Desktop version to fully test Zimbra to include the MTA in the above environment?

Question - Is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 the same as "RHEL" as refered to in many posts on this site? And if so, in many posts there seems to be the suggestion that this is a free product? Am I missing something here?

Question - Regarding the Zimbra Binaries open source downloads; apart from not being able to recompile for a differnet Linux distribution should I be able to work with all the SOAP and UI elements of Zimbra to customize for our existing cms/communitee environment (which is currently solely running under IIS)?

Question - If the above Red Hat Enterprise Linux is in fact NOT free then could you point me to a link where I can download the correct Fedora version. (I see version 6,7,8 but it would appear Zimbra only supports 5?). I went to Fedora mirrors page but left completely confused as to which product to download (don't have bit torrent).

Question - If Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is in fact NOT free then as a newbie would I/should I have a better/easier installation with Fedora or Ubuntu (and again for Ubuntu do I download the Desktop or Server version?).

Thanks and sorry for my lame newbei questions but this C# .Net guy is eady and willing to jump into Linux with Zimbra as my first plung!

[phoenix]

Welcome to the forums.

If this is for the OSS version then use a copy of CentOS5 inside VMware, it's binary compatible with RHEL and it's free. You'll also find details of installing on CentOS5 in this thread.

[jherington]

Thanks for that info,

Eventually we will move to a stand-alone server and at that point, can I use the Desktop version of the Ubuntu or Red Hat Entp or must I use the server version?

Is RHEL the same as the product sold at redhat.com?

[phoenix]

You should use the Server Versions of the products, there are extra packages that are needed for Zimbra and aren't (normally) used/installed in the desktop version. Yes, RHEL is the same as the one from Red Hat - it's just an abbreviation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it saves typing that every time.