While trying to upgrade postgresql on my Linode virtual host, I managed to accidentally uninstall apache and php thanks to yums dependency management. Needless to say, all of my websites went down. I was tired of centoses locked in time software versioning and the hoops that were needed to add another software repository to get newer versions of software.

It was time to dump centos and yum.

The next decision was what linux flavor to replace it with. The two candidates were debian and its descendant ubuntu. Debian was chosen because I read here that ubuntu locked you into specific software versions just like centos. Using the aptitude package manager is heaps better than yum because you don’t have to memorize arcane command line options.

It took 2 days to get everything running again.

My newest site, outdoormichigan.org, which uses postgresql is up and running. It needs postgres with its geography functions supplied by postgis.