ZoneMinder Forums

Good time of the day!
I understand that it may be a stupid question.. but.. I'm wondering which exactly OS is preferable for ZoneMinder? Where you Devs and QAs are testing your changes first? Which OS is most/more supported? Which platform has fewer bugs with ZoneMinder?

Many thanks!

My understanding:
- The savvy ones who know how to operate smart phones use Ubuntu.
- The ones who use flip phones seem to like CentOS.
- The ones who love to have their ZM APIs keep breaking seem to like Debian
- The ones who like to challenge the normal, because, well, why not seem to do ArchLinux and whatever else.

Okay, that was a joke. Almost.

But I do believe one mainstream dev uses ubuntu while the other uses CentOS. I use Ubuntu.

asker wrote: ↑Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:10 pm My understanding:
- The savvy ones who know how to operate smart phones use Ubuntu.
- The ones who use flip phones seem to like CentOS.
- The ones who love to have their ZM APIs keep breaking seem to like Debian
- The ones who like to challenge the normal, because, well, why not seem to do ArchLinux and whatever else.

Okay, that was a joke. Almost.

But I do believe one mainstream dev uses ubuntu while the other uses CentOS. I use Ubuntu.

Ah! Pain!! I use a flip phone and prefer Ubuntu!!! Am affronted and abacked, too

asker wrote: ↑Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:10 pm My understanding:
- The savvy ones who know how to operate smart phones use Ubuntu.
- The ones who use flip phones seem to like CentOS.
- The ones who love to have their ZM APIs keep breaking seem to like Debian
- The ones who like to challenge the normal, because, well, why not seem to do ArchLinux and whatever else.

Okay, that was a joke. Almost.

But I do believe one mainstream dev uses ubuntu while the other uses CentOS. I use Ubuntu.

Thanks for your answer! I'm asking because I want to find most preferable OS for ZoneMinder which will run out of the box with fewer issues. Like currently I have Debian Stretch and like out of the box I got different issues. I found solutions almost for all of them, but probably it will be better to find more appropriate/supported OS.

Are you saying that CentOS will work more stable with fewer bugs?

I have used Centos on my production server but went back to Ubuntu as I have more experience with it. Ubuntu 16.04 is very stable and I feel 18.04 may have some benifits for a new install. I set Ubuntu up via a net install and load only the basics. Think minimal... Also prefer Mariadb over MySQL.

Fortunately, I don't have serious problems with CentOS nor Ubuntu or Debian(like user experience). But usually different OS's has different headers (libs), scripts may work in a bit different way and OSes may have bugs by themselves. Like currently I have Debian stretch, and I see that for some reason ffmpeg loses connection with cameras (but they actually online), so, probably, it is incompatibility issues with Debian/FFmpeg. I'm just trying to avoid such situations

Ubuntu is probably the most tested. And 16.04 has the most testing so far. Use what you are most comfortable with, but you will get support from people who know your OS. I have servers on everything from Ubuntu to FreeBSD, with lots of things inbetween. I used 16.04 on my recent install, as the 18.04 instructions seemed to need some workarounds.

18.04 is working well with ZM 1.30.4. I had to modify the install package to fix the API to run under Bionic and that file is hosted on my Google drive/Onedrive account which is not ideal but works. The shell scripts work very well to get the system up and running with little fuss. Only NGINX setup has some issues I can not figure out but as long as Apache works well I am not worried about fixing NGINX.