In a follow-up to my comparison Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu Edgy as desktop environments, I went on to test them with both a server task. How easy would it be set them up as Egroupware servers?

As will quickly become clear, Ubuntu was the clear winner at making installing Egroupware a fast and pleasant experience.

Mandriva did one thing differently that I preferred: It installed PHP5 for me by default, which is needed for SyncML connectivity. Ubuntu installed PHP4, but I found I was able to switch to using PHP5 packages fairly easily later.

Now for the numerous things that Ubuntu did better:

• Once the package installation was complete, Ubuntu provided me feedback telling me how to access Egroupware. Mandriva did not. Only by poking around was able to conclude that the egroupware would be located at http://localhost/egroupware/ for the Mandriva installation
• Ubuntu started the Apache web server for me as part of the installation. Mandriva did not. it did not even add it to the GUI "services" application. i had to know to run "/etc/init.d/httpd start" to start apache.
• Mandriva give me a barebones groupware install by default, while Ubuntu gave me a full-featured one. This is subjective, but when learning a new piece of software, it's easier for me to see all the options and then turn off the ones I don't like, so I prefer Ubuntu's approach here. Both provide options to pick and choose specific modules, if you
  already know what you want.
• The SyncML Egroupware extension requires PEAR. Mandriva has PEAR packages, but failed to record the dependency so that they were installed automatically when the "SyncML" package was selected.
• Remarkably, installing "postgresql" for Mandriva didn't actually install the database server. (This worked on Ubuntu). Apparently, another package, "postgresql-server" does that.
• Ubuntu seemed to detect that I wanted to use PostgreSQL and give me specific instructions on how to make the changes I needed to setup and access the Egroupware database. I literally needed to copy and paste just a few simple commands.

  The Mandriva Egroupware install did not help me set up any database, and provided no clues about how to do this.

I know how to setup a database so I could keep going with Mandriva, but at this point I had developed a strong enough opinion to end the comparison.

The Ubuntu process was so easy, I believe it could be completed by a non-technical person who was capable of following instructions and pasting instructions into a terminal.

The Mandriva process required noticeably more knowledge of how the system works, including the database.

I went with Ubuntu for this project.