Real world Ubuntu server experience

Despite being a FreeBSD and Solaris advocate, I always give a shot to major Linux distros. My friends will be also surprised to know that I have a secret Linux server, running Ubuntu Server to test Linux specific applications. I always enjoy using apt-get and aptitude for package management and the way it handles dependencies. In fact, the way Debian/Ubuntu handles packages is putting RPM far behind.

I was loving Ubuntu until someone asked my to setup Tomcat which was a complete failure.
I did a simple sudo aptitude install tomcat5 and everything installed and Tomcat started momentarily. While testing the server, I realized it is taking too long to run application. Using top I figured out Java process was taking 100% of my CPU. I did everything I know and I couldn’t fix the issue. So I decided to give it a try on my FreeBSD dev box and see if it shows the same behavior.
Installing on FreeBSD was as easy as running portupgrade -r tomcat. Everything went smoothly (except manually downloading Java binaries which is always a PITA). Then I started tomcat server and put applications in appropriate directories and “that’s all folks”. You can guess everything worked just fine without any glitches.
So I decided to stay with FreeBSD for server stuff and keep the Ubuntu to play and see what Linux people are doing.

update 1: I did not provide enough information about my setup. I was running Dapper Drake + Kaffe. To me, it is highly unlikely that Java is totally broken in this stable release. So perhaps there was something wrong with my setup. But “Kafe” is what aptitude suggested when I was installing “Tomcat”. So I thought this setup should be fine.

update 2: My blog commenting system was totally messed up. It should be working now. Thanks to Masoud for pointing this out.