New distro question

Jarod Wilson jarod at wilsonet.com
Wed Apr 9 09:36:03 EDT 2008


On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 09:13 -0400, Tom Buskey wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com>
> wrote:
>         On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 20:50 -0400, Frank DiPrete wrote:
>         >
>         > Ben Scott wrote:
>         > > On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Frank DiPrete
>         <fdiprete at comcast.net> wrote:
>         > >>  MIS would be just as comfy with fedora as with RH. From
>         a support and
>         > >>  admin point of view it's pretty much the same.
>         > >
>         > >   Speaking as a professional MIS weenie, I can say that
>         the main thing
>         > > that annoys about Fedora is their release cycle.  Having
>         to do a major
>         > > upgrade to my OS every year, or living without security
>         updates, isn't
>         > > a choice I relish.
>         > >
>         
>         > yes, the release cycle for fedora is a bit fierce.
>         
>         
>         But that's the fun part. :)
> 
> There's the rub for us MIS types.  Fedora works great but after 2
> years, the updates go away if you don't keep upgrading.  A repo might
> not exist for a 2 year old release if something needs to be added that
> wasn't on the dist. CD.

Yeah, I know. I meant to include an explicit "but of course, this sucks
for you MIS types" in there, but apparently forgot it.

> For my desktops, I probably want the latest & greatest tools.  For my
> servers, I just want it to work and be secure.

And if I were in a position where I was maintaining more than just my
own, singular, personal server, I probably *would* go RHEL instead of
Fedora. (Actually, that *is* what I did in a prior life).

> IMO this release cycle is one of the major differences between Linux
> and Solaris.
> I just ran a 1995 copy of traceroute from SunOS (not Solaris)  on a
> stock Solaris 10 box.  That'd be Redhat 2.0 era?

Yeah, I think we might still have compatibility with RHL7.x apps on
RHEL5, but nothing quite that far back...

> On the otherhand, each update of an app or the kernel brings bug,
> speed and security fixes and might even add features that are desired.
> Solaris' awk/tar/etc is bug for bug compatible with the 1995 version.
> 
> Pros and cons each way

Indeed.



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com



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