[clue-tech] Linux on a Dell PowerEdge 2300?

[Greg Knaddison]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 07:02:48 -0800 (PST), William <bkimball1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> White Box seems to be dead.  An announcement on their homepage essentially says "we're not working
> on this any more, go get CentOS instead."  

I don't see any such comment.  WhiteBox is a project of 1 guy working
for 1 library.  He shares his RPMs when he feels like it.  Sometimes
he has a life and gets behind on making them, but security updates are
more likely to come quickly.  If you don't know much about the
project, you shouldn't go around saying stuff like "it's dead."  There
are many people who are very happy with the way that John runs
WhiteBox.  I am personally conflicted about his model and the CentOS
model and haven't entirely decided which one to stick with.

> So, I did.  It was a wonderful thing!  CentOS installed
> flawlessly on the first go (Server install, only).  Unfortunately, it seems the forums at the
> CentOS forum are relatively unresponsive.  I clicked around, and it looks like people tend to wait
> many days before anyone replies -- in some cases, it is the original poster simply replying to
> themselves to post additional information or progress.

Ther forums are a bit slow.  They were controversial on the mailing
lists when the website guy put them up because they fragment the
community and can lead to situations where people look _only_ at the
forums and say "is this it?" and leave...  However, the mailing lists
have some more reasonable traffic
http://lists.caosity.org/pipermail/centos/2005-February/thread.html 
Also, if you want lots of email you can always go to the
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo mailing lists.  Just say "RHEL"
when you mean "CentOS" and you will be a valued member of those
communities.

> 
> I hope to use a distribution that has a future, at least, more than just a few months.  Would you
> put your confidence into CentOS, or a different (free) Enterprise distribution?
> 

Let's start back at the beginning...always a good spot...you said:

" I favor RedHat, but I also need to
stick to the "free" route."

and 

"4)  I already have to pay plenty to solve the hardware issues, and I
am just a home user, so I
really can't dump thousands of dollars into Enterprise Linux offerings.
"

For a free, RedHat(TM)-like, home or development system where I have a
choice between Fedora which has a planned death of less than one year
(blech) and Centos/WhiteBox/Tao/etc which have no such planned
death...I go with Centos/WhiteBox/Tao/etc.  The RHEL rebuilds have
already proven themselves stable beyond a year's time.  I used to use
WhiteBox and then I got a little worried about the project when John
got busy with work and home life so I switched all of my boxes to
Centos - it's a 5 command job.  rpm -u this, yum install that, done. 
If Centos goes tits up, no problem, just find another RHEL rebuild or
do it myself.  If I get sick of that, I can take an hour and rebuild
the machine...it's not intended for commercial situations so that
doesn't matter, right?

Greg