[clue-tech] Questions about CentOS/Fedora

[David Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
[...]
> 1. Probably an RH-centric free distro. Both in the commercial world
> and in our group, there's a lot more folks using RedHat. Both Fedora
> and CentOS and a few others qualify.

Sigh.

[...]
> Does anyone have a recommendation for using Debian? I get confused by
> all the paths: stable that is so ancient as to be worthless for
> anything but a server environment, testing? Ubuntu is out there, but
> my direct experience and my reading tells me that it's just too
> squirrelly for present use. There are lots of nice non-free Debian
> approaches, but those are not useful for the present project.

I probably can't help.  Since I acutally know how Debian works I can't 
anticipate problems that your recipients will have.  But what exactly 
are you looking for in a distro, and who maintains the machines after 
they're given away?

If your schools have any half capable admins I'd say Debian is no 
problem.  I'd be happy to work with them to get them up to speed on it 
(and maybe help them figure out centralized configuration).

Stable is fine if you have specific needs that it meets and you're happy 
not to fix what isn't broke.  Especially for people who want a PC 
dropped in, run forever, never fool with it (i.e. upgrade the apps), 
when 3.1 releases (Real Soon Now) that would be fine.

But generally I'd recommend testing for workstations.  The problem is 
that upgrading apps to keep current may be beyond many of your users no 
matter what distro they use.  So do you want to do a major upgrade 
(e.g., FC3 to FC4) once or twice a year, or upgrade each app as upstream 
makes new versions?

The latter is easy to do with testing, the former with stable (though it 
will be once every 2 years or so).  The only time I've had issues with 
testing upgrades is with large apps (KDE) that roll into testing in 
pieces.  But I've learned to recognize that so I can wait a week or two 
for the missing pieces to catch up.  (This doesn't happen often--only 
shortly after a KDE release while the Debian packagers upgrade it, and 
only if I happen to be upgrading at that time.)

Other distros, Knoppix doesn't strike me as adding much to testing.  It 
may be a little easier to install and be a good compromise between apps 
newer than stable with updates less often than testing.

Ubuntu gets good marks from people I respect for usability (kind of like 
Macs).  But it restricts the number of packages it provides so getting 
others means a less smooth process (though probably much better than RPM 
repositories, still).  It also gets you the "upgrade every 6 months" 
routine (and you don't really want to run stuff afte EOL).

So that brings me back to who is maintaining these after you give them 
away?  The less capable they are the more I'd lean towards Debian stable 
(in preference to FCn et. al.)  If there isn't anyone I'd suggest that 
your machines are just like Windows--too expensive.  Obviously that's in 
people and process costs, not licensing.  But operating a network 
without maintenance seems to be false (foolish?) economy to me.

Perhaps someone could be identified as the school "Linux admin" and you 
(we) could be tier 2 support to that person.  It would be a challenge to 
keep things managable but I think it could be done.  Just basic support 
for an "approved configuration"--anything else they're on their own.

HTH,
Dave