OT: Linux flavors...

[Bill Vermillion]

Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets that will last an eternity, 
but on Wed, Jul 07 14:33 , Fairlight wrote:" 

> Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!
> At about Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 11:23:25AM -0500,

> Chad McWilliams blabbed on about:

> > I am in the process of trying to determine what flavor of
> > Linux to use to replace my Red Hat servers. I've tested
> > several (White Hat, Debian, LFS, etc.) but have not had a
> > chance to test Suse (seeing as I can't download a copy to try
> > out, unless I've missed it). It seems that many of you think
> > highly of it, which has peeked my interest. The question I
> > have is which version are you all running? From the website I
> > see:

> > Personal 9.1
> > Professional 9.1
> > Linux Server 8
> > Linux Enterprise Server 8

> I suggest Professional 9.0.

> And I did a full ftp install. Just get the initial floppy
> images and use them to start it up.

There is also a boot.iso that is about 10-15MB long you can use.

...

>   We used to have over 120 distributions to choose from, and
> now it's down to about 40 or so.

Actually there used to be over 200.

> Bill Vermillion probably has the actual number somewhere.

Ijust checked at ftp.nluug.nl [I can get faster DL's from there
than most in the US] and there are currently 124 distributions
at that site.  Two or three are variants.

There are also such things as the old Caldera distribution,
and the Connectiva [targeted to South America] among them.

But Whitebox is not there.  That's a Red Hat Enterprise from
sources with the RH logos stripped. It was set up so that people
could migrate from the EOL'ed version and get fixes from RH
through 2008 - the 5 year life promised for Enteriprise.

I suspect that in addition to not haveing Whitebox
[www.whiteboxlinux.org] there are others still out there - so there
are probably between 125 and 150 distributions still extant -
albeit some a bit stale at the moment.

> It's far more reasonable, and there were way too many for a
> long time.

There are still to many AFAIC.

> Two thumbs up to SuSE 9.0.  But as Jay pointed out, avoid 9.1 for now.

A client of mine moving from SCO into a custom ap, and it is on
9.1.  We'll see.  They are finally getting out of that weird
home brew Progress system.

The new one will be open for modification by them but not for
resale and it's a MySQL application.  The people who are
implmenting this have many years in the commercial world and almost
anything you'd want has been integrated.  For about $75,000 you'd
expect that however.    I'm waiting to see it run in real life.

When I first picked up this client in 1989 they had Xenix with
4 terminals and had been royally screwed over by a vendor who'd buy
one copy of software [if they were lucky] and sell it to many.

And they just keep growing.   On class days the end of the parking
lot from what used to be an old abandonded [at one time] shopping
center - is so full of student cars you have to look to find a
place to park.

That will take me out of the SCO world entirely.

I'll keep you posted if any 9.1 problems pop up.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com