What Linux to use

[Fairlight]

At Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 10:26:28AM -0400 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bill Vermillion was observed uttering:
> Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Thu, Sep 23 08:43  
> Tony Freehauf missed achieving immortality when he said: 
> 
> > hi experts
> > a customer running only filepro wants new & faster( 5 users).
> >   i plan to upgrade them to a new server using linix and droping sco host
> >   i have tested fp on linux - works well.
> > What flavor of  linux is a good rock solid choice. I want to buy a box set so 
> > the customer has someting to put on his shelf.
> > your input will be valued.
> 
> In this last issue of Linux Pipeline a survey of their readers
> showed the following.
> 
> Linux Distros Preferred by Linux Pipeline Readers:
> SUSE/Novell, 26%, 342 votes out of 1338.

And SuSE 9.0 Professional is exactly what I'd recommend.  I would -not-
recommend 9.1 yet, as it's based on the 2.6 kernel, and the latest is
2.6.8.1 (that has to be the first time since the 0.99.99 series that I've
seen an additional sublevel on an official release) direct from Linus.  The
kernel itself has to go ten more patchlevels before I'll even consider it
seriously.  Historically, there have been problems all the way through any
tree up to and including .17.  They don't get really stable until about
.18.  2.4 had a -horrible- .15 release that wiped whole filesystems.

So while the rest of their dist may be solid, the core kernel base is not
something I trust yet.  So I say stick with 9.0 Professional.

> Mandrake, 14%, 189 votes

Over my dead body.  :)  Mandrake has made so many mistakes in the past, I
refuse to even consider them seriously now.  They're also slow on security
patches, which I won't tolerate.  Many times, they're last out of the gate.

> Red Hat, 13%, 178 votes

No longer thrilled with them, especially when they managed to screw up
something as important as perl on RHEL3.  Despite escalating the issue
that causes it to segv, they have not released a patch, nor even emailed
the customer who has purchased their support--inside a three month window.

Fast on security patches, but I'm no longer enthralled with them,
especially after digging through the guts of their SRPMS.

> Debian, 9%, 122 votes

Lots of people using debian, but I've talked to several different camps.
The package management is supposed to be nice, but you can put different
package managers on anything--look what Bill Campbell is doing, for
example.  (That's not criticism, that's respect.)  Debian seems to be one
of those "late to the party" dists on security and being up to date.  It's
more of a do-it-yourself'er than an 'enterprise' type solution.  Based on
bug reports I've seen with just a few OSS projects, Debian also seems to be
a problem child of a platform, with its own unique quirks that no other
dist seems to have.

I'd avoid it for a production environment.  I consider it more a hobbyist
linux, akin to a more advanced Slackware.

I'm also not sure you can get it boxed.

> Fedora (Red Hat-Sponsored), 9%, 119 votes

On a production system?  Like hell.  :)

> Gentoo, 6%, 82 votes

I hear good things, but I don't have specifics or personal knowledge here.

> Slackware, 5%, 73 votes

If you like mostly rolling your own, perhaps.  But no boxed set in the
official sense.  Probably the -least- 'official' of the lot.

> Of course the survey is skewed as it only covers their readers,
> but it seems like it was not that long ago that RH topped all the
> lists.

RH cheesed off a lot of people, pure and simple.  They had the legal right
to do what they did, but they brought this reaction on themselves.  They're
the M$ of the linux world now, except they're actually looking slightly
more draconian than M$ (and I didn't think that was possible).  Their
quality is starting to match M$'s as well.  :-/

> Depending on the version of SCO the cheapest way out may just
> be upgrading the hardware.

Yes, it could be.  Especially if there's a learning curve, you don't have
an in-house admin, etc.  Running linux isn't as free as you would think.
You pay in either time or money.  Technically you do that with -any-
platform, if you actually maintain it.  I won't get into houses that just
install and attempt to let it run unattended.  :)

But if you already know SCO and have nobody in your back pocket that knows
linux well, you may indeed be better served simply upgrading.  Bill has a
point, much as I dislike having to concede it.  :)

Overall, I admin systems and they need very little administration work once
I finish with their configuration for the intended use--just security
updates, or whatever someone may want added later.  Aside from security
updates, it's hands-off.  It's that initial configuration that people seem
to have problems with, depending on their experiences and how well they
know *nix's underpinning in general.

SuSE is pretty damned painless, though.  I have no hesitations in
recommending 9.0 Professional.

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