fp5/Linux 2.6 -- anyone got it running?

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2005, Fairlight wrote:
...
><mini_grumble>
>Meanwhile, someone told me this week that SuSE 9.3 is coming out soon.
>That's absurd, IMHO.  They just got 9.2 to about the 6 month mark where
>I actually would trust it as a distribution--save everything but the
>kernel, which I -still- won't really trust until it hits an official
>2.6.18.  By the time they get one to the point you're willing to put it
>into production, they're ready to release the next one.  

I haven't seen any major problems with SuSE 9.2 Professsional, and we have
one ISP customer that's running it on a production mail server with about
7,500 accounts (against my advice :-).  They're running it because SuSE 9.0
doesn't have support for some hardware they're using.

We're installing SuSE 9.0 Professional in productions systems, and it has
one thing that 9.2 doesn't, the linux-abi modules that allow it to run SCO
binaries (the same one that Caldera/SCO were instrumental in developing
back before they started suing everybody in sight).  SuSE 9.[12] doesn't
have this support which is critical for one of our customers still running
COFF binaries.

>This is by no means a new trend, and RH did much the same thing, as did
>others...

The difference is that RH never seemed to do much testing before releasing
things, so they were (are?) often broken.

...
>Vendors really need to find a middle-ground between what M$ and SCO do, and
>what the linux vendors currently do.

The problem really isn't so much the software folks, but the hardware which
always seems to require new drivers, unsupported in earlier versions of the
OS.  I was discussing this today in relation to a commodity server project,
and we're considering using industrial type PC104 hardware since they tend
to stay stable for extended periods of time.  The extra hardware cost will
probably be more than offset by reduced software costs continually having
to update the OS.

></mini_grumble>

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.''
   -- H.L. Mencken, 1923