OT: Running Linux with filePro

[Fairlight]

In the relative spacial/temporal region of Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 02:34:50PM
-0400, D. Thomas Podnar achieved the spontaneous generation of the
following:
> Fedora changes so often, with so little regard for backwards
> compatibility, that it is difficult and very expensive to try to support
> it as a platform for commercial software. We stopped trying a long time
> ago.

I'm seconding this opinion.

> Those who like the Linux base under Fedora should strongly consider using
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux if they are looking for vendor support, and
> CentOS Linux if they want the same product, but with community support,
> i.e. free unless you feel like sending something to the maintainers.

Personally, I'd take CentOS and get a third party contractor.  Red Hat
-breaks- things that should never be broken, and never fixes them.  Perl
was broken on RHEL3 for at least three years.  RHEL5 shipped with a broken
libexpat, and I needed to roll a parallel library against which XML::Parser
for perl could actually be compiled.  The things they break, literally,
take either extreme carelessness, hubris, or ineptitude to actually break.
In the case of libexpat, it's hard to screw up "./configure;make;make
install", but they did it.  It's hard to screw up "./Configure -D;make;make
test;make install" with perl, but they did it.

Yet, CentOS doesn't have these problems.

You can find better linux consultants than the people that populate RH's
support team that won't answer questions, escalate things fast enough, or
just plain don't know what they're doing--not to mention the "engineers"
that don't fix things even when given the tools to reproduce the issues
consistently.  They can't be arsed to address dealbreakers like these.

> These present a MUCH more stable operating environment. Of all the Linux
> products, my personal feeling is that they are the easiest to adapt to
> from UNIX.

I think if you know the underlying subsystems, they're all about equally
easy to adapt to.  The problem is that too few people actually know the
underlying subsystems.

> SuSE, openSuSE, ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva etc. are nice and pretty stable
> also. ubuntu tends to be released often enough that it supports new
> device drivers the quickest, which means that it is usually first to run
> on new notebooks with wierd NIC or video needs, but RHEL / CentOS tend to
> work very well and are easy to maintain in the server world.

I don't like Ubuntu on political grounds--I don't like any distribution
with some sort of social agenda.  I also had the misfortune of logging
in to an Ubuntu system and seeing some of the just plain wacky locations
they install things to...it's not standard even according to the loose
"lack of standards" in the rest of the community.  Debian tends to
have a long-established history of being late to the game in plugging
security holes, and for ages was not taken seriously as a production-ready
environment; that's apparently changed, but far too late in the game for
me to ever recommend it seriously.  SuSE is just flat-out screwed up by
Novell in so many ways it's not even funny--including kernel patches that
miswrite the boot loader menu and leave the system unbootable to the new
default kernel until you find and fix the issue (happened at least five
times throughout SP1-SP3), not to mention their lack of SRPM availability
and their lousy distribution and licensing systems, and the fact that
they won't even directly sell licenses themselves--you MUST go through a
reseller...they're a non-starter these days.  OpenSuSE is not plagued by
the licensing and distribution side, but the engineering is going downhill
fast.  The new "officially supported" in-place upgrade from 11.1 to 11.2
works like crap, and isn't even worth trying--it failed twice here, and
the third time it left so many problems that it'd take less time to roll a
whole new fresh system and just migrate the data and configs than find and
fix all the things that were broken.  I can't at all speak to Mandriva.

> FWIW, based on long Linux experience.

Ditto since 1993 (kernel 0.99.9pld, SlackWare -before- 1.0), and I support
your observations, by and large.

My recommendation, -especially- for servers, is CentOS.  I've been running
them for over a year now, and I've also done in-place upgrades from 5.3 to
5.4 and 5.5, and -nothing- has broken.  It's solid, doesn't force you to
put a GUI on a server (although you can if you like), it's lightweight
compared to something like SuSE/OpenSuSE, and the distribution channels are
plentiful and fast.  Considering it's based on RH's codebase, it's
remarkably sane by comparison.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.