[cumbria_lug] Red Hat^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFedora - opinions...

[Schwuk]

Michael Saunders wrote:
> OTOH, the planned release cycle is waaaaay too fast; with a new
> release every 4 months (and total of 7 months security errata), it's
> too much of a moving target to be used in any serious scenario.

Admittedly there is the Fedora Legacy project, but that is way too up in 
the air ATM to really comment on.

OTOH, it appears that with the incorporation of tools like apt4rpm and 
yum, they are moving towards a Gentoo style scenario, where you can 
install any release and upgrade to the latest (provided you have the 
bandwidth). In theory, you could always do this with rpm, but it was 
messy - now the project is going to be some serious effort into it.

Still useless for 'serious' use though...

> SUSE (nee SuSE) have decided to stretch out their releases -- a good
> thing, and could make it a better call than Fedora on newcomers'
> boxes.

Yes, but SUSE still have a major stumbling block - they're not free. I 
can give a copy of RHL/Fedora/Mandrake/Knoppix etc. to anyone, and that 
is a (large) part of the reason for linux's popularity growth. This was 
always a factor against Linux as you needed to be a guru to get it 
installed - what's the point of giving it to someone if they can't use 
it? This stumbling block has been removed in recent distros, to the 
point where can (almost) be confident in giving a set of CDs to a newbie 
and have them ending up with a working system with little/no help. It 
doesn't matter if SUSE have the better distro, if people never see it. 
Given a choice between having Windows for free (via the Microsoft tax), 
getting $distro for free or paying for SUSE, SUSE will lose almost every 
time (so will linux in general for that matter, but that's a different 
discussion).

> I'd wager that RH will release a 'Personal Desktop' (or similar)  
> within a couple of years (they've made noises about this).

Not too sure about this - Red Hat/Fedora & Mandrake have already got the 
lions share of the (consumer) desktop, and if RH take that long to come 
out with a desktop product, they'll have lost major ground to likes of 
Sun's Java Desktop (a misnomer if ever there was one) which is already 
proving popular with companies.

> Indeed. But you don't _have_ to pay for RHEL -- the ISOs can be found
> online, and as errata are produced the SRPMs are made freely available
> on RH's FTP site. Granted, it's not quite as straightforward and clean
> as up2date/RHN et al., but 'rpm -bb foo.spec && rpm -ivh ../blah' is
> still a cinch.

Fine for you and me, but try selling that one to your IT director... :)

> I was planning to do this (install RHEL WS 3.0 beta and upgrade via 
> SRPMs when the final is out), but have since become a Slacker :)

This may become a common trend - all the systems that where 
predominantly RHL before will migrate to the likes of slackware/debian etc.

Cheers,
-- 
Schwuk