DISTRO advise (was Re: [Nottingham] k3b install, yum, gcc and libs)

[Michael Leuty]

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 10:32, David Wolfson wrote:
> I've got RH9, 'cos that's what I have discs for, but as RH have gone enterprise, am I likely to find dwindling support/downloads/community activity etc?  And anyway, I like the whole 'beer-free' bussiness with linux, and although I've not got the mozzilla mug yet, I can't help wondering if using redhat is not exactly in the communtiy spirit.

I don't think you need worry on either count. Although some people have
accused Red Hat of being "the Microsoft of Linux" this seems
far-fetched. Red Hat have always taken their open source credentials
seriously. They used to sell Red Hat Linux as a CD in a box (9 being the
last version they produced) but you could also download it for free.
Support was available if you paid for it.

Red Hat Linux was developed "in house" with (I think) public beta
testing. Fedora is developed with more community input but with overall
control by the Red Hat team. It is a free (in both senses) and good
quality distro, but Red Hat will not provide official support for it.
This hardly matters as there is so much support available from the
community. Red Hat use Fedora as a test bed for software which will
eventually find its way into their commercial products. (These are also
open source and you can download the source code and compile it if you
want to.)

Red Hat no longer provide support for RH9, and updated packages for
Fedora Core 1 will soon be unavailable. However www.fedoralegacy.org
will provide security updates and critical bug fixes for RH7.3, RH9 and
old Fedora releases, as a community project.

I'm happily using Fedora Core 2, but I'm sure I'd be just as happy with
Mandrake or SuSE. There is very good community support for all three
distros. I've never had any problem installing new software, which has
always been available in one of the yum repositories. There again, my
needs are pretty simple: I only wanted stuff like Firefox, Bluefish and
Audacity.

I have heard that generally it is better to do a reinstall rather than
an upgrade when moving to a newer version of a distro. This is a good
reason for having a separate partition for /home, as you can reformat
the other partitions during the reinstall. I have seen it suggested that
you should also delete .gnome and .kde in your home folder when
upgrading.

The main advantage of upgrading to Fedora Core 2 would be that it has
recent versions of KDE, Gnome and other software already included. But
if RH9 does everything that you want then that's fine.

-- 
Michael Leuty
Nottingham, UK