[Sussex] Upgrading from RHEL to Fedora

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On 4:58:48 pm 30/08/2005 Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> wrote:
> other distributions. Until I'd tried it I had assumed that one of the

assumption is the mother of all fuckups ;)

> key advantages of a commercial distribution (prime candidate Red Hat)
> was that it could easily include the less than idealogical extras like
> (key in this case) the Nvidia drivers. The reality is that although

the key advantage of a commercial distribution is support. They may strike
deals with ISVs to get you packaged versions (e.g. the RHEL extras channels
have IBM JVMs and the like). It doesn't mean they are going to round
*everything* up. Besides, RHEL (and indeed all recent Linuxes) have a basic
driver for nvidia cards.

> kernel upgrade breaks them - not necessarily unusual for Linux, but
> less than I expected from Red Hat. Oddly on my last Debian upgrade

Why Red Hat? It's nvidia's fault.

For the record, Ubuntu provide the nvidia and ati drivers in unsupported
packages, so it breaks less and although it's still not officially
supported at least you don't have to go off and install it yourself
manually.

> require to fix the current driver issue). I really don't see it as
> particularly helpful to tell an end user to download the source RPMs

It's a commercial distro, they want to maintain their edge. Remember there
are other people who rebuild the source RPMs for you too, like CentOS and
Whitebox.

> ;) Initially I though "great I'll give it a go", then I read something
> about the user accounts running with root privileges and decided to

Nope, they all run as normal users. The difference is that the root account
is disabled and sudo is used. While that isn't a problem, you can enable
the root account very easily and disable sudo if you want to.

> of upgrading. I did have an urge to try Exim 4, but no really pressing

Do, it rocks.

> need, and I was interested to try Dovecot too. The one thing I did do

Likewise.

> Desktop wise I was running unstable, but as soon as Sarge went stable
> I backed off to testing - at which point I promptly broke Evolution!

Why on earth would you run testing? Never ever ever run testing!

> Tricky on that. It is actually very close to the Debian way with the
> unstable, testing and stable setup. A more organic feed through would

As above, ignore testing. Ubuntu are talking about introducing a rolling
unstable. Personally I think they are a bit dumb and I only used sid
because stable was so depressingly old. I am very happy with 6 monthly
releases and not changing very much of anything in between them.

> I guess that pretty much means that I'm not 100% sure what the best

Fair enough, nothing wrong with wanting more :)

> method is, I'm just not 100% happy with any of them :) Debian is my
> favourite for now by a long margin though.

Well then I'd definitely recommend looking at Ubuntu.

Cheers,
---
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
  www.tenshu.net