[Sussex] Upgrading from RHEL to Fedora

[Paul Tansom]

Chris Jones wrote:
> 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.

Video yes, network and sound no :( On the commercial support side of
things, for these machines the Red Hat support isn't work the cost of
the phone call (and it's a free phone number!). The machines (Shuttle
based) are not on the Red Hat supported list therefore they are
reluctant to talk to you and even suggest switching to Fedora or using
Google! I had an issue with an IDE CDRW not working on one machine
because it wasn't detected as such on install. The RH support response
within the first minute or two of the conversation was the
aforementioned Fedora or Google. A quick bit of digging turned up that
all it needed was enabling idescsi!

>>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.

I didn't say it wasn't, just that I had incorrectly assumed that a
commercial distribution would be easier to support with proprietary
drivers. The reality is that Debian is easier, although admittedly
partly due to the fact that it has been decided not to renew the RH
subscription (without which RH is dead in the water).

> 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.

That's as I understand it now. Not sure, as I say, whether the first
impression was a misunderstanding or a poor choice in the first release.

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

I have done, and the configuration is very nice. Functionality wise I've
not found any strong reason to upgrade, although I will be.

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

Well it runs rings round Courier in terms of the NAMESPACE issue where
Courier insists it is doing things the right way and the rest of the
world should change to match it. This may be true, but since I can't
find a main stream email client that works properly with Courier (i.e.
not putting all folders below the Inbox) it needs to accept that the
real world isn't perfect yet!

>>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!

Because post release unstable becomes less stable. Testing at least has
a period of testing in unstable before a package moves on down the chain.

>>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.

It's on my list of things to do, but since I am perfectly happy at the
moment with my Debian testing desktop I've not really had the urge to
change. My family PC will either get Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian testing
and my Windows box is about to become a dual boot with either Fedora or
Ubuntu. Current favourite is Ubuntu on family box and Fedora on dual
boot since the family one is the one likely to be used rather than just
a test machine. I still prefer being closer to pure Debian than straying
off onto another fork in the road - all be it Ubuntu does feed back into
Debian.

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/