A newbie What are differences between Red Hat Linux 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

W Paul Mills

In my limited experience (a relative newcomer currently running Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat Fedora 5(?) and SuSE 10.1 on a miscellaneous collection of machines) all three seem to load easily and run pretty well but:

a) RHEL is set up as an Enterprise server with all the security locked down pretty tightly, plus its package manager (I forget the name) is totally ignorant of dependencies. I'm currently using it for my intranet's webserver but I'm building a Debian replacement. b) Red Hat Fedora seems to be aimed at the less-technically- inclined pure workstation user. I replaced it with Debian. c) SuSE's yast2 manages packages pretty well but I haven't been able to point it at an online repository (there's probably a way that I haven't figured out), so I'm limited to whatever's on the CDs that I made. I'd replace it with Debian except that it's my DNS and openvpn server and not (quite) annoying enough to change. d) Debian's apbreastude and friends manage packages and can be pointed at 'stable,' 'testing' and 'unstable' repositories, depending on what you're interested in.

The three seem to have slightly different locations and methods for systems administration. Red Hat and SuSE seem to have more integrated administration tools while Debian's seem to be more command-line oriented. Personally, I kinda like Debian because it seems more user-friendly to me. Of course, I'm a zVM mainframe sysadmin so your mileage may vary.

Just my two zorkmids' worth.

-- -- Marten Kemp (Fix name and ISP to reply)