Been a While What Distro do I get 4826

On Sun, 18 Sep 2005 08:49:19 +0200, Michael Heiming

I'm using FC3 and FC4, I also keep an old machine with Whitebox 3 (free version of RHEL 3) which I use for installing distribution sensitive software (specifically Xilinx tools which run fine on Fedora and Mandriva but have a cranky installer that has all sorts of dependencies on the libraries in RHEL 3). I've also tried CentOS 4.1 (free version of RHEL 4). I've given up on Mandriva at the moment. I used them for a while after Redhat made the split between RHEL and Fedora. Mandriva has all sorts of problems on AMD 64 systems. Mandrake 10.0 didn't work at all, 2005LE seems to work once you get it installed but you have to give a switch to the installer to keep it from freezing when it loads the NForce SATA drivers. The latest version, 2006 RC1, has the same problem (don't know about RC2 which just came out but I doubt they fixed it). Fedora Core 3 has been completely reliable, Fedora Core 4 is getting there. If you remember the old Redhat Linux releases came as .0, .1 and .2 versions. The .0s were crap, the .1s were pretty good and the .2s were solid. Fedora follows the same progression except that there is no longer a label that tells you where they are because it's being continually updated. The initial release of a new Fedora can be seriously broken, fundamental things like the updater might not work at all or have so many RPM dependencies that it's unusable. After a couple of months the rough edges start to be worked out and it becomes usable, eventually it reaches a stage where it's completely solid. Fedora Core 3 is at the completely solid stage, Fedora Core 4 has reached the usable stage, in another couple of months I'd be ready to call FC4 solid. The RHEL releases start life in a solid form, basically because they represent a mature version of FC. RHEL 4 seems to be a snapshot of where FC3 was last spring when RHEL 4 was released. The RHEL versions are maintained for a long period of time, 5 years, whereas Fedora is only supported for a year or so. Also RHEL is maintained by patches to it's components while Fedora gets new technologies and kernels as they become available. If what you want is to install something and then keep the same system running for 5 years you should use RHEL or a clone, if you want the latest stuff and don't mind doing annual upgrades then use Fedora. There are several clones of RHEL, specifically Whitebox, CentOS and Scientific Linux (which comes from the particle physics guys, FermiLab in the US and CERN in Europe). The clones take the Redhat source RPMS, remove Redhat's logos and rebuild the binaries.