Re: No can do on the new Redhat Kernel...

  • To: "'Gerry Creager '" <gerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
  • Subject: Re: No can do on the new Redhat Kernel...
  • From: Gerry Creager N5JXS <gerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:27:28 -0500
RedHat is just about as conservative as they come:  They want a mass
market.  One reason for so many RH releases is market analysts.  Most of
this stuff, really, could be incremental updates from their FTP site.

I personally like SlackWare, and with your SunOS/Solaris background, I
suspect you'd find it fairly comfortable.  

The main gotcha tends to be, "Oh, my!  Someone just released a new
{widget} and I've gotta go get it."  Once that syndrome wears off,
staying stable is pretty simple.

The biggest hit on binary compatibility in the past was an update to new
glibc libraries which broke a lot of stuff a couple of years ago.  Tha
switch, however, was really a good thing regardless of how much you
needed to recompile (and that, really was little, for quite a while, as
the compatibility libs are still around in places).  Major kernel
releases, generally, are biggies, but I usually wait 'til the 3rd of 4th
minor rev to snag them unless (as happened to me this time) the rev0
release has things I'm especially anxious to get.

Debian has been heralded as the most stable.  I've got one Sparc debian
install up and it's rebooted, usually, when the power comes back on. 
It's currently been up 43 days... or, more specifically, ever since I
relocated it to a remote site!

And for the sake of completeness, I've some good friends, including our
campus security goddess, who are convinced FreeBSD is really much more
secure than Linux.  And she co-authored a book on linux security.

Hope this helps!

gerry
--
Robert Mullenax wrote:
> 
> Gerry,
> 
> That makes perfect sense.  We only install security patches on Solaris
> and very few others (like Xsun patches on workstations).  It just
> seems to me that even new production versions of RedHat seem to break
> things,
> as if they are always sneaking something in without a whole lot
> of regard for binary compatibility.  I know SunOS/Solaris in it's
> early years had some bugs, but for the last several years I can't
> imagine a Solaris upgrade that would start breaking Unidata-type things.
> 
> That being said, I have also come to realize that no matter what I may
> think, the world is rushing headlong towards Linux.  Is there a distribution
> out there that is more conservative in it's approach to binary
> compatibility?
> 
> Although it may be a little too exotic, I am also going to look at FreeBSD
> upon the recommendation of Tom Yoksas.  We are certainly not going
> to get away from Solaris, but it is clear I need to broaden my horizons
> so to speak.
> 
> Thanks,
> Robert Mullenax

--
Gerry Creager
AATLT/Network Engineering
Texas A&M University
979.458.4020 (Phone)            979.847.8578 (FAX)

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