> It was brought to my attention today that RedHat is apparently dropping
> support for it's free versions of Linux. This leaves us (and I'm sure
> many of you) in a quandary as to what to do. The options appear to be
> either to buy support (which apparently will be $150 per desktop, more for
> servers) or switch to another vendor.
The Fedora project releases may be fine. Personally, I've found RedHat's
support to be of little value. While here at Lyndon and at my previous
employer I was better able to resolve system problems on my own (with google)
than their "support" people were. My biggest concern is the availability of
security updates when RedHat announced last year that they would be limiting
to 12 months for versions >= 7.0. Now, after RH 9.0, they're only officially
supporting their Enterprise products but for 3 or 5 years, I can't recall
which.
> We will probably be forced to switch to another vendor, at least for
> many of our desktops, because of the costs involved. I'd be interested in
> any opinions anyone has as to preferences for other Linux distributions
> and why. Also, are there any gotcha's with the other distro's as far as
> running the LDM and gempak are concerned?
We are using Slackware Linux on all of our lab machines and web server here at
Lyndon. We use McIdas, gempak, weather, netcdf libs, RDSS (suds and solo) and
the IDV. The only glitch I ever ran into with the Unidata applications was
building McIdas on Slackware 9 which included a newer release of "make" than
what Unidata had tested with. Some of the "pluses" for slackware:
1. In general, the system does not change radically from one release to the
next so moving to a new version tends to not break things.
2. It is a very stable OS and is noticeably faster than RedHat or Mandrake on
the same hardware.
3. Building other applications from source is extremely easy on Slackware.
4. Since the system is very straight forward in it's configuration
creating installable Slackware packages is very simple. Slackware packages
tend to contain minimal, if any, changes from the original developer's
code. (Anything that you can't find on the installation CDs can likely be
found at www.linuxpackages.net.)
5. Security updates come out quickly after a vulnerabilty is found.
We used to use Debian quite a bit here a few years ago and that was a
nice system to work with. The installation is probably the most difficult
of any Unix I've ever dealt with other than HPUX, much more involved than
Slackware or RedHat. On the positive side, once it is installed it is very
easy to maintiain. The down side to debian is that their stable releases are
old. Really old. All the Unidata applications ran well.
Mandrake tends to use very new releases of software and I've found it to be
more unreliable than other Linux distributions. It has some great features
but I wouldn't want to support it.
Our LDM is running FreeBSD which is a very good system as well. It seems
to handle high loads much better than linux does at this point (kernel
2.4). Their method of issuing security updates as source code patches isn't
my favorite.
That's my $.02
--
Mark Tucker
Meteorology Dept. Systems Administrator
Lyndon State College
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu
mark.tucker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(802)-626-6328
