On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 13:37 -0600, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> The past several days I have installed Fedora 10 on a test machine. I
> can't believe what I see.
I haven't moved to Fedora 10 yet but I have just recently downloaded
Fedora 10 and was planning on putting it on a system soon. I'm running
Fedora 9 on the development systems and CentOS 5.2 on the operational
systems.
>
> A lot of configuration options have simply been taken away. Options to
> let GDM run to let WXP make X-windowed images for GIF file generation,
> login as root, and various other things---gone. I can't even get LDM to
> start under the startup boot scripts. A Google search reveals loud
> complaints as well that have worsened from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10.
The problem that I have with later versions of Linux is that SELinux
keeps locking out more and more of the operating system. Also, X11
security keeps getting stronger. So you have to figure out how to work
around a more secure system. I generally disable SELinux because it
just gets in the way of almost everything I do. Only recently has
SELinux offered enough options and configuration to allow third party
software to run well with it.
> Privately (and publicly), people have told me to switch to Centos. I've
> been scared because it runs an older version of Fedora (just repackaged).
CentOS runs fine on my operational systems. I finally converted my
operational systems from Fedora to CentOS about 15 months ago. The
reason is that Fedora is too much of a moving target for an operational
system. The old days of just doing upgrades no longer worked properly
with Fedora. So having to reload every computer every 6 months became
too much of a pain to absorb. Not to mention you got a new set of
software with each Fedora release that often breaks running code (like
moving from Perl 5.8 to 5.10). CentOS resolves this problem. The
systems are stable with limited upgrades to software and no system
reloads every 6 months or so.
The problem with CentOS 5 is that its based on Fedora 6 which is by
Linux standards getting old (released in Dec 2006). I did notice that
CentOS does break with Red Hat Enterprise in some areas... like it uses
Firefox 3 whereas RHEL5 still uses Firefox 1.5 and CentOS uses a newer
version of yum.
I haven't heard any rumblings about a new RHEL version coming out.
RHEL4 came out in Feb 2005 and RHEL5 came out in Mar 2007 so we should
start hearing about RHEL version 6 soon. But RH did just announce 5.3
which should be coming to a CentOS distribution shortly.
> But if those choices will be taken away from me in upcoming versions of
> CentOS, then what? I'm back to square one.
I would recommend moving to CentOS 5.2.
________________________________________________________________________
Daniel Vietor
Mail: devo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Unisys Corp
Title: Engineer/Meteorologist
2476 Swedesford Rd
Phone: 610-648-3623
Malvern PA 19355
Fax: 610-695-5524
