As a former Caldera (SCO-bastages) partner, I guess maybe we've been ahead of
the curve on trying other distributions. We've tried Mandrake, Slackware,
SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, as well as have spun up our own . . .
Personally, I like Gentoo the best - even over our own GalileoLinux . . . but
you really have to be into Linux to not get frustrated. Donald Giuliano from
OU has done a great job of putting together an ebuild for nawips . . . and if I
can get free for a minute, I'll make one for LDM.
SuSE 8.2 uses gcc 3.3 which has a broken g77 compiler . . . LDM will work fine,
but gempak will not. Debian is a good distro . . . but it's not any easier to
install than Slackware or gentoo. Mandrake is way to bleeding edge . . . and
their business model seems to suffer - up one day, almost out of business the
next.
Like others . . . I'd like to see what Novell is going to do with their second
Linux purchase . . . they also have Ximian, which is a great desktop Linux.
Stonie Cooper
Planetary Data, Inc.
> On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 16:19, Arthur A. Person wrote:
> > Hi...
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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?
>
> This does concern me in terms of the direction Red Hat is going.
> According to the email I got, Red Hat 9 is the last version Red Hat is
> going to release and support for it will end on April 30, 2004.
>
> It looks like Red Hat is trying to get everyone to move to Red Hat
> Enterprise. The new equivalent looks to be Enterprise Linux WS which
> will cost $179 for basic (no CD, download only, no support, 1 year of
> updates) or $299 for standard edition (CD at no charge, web support,
> etc). My only problem with Enterprise is that it will be more like
> Solaris. In other words, major updates will occur, not every 6 month,
> but more like every 2 years with intermediate bug and security fixes.
> Enterprise 3.0 is essentially Red Hat 9 and probably will be for a
> couple of years. Also, WS will only have Apache, Samba and NFS on the
> server side. If you want server programs like FTP, IMAP, DHCP, YP, etc
> you will have to move to Enterprise Linux ES which will cost $349 for
> Basic (no CD, no support) or $799 for Standard.
>
> I'm also not quite sure where Fedora is going. It looks like this will
> be a download only with very limited support and documentation. Since
> Fedora seems to be a Red Hat light (limited Red Hat financial backing
> but mostly community developed, tested and supported), it might be more
> difficult to use it in a operational environment.
>
> I guess as long as RH 9 continues to run here, I'll stick with it. I
> wonder how Novell buying out Suse is going to change that product??
> Also, it might not be a bad idea to try out other Linux releases such as
> Slackware.
>
> --
> Dan Vietor <devo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Unisys
>
>
