[oclug] Impressed!

[Gilles J. Seguin]

Ben Hall wrote:
> [...]
> As for your Red Hat thoughts, I'm with you 100%!  As I mentioned
> yesterday, we're putting in a 6 system RHL mini-lab.  I seriously looked
> at RH Enterprise WS just so that we could (officially) support the lab
> for more than a year.

My understanding is, RH says that they will produce new version
every six months fpr RHL.  That means that they are supporting the 
last six version or the last three years.

> Even RHEWS' price is okay.  Unfortunately it
> seems to be based on RHL 7.3 (!!) so forget about that!

   You need RHEL, that is for entreprise, when you require support
for thing like Oracle.  Obviously Oracle will have QA problem
with the six months release.
   That means that they had to have support for ten releases
for RedHat alone, for a five years garanted support.
And RHEL has a release period longer than a year.
Which yield version 7.3.

> In the end,
> I'll be doing RH9+apt.  I've read reports of other people successfully
> using apt-get to upgrade from RH7.3 to 8.0 to 9,

  Well, applications from those versions are all compatible at the c api
level.  And applications with an c++ api, are all incompatible or will
even not link. This include beta distribution severn.
  The incompatible API is reflected by the jump from 7, 8, to 9.
  Then next relese will be RH10, if they keep GCC version 3.3
that is in the severn beta distribution.

> so I'm crossing my
> fingers that things will work well in the future.

   For rpms, rawhide has this alternative
<http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/>
 
> Honestly, I'd rather have done Debian Woody+backports of things like
> Gnome2, but people here are new to Linux and only know about RH,
> Mandrake and SuSE.  While all of these have their pros and cons (and I'm
> not looking to start yet another "my distro's better than yours") I
> consider RH to be the best shot of the three (for us,) as RPMs are
> almost always available for it (and I find it fairly flexible, in the
> end.)

   I am more open to term like audiences/goals/tradeoffs rather
than better/worse.