[oclug] Redhat Alternatives

[Brian Barber]

I'll get the disclaimer out first.  I'm a Debian user, and I like Debian alot - more and more each day, in fact.

At work we are running a RedHat server with Oracle 9i and a whole bunch of geospatial apps, plus the usual suspects Apache, Tomcat, Perl, etc.  Given RedHat's recent announcement, I sent out a message to our technical spatial list for suggestions.  Out of the woodwork of this predominently Microsoft shop came a bunch of closet Linux enthusiasts who unanimously called for Debian.  As the keeper of the box, I had SuSE in the back of my mind, but we will probably flatten the box and re-build it with Debian Stable.  SuSE is a fine distribution all around and with good management utilities and support for SAN HBAs and the like, it makes for a great server.  I'm just not sure what Novell is going to do with it.  I wouldn't want to migrate to SuSE, only to have Novell do to SuSE what RedHat did to its general purpose distribution, and re-build again.

My $0.02CDN,
BB