[BC] Windows Vista

[Chris Gebhardt]

jon wrote:
> I've successfully installed Rivendell on Fedora 9 (and I assume 10 is the
> same deal). No compilation required, google found all the precompiled
> stuff. Took about 30 minutes or so.
> 
> Jon
> 
>> I've been playing with Ubuntu for a while now and really like it. I will
>> probably start messing with SuSE pretty quick so I can evaluate Rivendell in
>> the preferred environment. I'd still like to see if I can get us off the
>> Microsoft platform for our mission-critical on-air machines.

Since computers and working with Linux and mission-critical systems is 
what I do, I thought I would pop in and offer a little tidbit.  Take it 
for what it is.

If you're interested in working on a RedHat-based system (and there's no 
reason you shouldn't be unless you don't like stability, popularity, and 
probably the widest userbase of any distro) then you should STRONGLY 
consider an Enterprise variant.

I will put Fedora on a workstation, or on a home PC, but never on a 
server or a mission-critical system.   Fedora, by its very nature, is a 
testbed for what will wind up in Enterprise.  The lifecycle for each 
release is VERY short.  From the Fedora website:  "In practice, Fedora 
releases a new version about every 6 months, which means than each 
version of Fedora gets updates for about 13 months."

What this means is that after a little over a year, you have an obsolete 
version that is no longer maintained of updated with security / feature 
releases.

With an Enterprise release, you are guaranteed a long lifecycle with 
long term support.  For instance, if you take my personal favorite 
distro, CentOS, the current version (CentOS 5) will be maintained until 
at least 2012.

 From the CentOS website:  "CentOS is an Enterprise Linux distribution 
based on the freely available sources from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 
Each CentOS version is supported for 7 years (by means of security 
updates). A new CentOS version is released every 2 years and each CentOS 
version is regularly updated (every 6 months) to support newer hardware. 
This results in a secure, low-maintenance, reliable, predictable and 
reproducible Linux environment."

Anything Fedora can do (generally speaking) CentOS can do as well.

What you will not get is the "latest and greatest", or as we call it, 
"bleeding edge" packages.   By the time a package is released to 
Enterprise, you can be fairly certain all the kinks have bee ironed out 
by the Fedora users.

Again, I'm not a Fedora hater.  I run it on a couple systems myself. 
But they're not servers, and I don't give a hoot if they tank.

There's my 2 cents.  YMMV.

Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
chris at virtbiz.com | (972) 485-4125