Open Query: what replaces RedHat? [LWN.net]

From:		"Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To:		letters@lwn.net
Subject:		Open Query: what replaces RedHat?
Date:		Thu, 4 Sep 2003 13:14:06 -0400

Yeah, I know; RedHat isn't really dying.

But I don't at all know how their Big New Idea is gonna work out, and I'm sure
I'm not the only guy building production customer boxes on RH7.3 because 8
was an orphan and I'm not completely comfortable with 9 yet (for servers;
it's pretty spiffy for the desktop).

Hell, AutoZone (mentioned in all the SCO fuss last week) is shipping RH7.2; I
saw a login prompt at a store recently.

So, what's a guy like me to do? Will there still be a frozen ISO of "the latest
RedHat distribution" that I can bang on, even in The New Environment? Do I
switch to Mandrake? (I'm a RedHat guy; the Debian layout leaves me cold,
alas.) Or do I go back to paying RedHat almost as much money as I always paid
SCO (sign of the cross) and switch to ES and AS, as they so clearly want me to?

Yeah, I need stability, but not as much as the people whom I read as their target
audience for AS and ES.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com

Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274
    OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows
        -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c

to post comments

Open Query: what replaces RedHat?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 4:06 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

Why are you uncomfortable with Red Hat 8 and 9 for servers? And what is that "layout" that you don't like in Debian? Layout of files? What kind of services are you going to run? On which hardware? Cannot you just create own packages for the software you are uncomfortable with? It's quite easy with RPM based systems.

Ask yourself what your priorities are. Are you ready to spend 1 day setting up a server to get 10% speed increase? Are you ready to spend an extra week to reduce the risk of failure? If your time is cheap compared to the server cost, Gentoo may be the answer. If you are selling your servers to complete dummies, consider SuSE. And if your time is expensive and you don't want to learn, don't try Debian. You know that already.

It's just example answers, because the question wasn't asked correctly. There is no universal answer.

Open Query: what replaces RedHat?

Posted Sep 22, 2003 3:26 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

I was talking mostly about Debian's choices from an administrative standpoint; I like init.d and
sysconfig. I gather that Debian skews BSD on that sort of thing.

I know there's no universal answer; it's mostly comfort level things -- I am the admin on most of these
boxes, to the extent that they have an admin. Those who like RedHat, for reasons similar to mine, will
likely hear resonance in the question, and those are the people I'm most after for answers.

Mandrake should be fine

Posted Sep 11, 2003 4:26 UTC (Thu) by lakeland (guest, #1157) [Link] (2 responses)

You seem remarkably stuck on using RedHat, yet you don't present any reasons for this in
your letter. You also say you've tried and rejected Debian -- great, one thing less to try
now. There is really very little vendor lock-in with Linux if, and only if, you stay familiar
with two or three different distributions.

So I suggest you give Mandrake a whirl on a test system, see if you can use it to do
everything the RedHat box currently does. Sure, it will do some things differently --
Mandrake forked from RedHat so long ago now they share almost nothing -- though
perhaps not quite as different as Debian.

You will struggle if you've only ever successfully managed a RedHat box, so give the test
period enough time and energy for Mandrake to have a real chance. RedHat has a lot of
little quirks in how it does things, and after a few years it is easy to think that is how Linux
does things instead of RedHat does them, and so get annoyed at Mandrake when it does
it differently. I recently read a rant by a RedHat user about debian starting a service
automatically after it had been installed, which from my perspective seemed insane -- why
would you want to install apache but not start it? -- but is the expected behaviour from
RedHat.

Oh, and you can replace Mandrake with SuSE, or anything else, in the above comments. I
think everybody relying on Linux should be familiar enough with another distribution that
they're not forced to use whatever their current favourite gives them.

Installing a service without starting it...

Posted Sep 11, 2003 20:03 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

I recently read a rant by a RedHat user about debian starting a service automatically after it had been installed, which from my perspective seemed insane -- why would you want to install apache but not start it?

So that you can configure it first. Most of the time the default won't provide the service you want it to, and in some cases it will provide services you would rather not share with a potentially hostile world.

Now, I know Debian attempts to let you to configure services at installation time, but this noble effort is a disaster in the real world. Not many people want to configure every detail of every service in one sitting, especially when punctuated by delays caused by installing (and possibly downloading) each package. This is just bad human interface design. Collecting configuration settings in logical groups and performing installation as a separate step is more flexible and leads to better results. One can walk away and do something else while the computer does non-interactive parts of installation.

Debian advocates would do well to admit that RedHat does many things well, and begin shamelessly copying the best ideas.

That's how free software is supposed to work.

Mandrake should be fine

Posted Sep 22, 2003 3:31 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

> You will struggle if you've only ever successfully managed a RedHat box, so give the test
period enough time and energy for Mandrake to have a real chance. RedHat has a lot of
little quirks in how it does things, and after a few years it is easy to think that is how Linux
does things instead of RedHat does them, and so get annoyed at Mandrake when it does
it differently.

Everyone seems to dismiss comfort level as an evaluation tool.

Certainly it's not the number one decision factor, but I think that anyone who dismisses it completely
does so at their own peril.

I've been an administrator of various Linux and Unix systems for close to 20 years now; as most people
probably do, I've developed my tastes for how systems "should" do things... and those systems I haven't
worked on personally to any great extent, like Solaris, I've glarked from the Green Book and it's
predecessor.

Yes, I do realize that RedHat != Linux; I've merely been happy with it so far.

To answer someone else's question, I'm mostly not happy with 9 for server deployments yet due to lack of
personal experience with it in that role -- I'm always about 6 to 12 months behind the leading edge for
public deployments. Some of that is "this package expects a library that RH9 doesn't have" -- yeah, I
can build source packages when I need to, but I prefer developer built binaries when I can get them.

Open Query: what replaces RedHat?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 12:30 UTC (Thu) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link]

I have dropped Red Hat a few months ago (because of their up2date policies) and use Mandrake on my laptop, SuSE on my workstation and Adamantix on the firewall. One of my friends installed Knoppix on his harddisk.
All of the major Linux Distributions are good. Mandrake is IMO the best for a non-programmer desktop machine; SuSE wins on the hardcore programmer workstation. (Didn't scale Knoppix yet, but I guess it would be doing good on the desktop too.) For servers I prefer Debian (Adamantix is an extra secure Debian variant) because of ease of administration over a network. SuSE is a good second choice here.
As you see there's choice, and I only mentioned the major distibutions. It could be that other distro's even fit better, but for that one should consider the specific use of the boxes that yous shift.

Peter

Debian Wannabees

Posted Sep 11, 2003 14:28 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

Interesting that Mandrake and now RedHat are trying to move to distributed maintenance of packages by the community in order to reduce their costs.

Meanwhile, Lindows, Libranet, Knoppix and many others already have access to thousands of high-quality community-built and actively-maintained packages by virtue of their Debian base.

As the author of the letter says, RedHat hasn't proven they can make this work, and Mandrake certainly hasn't demonstrated this. After all, why should any developer sink time into packaging a piece of software for the benefit of only a single company's distro's users and community -- and effectively for that company? (Incidentally, the recent Gentoo fork exposes this problem with that distribution as well.)

I'm not at all optimistic that any company can get support from others to do its dirty work in this way; IMO only a non-profit maintainer-governed model is sustainable in the long run. Indeed, the case for corporate governance of distros is not unlike that for proprietary software: need a corporate entity to fund creation, coordinate releases, enforce quality control. But that idea's time has past: development of software from kernels to office suites has been communitized, and Linux distributions are going and will inevitably continue to go that way as well.

So why not take the bit of time to pop in a Knoppix CD and start the switch to a distribution with a development, quality release, and governance model which is proven to be sustainable and scalable? Or you could just keep wasting your time switching back and forth among various Debian wannabees...

Open Query: what replaces RedHat?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 20:42 UTC (Thu) by EricBackus (guest, #2816) [Link]

Maybe try SuSE? I recently went from RH8 to SuSE8.2, and I find it to be quite nice. It seems to have better integration with KDE and fewer incompatible changes to KDE. I like the breathtakingly large number of packages available in the distribution.

My impression is that most of the major Linux distributions are good and keep getting better. Try several, see what you like.
--
Eric