Forum OpenACS Development: New linux distribution to replace defunct RedHat consumer?

as redhat are removing all support for redhat consumer releases, i'm looking at moving all my servers to a new distro - i was thinking debian, but maybe i should switch to gentoo.

the linux world is reall going to hurt - i have a lot of servers runnnig a few pieces of commercial code that secify redhat and may or may not work on other distros (certainly not without some pain...)

has anyone else been thinking about this? maybe we should run a poll to see what the popular distros are for dev and deployment. we might all be surprised!

Mark,

You must have just received your notification, as I did, that RH is discontinuing support for 7 & 8 on December 31st, and 9 in April of next year... in favor of their enterprise product support services. I was just about to pose the same question.

I liked knowing that a group of commercially-motivated folks were watching after security and stability, and provided a no-brainer means to keep current with up2date. I know lots of folks can't see paying for this service since it's all free software. But I got more than my $5 worth of peace-of-mind each month.

So, which distro(s) provides a no-brainer way of keeping current with security patches, and also provides a reasonably timely distribution channel for new and modified packakages/applications?

I don't see this thread as a "my distro is better than yours" war. As for me, I'm interested in:

1) a no-brainer way of keeping current with security patches, and

2) a reasonably timely distribution channel for new and modified packakages/applications

Professionally I am also using Suse if people are new to Linux - an easier sell in Germany.

Otherwise I suggest Debian: it is the Linux with the clearest and most open strategy out there. It is truly open source and free. Oh and it is rock-solid and hence great for server-side software.

Red Hat still supports Fedora with people, for how long that remains to be seen. The next quarterly hiccup may see a certain cut of support...

You cannot buy support from Red Hat for Fedora though.

Joel,
as a person who heavily relay on the install docs, I'm happy to learn that you care about debian.

<Install docs work for Debian sid>

Sid is the unstable distribution, the one "where active development of Debian occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers and those who like to live on the edge." (debian.org/)

Why not woody or sarge? Personally, as a beginner, I do not like to "live on the edge."

Re Gentoo,
I dumped RH a long time ago and have been using Gentoo ever since.
If anything it is a much better server distro than RH and the update system is more like BSD than anything else.
The only downside (for newbies) is it is a source based distro, i.e. all packages are compiled from source and you can't set up a system in 1 hour. The advantage is a highly optimized system

Do we need to pick one distribution?  I can see value in having a 'main' distribution which we can point new and distro agnostic users to as well as encourage maintenance effort for one distro...  but I would have thought it would be beneficial to have a place on openacs.org for installation docs on any distro anyone wants to support.  I'm assuming this decision isn't going to stop openacs from installing on alternatives.

I've been running Gentoo for a while and I think it's a great distro.  The ebuild packages Chris Johnson put together work well and encouraged me to do some work on them myself.  Currently I plan to keep maintaining them (and an openacs ebuild if Chris doesn't beat me to it), so it would be nice if there was a place on openacs.org for some docs and links even if Gentoo isn't the communities first choice.

Some interesting followup points:

* True Fedora will continue to support - but no up2date system

* HOWEVER, Ximian has indicated that their red carpet updater will continue to channel the appropriate updates.

* Speaking of Novell subsidiaries, Novell buying SuSe (and IBM investing on Novell on condition of that purchase) makes SuSe look sensible.

* Red Hat's chief executive tells consumers to buy Windows instead of running linux, makes RedHat look stupid.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39117575,00.htm

Interesting times we live in!

Hm, it's been a year and a half now, so it's probably worth asking this again.

Is there any Linux distribution and support service uitable for the completely clueless home desktop computer user? It has to be something inexpensive and dead-simple which Just Works, yet gives them, out of the box all the Internet browsing desktop bells and whistles the expect - Java, Flash, mp3 and mpeg players, etc.

Does Linspire meet those requirements? Last time I looked (when it was still called "Lindows"), they were having the desktop user log in as root - ugh, sorry, no way in hell will I recommend any system doing that. Is that fixed now?

Any Linspire competitors? (And any that are Debian or Ubuntu based?) Mepis might be the ideal Linux distribution for this, except AFAIK there is no one you can buy AOL-like support from.

i think we should try to give factual answers too.

even moreso, i think redhat should give factual answers.

i don't know whether they have some poor tech support people who are very confused about the direction of their company, but information even from them seems to be misleading or just plain wrong.

so straightening out misunderstandings will be helpful.

Luigi, I use debian stable, as do many other developers here. We let the doc person know whenever something doesn't work! So I wouldn't have any hesitation about using debian stable.

Thanks Lamar, that is really helpful to know.

I hope the OACS community, of all Free and Open Sourec Software communities, realizes that just because a company decides to stop supporting a certain product doesn't mean the product will die...

talli

Thanks to Lee for pointing out that through his, mine, and other efforts gentoo packages will remain up to date and available for development and hopefully production use.

I, too, face the problem up keeping a work Redhat box up to date with the possibility of making a hard decision between Fedora, Enterprise ($$) Redhat, or Other distro next spring. I think we will end up going with one flavor of RH or another (either Fedora like I said or Enterprise).

I think Debian has shown how easy the administration of a distro *can* be.

I think Gentoo has shown how easy to configure, understand/learn, and keep extremely up to date a distro *can* be.  This is my home development and deployment distro.

But no one to my satisfaction has solved the Really Big problems, some of which have been mentioned in this thread: API upgrade paths to keep binary and API compatibility over several years on a box.  Java and .Net are designed with that more in mind, and I'm sure that WinLonghorn will be closer to it than Win32 is for sure.

The real winner will probably be DragonFly BSD, which is spinning off of FreeBSD 4.x (and something I may move to next after it gets some momentum):

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/Goals/packages.cgi

This is one of the most exciting and concise descriptions of the problem and proposed plan I have come across--highly recommended if still theoretical reading.

Fedora has recently gotten more community involvement, and is extremely nice to use. My only complaint about it is the very short lifecycle (18 months, with Fedora Legacy handling another year or two or three...but no guarantees). It's still my favorite distribution, though my latest production server, and the one where I'm running OpenACS, is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0. Yeah, it costs a little money, but I get a five year life cycle, and they do respond quite nicely to bug reports. I have about 100 Fedora servers that I'm responsible for (indirectly...they belong to customers), and only a couple of RHEL boxes, so it should be clear that I still prefer Fedora for almost everything.

Gentoo is a nightmare on servers primarily because its package management is horrible. I know portage has many fans, but it has some pretty major limitations: Creating a local repository of additional apps is very difficult compared to yum...I've read the docs on how to do it, and when they say things like "to get the dependencies for your application, build it with all options enabled and simply download them with wget". Umm, yeah, I want to babysit my repository such that I have to manually download things with wget. Querying installed packages is laughably limited, compared to RPM or deb. And egads, who thinks a 2% performance boost (or 2% drop if you choose the wrong options) is worth hours of compiling? Madness. Anyway, I just can't see running Gentoo on anything other than "play" systems. Clearly, I'm not the target audience for this distro...I compile enough software managing my own products, I don't need the thrill of compiling everything on my operating system in order to feel like I'm involved or in control. I know they provide binaries, but it is clearly an afterthought, and binary builds are second-class citizens. I've yet to even figure out how to get at the pre-built binaries, as it doesn't seem to be documented in the emerge man page (maybe I missed it).

Debian has a nice long lifecycle, and Ubuntu has followed suit. If I weren't such a fan of yum/RPM, I'd probably be on the Debian or Ubuntu bandwagon. They have proper package management, it's reasonably easy to setup local repositories without maintaining a complete mirror or jumping through crazy hoops.

I haven't tried any others, but for servers here's what I've learned to look for:

Long updates lifecycle. My desktop machines get upgraded to the next revision within days of a new release. My servers remain on the same OS for years. I've got RH9 boxes still chugging along with no plans for an upgrade (thank goodness for Fedora Legacy so I don't have to maintain all of the packages myself). If I can't expect to get updates for three years, I don't want it.

Good package management. Without good automatic package management, like yum/apt-get/up2date, maintaining more than a few secure servers just is not possible. This is my biggest beef with FreeBSD (which is otherwise a very fine server OS)--managing updates with ports is horrible (much like the ports-inspired portage). Even if many of your apps are custom-built, you still have several hundred or so packages that all effect the stability and security of the whole system. An inferior package manager is enough of a reason for me to forget about using an OS on the server.

Hmmm...That's about it. With those two things most everything else just falls into place. yum/apt-get have the ability to use multiple repositories for grabbing software which has led to a wonderful variety of high quality packages from the likes of Dag Wieers, Axel Thimm, and others. Getting a missing package is now almost always one command away (and having it under control of the package manager means that you don't have to keep the same volume of notes of what software you've installed--it will usually automatically get updated when new versions are available).

Hi Vlad,

You consider Pacman superior to RPM? I've looked at it in the past and I'm utterly perplexed by this assertion. In what way(s)?

I think what you are looking for is CentOS. Its built from RHEL sources. Long cycle and no required payed support.

Interesting, Patrick.

I'm tempted by Solaris 10 zones (and dtrace) too, but I confess that at this point I'm addicted to apt...

We here at MAICh are using Slackware linux 4 years now and we are pleased of the performance simplicity and security of this distro. Since we do a little bit of development too Slack is the best distro I used so far. If something will not compile in Slack it will not compile anywhere :) Maybe you can give it a chance