[NCLUG] Suggestions for a distro change

[Mike Jensen]

This is an interesting argument, and maybe I am miss-informed.  But it
took two years for lenny to be stable.  That means that Etch had a product
support time for 3 years (two years it was the current product + 1 year
past it's replacement time).

So even though it is only 1 year past product life time, the product
versions do not change very fast.  At least that is my understanding,
correct me if I am wrong.

cheers,
Mike Jensen
jent at afkfoo.com

On Tue, April 7, 2009 13:08, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Shelley, Robert - Fort Collins, CO wrote:
>> Linux distros, let me be the first to suggest Debian Long Term Stable.
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-choosing.en.html#s3.1  It is intended
>
> Debian stable is *NOT* a "long term" release, certainly not in the family
> of the "LT" in Ubuntu LTS or CentOS.  Debian only provides security
> updates for a release for 1 year after the following release, so it's
> fairly heavily driven by the Debian schedule.  Which means that right now
> we don't know how much longer Debian Lenny is going to be supported, and
> Etch is only supported for 10 months now.
>
> This is why I think that Debian is not a good choice for production
> servers.
>
> Of course, it really depends on what you mean by "server".  If you mean
> something like "My music server at home", it's probably fine.  If you mean
> "The server at my data center that runs all these public-facing services,"
> in my experience Debian has not been a good choice.
>
> Neither is Fedora or Ubuntu non-LTS or OpenSUSE.
>
> If you are currently running Fedora, CentOS is probably what you want to
> look at.  It has 7 years of support, so CentOS 4 is supported until 2012,
> and CentOS 5 until 2014.  CentOS 3 even is supported for another 18
> months.
>
> Red Hat Enterprise is also an option, if you would like to pay the (modest
> IMHO) price for support.
>
> Ubuntu LTS (8.04 currently) is another good choice.  The nice thing about
> Ubuntu LTS is that it's the same thing as the general release, there's not
> a Fedora/CentOS split like there is with RHEL.
>
> However, *NOT* all Ubuntu releases are LTS, so you don't just go grab the
> latest Ubuntu you need to make sure to get the LTS if you want the longer
> package cycle.  This confusion is the down side of there being no split
> like
> Fedora/CentOS...
>
> SUSE is really only an option if you are willing to pay for it.  There is
> no CentOS equivalent of SLES -- OpenSUSE is *NOT* an LTS release.  This is
> IMHO one of the major weaknesses of SUSE.
>
> One thing to realize is that you pay a price for these longer term
> releases.  The packages on them will be older, so if you really rely on
> having recent packages you are likely to be disappointed.  If that's the
> case you either need to look at back-porting the packages you need (which
> can range in pain from "little" to "sticking your face in a fan",
> depending
> on how invasive that package is).
>
> If you really need more recent packages, you will have to carefully think
> about whether you should go with a non-LTS release that has the packages
> you need, and take the pain of updating, deciding if you can live with the
> older versions, or deal with back-porting and checking for updates of the
> packages.
>
> I realize that a lot of this is just echoing what others have said in this
> thread, but I think it also expands a bit on some of what was said.
>
> Thanks,
> Sean
> --
> Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
> tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High
> Availability
>
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