[TriLUG] OS recommendations/Aging software issues

David W. Aquilina david at starkindler.us
Thu Jun 2 09:59:33 EDT 2005


On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 09:34:53AM -0400, Marc M wrote:
> Whatever choice I make is going to have to last for a good while. Does 
> anyone have any advice for this situation? 
 
Firstly, I'd strongly recommend against using anything that's EOL, such as Red Hat Linux 9 or Fedora Core 1 and 2 - whatever you go with you're going to want security updates to be provided by the vendor for a good long while. 

Also for that reason I'd recommend against Fedora Core - releases are made often, so it has a relatively short lifecycle. Good for a desktop user or a hobbyist, bad for something that you want to set up and not have to think about for a while.  

What's left and still Red Hat based? RHEL is a very good choice, IMBO[*]. It will provide a 7 year lifecycle, and you can get support from Red Hat should you need it. If you don't want to pay for support there are several RHEL rebuilds out there, the most popular seems to be CentOS. If you trust them to stick around, you still get the long lifecycle of RHEL but with no support. 

* In My Biased Opinion

RHEL 3 has been around for a couple years, it's losely 2.4 kernel based with several 2.6 backports. It's also similar to RHL9, so if you have applications that you know run on RHL9 chances are they'll run without trouble on RHEL3. RHEL 4 was just recently released. 

-- 
David Aquilina
david at starkindler.us



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