[LON-CAPA-admin] Fedora v. Enterprise Linux (good price on enterprise)

[Lynn Thorp]

Red Hat Enterprise has some academic pricing that is very good. $50/year 
subscription for server and $25/year for desktop.
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/education/indiv/

Lynn Thorp
This might not get to the right thread.  My "new" (we just have 
ndsu.edu, not ndsu.nodak.edu now) e-mail address wasn't registered yet 
and the e-mail got rejected so I'm reposting after I resubscribed.
Peter Kovac wrote:

 > Greetings~
 >
 >    The good news about future Suse packages/installers got me 
thinking.  As dangerous as that is, I'd also like to make a possibly 
inflamatory suggestion: I think LON-CAPA needs to replace Fedora with an 
Enterprise Linux distribution as its development base.
 >
 >    I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" flamewar. 
  I do, however, think that for L-C to grow and become more marketable, 
L-C *needs* an "Enterprise" base.  Consider the following points:
 >
 >    - Fedora has a 6-month release cycle
 >    - L-C has required new versions of the base O/S for Fedora 
upgrades at least 3 times since the Fedora project start, including for v.2
 >    - Fedora is a non enterprise-supported, community O/S with no real 
corporate backing
 >    - Some versions of Fedora have also been plagued by release bugs.
 >
 >    The kind of people that make large-scale IT decisions don't like 
to see that kind of thing.  From previous discussions with developers, 
providing generic packages for L-C is a fairly difficult and 
time-consuming task given the current setup (filesystem structure, etc). 
  For a stop-gap, I think producing a RHEL-equivalent package/installer 
would be a very good step.
 >
 >    RHEL-equivalent O/S's descend from the same source as Fedora, 
hopefully making the transition easier.  More importantly, RHEL has a 
seven-year life cycle, significant market penetration, a good 
reputation, and the possibility of purchased, enterprise-grade support. 
  RHEL has also become a de facto compatability standard.
 >
 >    Those features, of course, cost money.  However, RedHat makes 
SRPM's (*) freely available out of the kindness of their heart (oh, and 
the GPL).  This means that there are several excellent free and reliable 
projects based on RHEL that would provide a nice base for small users 
without the expensive, customized support options.  Centos [ 
http://www.centos.org/ ] (popular community project, base of such things 
as the ROCKS cluster distribution - http://rocksclusters.org/ ) and 
Scientific Linux [ http://scientificlinux.org ] (produced by Fermilab 
and CERN) are both excellent options.  Having a RHEL-equivalent 
installation package will make L-C much more palatable to MIS types and 
people managing large groups of machines.
 >
 >    Just my $.02.  And yes, if the summer continues to be slow and 
people agree with me, I'm willing to work on the transition.  ;-)
 >
 >    -P
 >



-- 
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Lynn Thorp                           e-mail : Lynn.Thorp at ndsu.edu
Systems Administrator                Phone  : (701) 231-7786
Dept. of Computer Science            Office : IACC 258A19, NDSU
   and Operations Research            Fax    : (701) 231-8255
North Dakota State University        http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu
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