[LON-CAPA-admin] Lunix distro options

[James A. Mueller]

>> My question then is there really any risk to our school's network  because we
>> run FC?  If so, what other options should I peruse?  He mentioned Cent OS
>> (I've never heard of it) and suse.  I work for a high school in a very small
>> district and I like the fact that FC is free.

> Cent OS is attempt to build a free version of RHEL out of the source
> RPMS, we haven't tried doing a lon-capa install on it in house. But if
> you want to try it out. The RHEL 4 instructions might work on it.

We are using Scientific Linux (www.scientificlinux.org) which is another
RHEL rebuild.  The RHEL instructions work fine execpt for the following
minor items.

1) loncom/build/distprobe won't understand what is inside
your /etc/redhat-release.  You can either modify distprobe, or just lie
to it by changing /etc/redhat-release from 
"Scientific Linux SL release 4.2" to
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4.2"

2) SL uses yum for updates, so we use yum for system updates.  We only
use up2date to get the loncapa updates for RHEL4, because we haven't
been able to get to
install.loncapa.org/redhat/linux/enterprise/loncapa/4ES/ through yum.
I expect that this issue will go away when Redhat dumps up2date in
RHEL5.

I expect that CentOS would have only minor problems like these as well.

		-Jim Mueller