We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us.
So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to see about these longer lived Linuxes. Got any advice? I expect some of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.
I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess). I don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies." I don't want one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window manager and desktop than Gnome).
Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life. But I worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such. gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to Brazilian radio stations. Nothing else can, it appears. So If I switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5 system onto one of the other RPM based distros. It appears to me that CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just try to run an upgrade by installing their packages. Maybe remove fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. Last time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways. When we went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted. One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more work.
So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson pauljohn32@gmail.com wrote:
We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us.
Yah, most Fedora users will warn you against such if you ask preinstall. If you're asking whether or not you can simply upgrade from Fedora to CentoOS, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. You can migrate by doing fresh installs, ie. redeploying the system however.
Do tell, what packages of yours require recompilation every kernel upgrade? That seems a bigger issue.
Also, why aren't you using (what I believe to be) freely available Fedora build systems to automate the process - regardless of your final choice of distro.
Good luck.
-- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
Paul Johnson wrote:
Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life. But I worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such. gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to Brazilian radio stations. Nothing else can, it appears. So If I switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
Both SL and Centos will use RPMs built for RHEL for things not included int the distro. I don't know much about SL - but Centos is very timely about making updates available after RH releases them.
I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5 system onto one of the other RPM based distros. It appears to me that CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just try to run an upgrade by installing their packages. Maybe remove fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
That's probably possible, but I would do a clean install so you know exactly what you'll be running for the next several years.
In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. Last time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways. When we went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted. One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more work.
Centos5 is going to have apps nearly identical to what FC6 had at the time it was released. And they'll stay at that rev with only bugfix and security updates for years.
So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
Centos5 isn't bad today, but the apps will likely seem outdated in another year. But, in the fedora/RH world you have to take wild and crazy changes in the kernel and device drivers if you want a new firefox. What would you like your disk drives named today?
On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:47 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us.
So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to see about these longer lived Linuxes. Got any advice? I expect some of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.
I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess). I don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies." I don't want one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window manager and desktop than Gnome).
Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life. But I worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such. gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to Brazilian radio stations. Nothing else can, it appears. So If I switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5 system onto one of the other RPM based distros. It appears to me that CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just try to run an upgrade by installing their packages. Maybe remove fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. Last time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways. When we went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted. One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more work.
So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
---- I haven't migrated from Fedora to RHEL/CentOS and I've never used Scientific Linux.
I would recommend CentOS over Scientific Linux only because they are so vigilant about upstream compatibility and releasing updates.
It's conceivable that you could migrate from FC5 or FC6 to CentOS-5 by as you say, removing redhat-release and redhat-release-notes and installing the relevant corresponding packages from CentOS or Scientific Linux - see http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/MigrationGuide
Also note my notes about migrating from RHELv5 to CentOS-5 near the bottom.
It's conceivable that some rpm's from FC6 are newer/higher numbered than RHELv5/CentOS-5/SL-5 and that may cause some issues...I simply wouldn't know what they might be because I haven't done any.
It probably would be safer to boot from CD's/DVD and using
linux upgradeany
at boot but yum can undoubtedly handle the migration and it would appear that you have the technical savvy to handle any bumps in the migration path.
I would agree with you that the relatively short cycle of Fedora is an issue and RHEL / CentOS / Scientific Linux obviously gives you the longer cycle with the obvious problems that stable per RHEL means you don't typically get the latest gcc, etc.
In my circumstance, I have thus far been using Fedora on desktops and have used a fairly elaborate kickstart system to wipe the hard drive and install / configure Fedora so completely that when completed, the box can be dropped into the user's office and plugged in. I have thus far balked on the idea of trying to upgrade in place but I am thinking I am going to experiment with the migration from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 via yum...obviously with the fallback position that I can always grab the box and run the kickstart install.
Craig
On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson pauljohn32@gmail.com wrote:
The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us. ... In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. ... So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
I agree very much with your sentiment. On our servers we run Scientific Linux. The desktops run Fedora.
The servers are great, but admittedly we use a much smaller set of software. With the desktops, its either do updates frequently or do them 500 at a time. I'd be a lot happier if the kernel was updated less frequently (like with the server.)
Right now, I think the happy medium might be with the latest SL, and a few applications like Firefox and Thunderbird compiled by hand in /usr/local/...
On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson pauljohn32@gmail.com wrote:
We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us.
for external kernel modules id recommend taking a look into dkms. saves you alot hassle.
regards, Rudolf Kastl
So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to see about these longer lived Linuxes. Got any advice? I expect some of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.
I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess). I don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies." I don't want one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window manager and desktop than Gnome).
Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life. But I worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such. gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to Brazilian radio stations. Nothing else can, it appears. So If I switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5 system onto one of the other RPM based distros. It appears to me that CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just try to run an upgrade by installing their packages. Maybe remove fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. Last time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways. When we went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted. One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more work.
So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
-- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
Michael Semcheski wrote:
On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson pauljohn32@gmail.com wrote:
The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us. ... In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. ... So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on a one year old distro, it was very handy.
I agree very much with your sentiment. On our servers we run Scientific Linux. The desktops run Fedora.
The servers are great, but admittedly we use a much smaller set of software. With the desktops, its either do updates frequently or do them 500 at a time. I'd be a lot happier if the kernel was updated less frequently (like with the server.)
Right now, I think the happy medium might be with the latest SL, and a few applications like Firefox and Thunderbird compiled by hand in /usr/local/...
Currently I care for SL5 (my current desktop at home), CentOS 4 (desktop at work, and a server at home) and WBEL 4. Oh, and a RHL 7.3->CentOS3 for theboss@home. I should also mention some FC and an OpenSUSE10.2 laptop.
I would have no concerns about SL5 or CentOS5. Choose based on package selection; SL5 may have the edge for you. Both are built from RHEL5 source with minimal changes, but SL5 has extras for the scientific community.
There is no reason at all why you can't install SL, and use packages from the CentOS repos, RHEL users do it fairly regularly.
I think SL supports Atheros wireless out of the box, and includes real Java and some other stuff important to scientists.
The main difference I see between SL and CentOS is the size of the communities and work force; Essentially, SL is done by (I think) two people (but I think they're paid to do it) whilst CentOS, like Fedora, is chiefly done by volunteers.
Both are supported by mailing lists, and I reckon if one's using RHEL-Clone then hanging out on the relevant RHEL list is also appropriate.
There used to be Tao linux, and google may still know of it. It merged with CentOS a while back.
WBEL is basically "what we use here, built from RHEL source. You may use it, but don't come here for help." It was an okay choice when I downloaded it, but I see no reason to prefer it now.
You could also look at SUSE, and maybe evaluate it. it's rpm-based, and yast really is very nice. There's no SUSE-clone that I've noticed, but OTOH the licence fees may be fairly modest for academe.
Academe should also check out RHEL prices; I haven't for some time, but I think one can run RHEL for a modest cost (and get extremely modest support).
As for upgrading, I think that all that's needed to upgrade from FC to Tikanga-clone is to boot the media and go for it. That might be some required magic (upgradeany os some such), and one should check ("rpm -qa --last | less") for packages that didn't get upgraded and explore why not. likely some will be orphaned, but those could be a problem however you do it.
FC3->Tikanga-clone should be about the same upgrade as the (supported) Nahant->Tikanga, and FC6->Tikanga like Tikanga->Tikanga, and I think that's supported too.
On 10/31/07, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson pauljohn32@gmail.com wrote:
We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date.
Do tell, what packages of yours require recompilation every kernel upgrade? That seems a bigger issue.
These are the modules I need to build whenever the kernel changes. Sometimes I can get nvidia from livna, sometimes it is not ready yet. I build these as RPMS, so usually there's just minimal work to run rpmbuild and then copy the RPMS onto the server where yum finds them for the workstations.
nvidia openafs ipw3945
Also, why aren't you using (what I believe to be) freely available Fedora build systems to automate the process - regardless of your final choice of distro.
Tempted to say WFT are you talking about, but I'm trying not to cuss.
What do you mean? I mean to say.
Good luck.
-- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
-- Fedora 7 : sipping some of that moonshine ( www.pembo13.com )
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:47 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us.
If you like RPM based installs, and you like the work Red Hat have done around Fedora, why don't you reward them for it?
You can get RHEL for less than a buck a day:
https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html
See the Basic subscription for RHEL two sockets or less.
In doing so, you are funding Red Hat, and Red Hat pays many hundreds of F/OSS developers. You get updates, bug fixes, new versions of RHEL when they come out, and so on. Everyone wins.
Just my two cents.