Whitebox Linux

Daniel Veillard veillard at redhat.com
Tue Jan 13 20:30:53 UTC 2004


On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:44:19AM -0600, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
[...]
> RH had to do *something* if it was to survive as a company.  Unfortunately,
> while I have been very happy to support RH at work by purchasing RHEL, I
> have not that option at home.  I simply don't have the cash to purchase RHEL
> for home use, even considering that it costs just as much as Winbloze.
> 
> Fedora is very cool, and I'm testing it and writing HOWTO's for it now, but
> I don't know if I can keep up with the upgrade schedule.  Which leaves me
> and a whole bunch of others between the rock and the hard place.

  If you think that upgrading between Fedora Core release looks too much
of a burden, nothing prevents trying to build tools making that process
smoother. I think there is a number of good ideas which are fine playing
with on home boxes, but that you would not want to try on your database
server at work. Things like live upgrade without reboots, or using 
User Mode Linux to test upgrade progressively while still running the
previous system "just in case". Really there is a lot of neat ideas
that enthusiasts could come up with (or resurect from other areas
like Mainframes or Multics) for which Fedora would be a great testbed.
  One of Fedora goals is precisely to be a test field for innovative
code, sysadmin and maintainance tasks are certainly a place which
could be improved a lot, packages are a really great building block for
this but more systematic and higher level services and tools can certainly
be built on top. You can't keep up with perceived upgrade schedule,
so there is an itch to scratch and in the tradition of OSS that's usually
where you get new developments. Sysadmin and maintainance may look less
glamourous than kernel hacking or building Apache, but it would probably
reach very quick a very wide audience, if your need is better sysadmin
tools, then the solution is not to change distros, it's to design and
implement better tools :-)

Daniel

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