Fedora or others?

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 22:04 3/31/2004, you wrote:
>I am currently in a dilemma of whether to use Fedora Core 1 or use other
>distribution for my production servers.

My sincere, personal opinion: use Fedora.

>I thought it was fortunate that Fedora is there, but I can't trust it
>since it is just a test version.

Please don't listen to the idiots who say Fedora "is just a test version."

Fedora Core 1 is exactly what Red Hat Linux 10 would have been. The major 
changes are that (1) Red Hat has opened up the development process to the 
community and will allow much, much greater participation (with the 
accompanying much greater responsibility); (2) the pace of development and 
integration of new tools and technologies will be somewhat faster; and (3) 
they do not offer nor sell commercial support.

In the past, some people said Red Hat Linux was too slow to bring in 
cutting-edge technology, while others said that progress was too quick and 
they needed servers that didn't change for several years. With the split 
between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RH attempts to please both 
while improving profitability. Red Hat is no use to any of us if they're 
broke, right?

Fedora should be approximately as stable as Red Hat Linux was, if not more 
since the whole devel process and many of the Linux tools are more mature. 
It is also Open Source, Free (as in "with freedom"), and free (as in "at no 
cost"). You are likely to enjoy it just as much, if not more, than you 
enjoyed RHL.

There is too much fear-mongering out there... if you cannot afford to pay 
money for a Linux distro, you should be happy with Fedora. You *could* also 
look at WBEL or other "rebuilt from SRPMS" copies of Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux... those will offer more robustness and stability *if* their 
communities can keep up with patches and updates. Whether or not they will 
be able to do so is, of course, too early to tell.

Cheers,


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com