[SATLUG] OS Longevity

[Sean Carolan]

I considered going with Redhat Enterprise Linux but found the RedHat
sales reps to be very unhelpful.  When I asked them what they would be
willing to do to get my business they basically shrugged and gave me
the list pricing for their support plans.  Upon asking what those
support plans included, I was not impressed.  We like to do business
with people who are eager to provide good customer service and RedHat
didn't cut it.  Same with Novell/Suse - not very helpful at all.  They
would likely have a much bigger market share if they had better
trained their salespeople.

So the next question - why FC2?  There are a few reasons we went with
Fedora Core 2, I'll try to name a few here:

*  Bluecurve desktop looks so similar to MS windows that my end-users
picked it up within a couple of days.  Usability was a big concern for
us, and both I and my sales reps really like the custom Gnome
interface on the FC2 distro.

*  Needed to have the latest kernel for our dual-raid drives to work. 
We purchased this server not knowing that it was a mutant
software-raid hybrid thing that required some special MS-specific
drivers to make the disks work in a RAID0 array.  In the end we went
with the 2.6 kernel specifically because of the built-in support for
the SATA drives.  If one of the drives fails, I have a spare in my
drawer that I can plug in to rebuild the array.

*  Newer packages for Open Office, Gaim, etc. make a big difference
for our end-users.   The version of OO that we have has built in
support for printing to PDF files and attaching them to an email with
Evolution.  This is a huge timesaver for my sales reps, who can either
fax or email out a quote right from within their Open Office
environment, without having to first save then type an email, then
find the file, then try to attach it to the email, etc.  That being
said, I am not at all a big fan of the default Nautilus
"Open-a-new-window-for-everything-you-do" setup.

*  Very active community behind this distro.  The IRC channel is
sometimes filled with so-called "1337" hax0rs but I have found the
mailing lists and bugzilla to be quite useful.

*  Yum is very good for busy person like myself to keep the server up
to date, at least with the latest security patches.

So in the end we have made a compromise between being on the "bleeding
edge" and sticking with a stable distribution but older packages.  I
have found the 2.6 kernel to be rock solid, the only time it really
locked up was when I had misconfigured the raid drives, and that was
due entirely to user error.

I'm thinking that a safe bet may be to stick with the FC2 distro with
current kernel as long as we can, and just update individual packages
as necessary.

Thank you for your input, it's always nice to hear from people more
experienced than myself.

-Sean