[lug] Interesting news

[Gary Hodges]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> Gary Hodges said:
> 
>>Jeffrey Brown wrote:
>>
>>>Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire Leading Enterprise Linux
>>>Technology Company SUSE LINUX
>>
>>Well, what the hell am I to think about this?  Here I am right on the
>>cusp of getting everyone in my group behind SuSE because of their good
>>distribution and business model that is well suited to our group.
> 
> 
> Have you considered breaking up the distribution and the support?
> 
> Then you could pick a distro that isn't going anywhere (i.e. Debian) and a
> support outfit who's immutable business model is supporting whatever you
> have

Actually, a couple months ago I was thinking we would head down the 
Debian path.  I went to that distribution meeting with a Debian slant, 
but also with an open mind.  SuSE pretty much sold me, and there were a 
few, I won't say negative, comments about Debian that got me thinking 
that Debian may not work for us.

We are a small group with no full time sys admin.  I'm a meteorologist 
who is our Linux admin by default.  I want a dist that I can pop in the 
CDs and have everything going an hour later.  I've played around with a 
couple of Debian installs, and I just didn't get that ease-of-install 
feeling I was looking for.  As for support, we really don't need 
anything official.  Thanks to all of you on lug I manage to work through 
most all of the issues that come up here.

Third party software is another issue.  Several of the folks here use 
S-Plus.  Maybe that works on Debian, but I don't know.  We use IDL a lot 
too.

Cheers,
Gary