[lug] Moving from RedHat 8 to Fedora

[Collins Richey]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:34:56 -0500, Gordon Golding
<gordongoldin at netscape.net> wrote:
> I'm thinking of taking an old RedHAt 8 machine down and rebuilding it with Fedora.
> 
> 1)  What's the opinion on Fedora vs. RedHat?  Is it _really_ better?
> 
> 2)  Can anybody think of major issues that I need to wath out for?
> Our code-base is Java 1.4 with Postgres.
> 

I can only cite some of the benefits, and I must say in advance that I
only run desktop systems:

1. Fedora is right up there with a relatively modern toolbase and 2.6.10 kernel.
2. Most everything just works. I haven't put Postgres on the system
yet, but MySQL was pretty much a no brainer.
3. Like everything RedHat, there are extremely few (IMO, based on
experience with Debian or Gentoo) RPM packages for FCn. Of course,
this is not a problem for a server.
4. YUM or APT-GET for RPM is a big improvement over raw RPM stuff in
the past. Even the critical portion of up2date is available free of
charge.
5. Free as in beer, and RedHat has just announced its intention to
beef up support for Fedora. They've finally realized that screwing
over a large portion of your customer base is not a smart idea.

One disadvantage, and that's a matter of opinion)

1. The basic desktop system is GNOME-GNOME-GNOME. That's not to say
that you can't put KDE on the system (the RPMs are there). I've been a
dyed-in-the-wool XFCE user, but I've been pleasantly surprised by
GNOME.

I would suspect that the versions of Java/Postgres might create some
upgrade problems, but that's the case anytime you jump up a notch or
two.

Try it; you may like it.

One of my associates on the linux-users list checked out the upgrade
path from one FCn release to another (FC2 to FC3). Other than 45
minutes of down time, he encountered no problems.

Given RedHat's love of bleeding-edge package choices, I'm really
surprised that I haven't encountered any problems with my FC3 setup.

-- 
 Collins