On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 19:33, Vineet Kumar wrote: ... > debian's maintenance and upgrade facilities blow everything at redhat > out of the water. Completely. In the redhat world, a reinstall is SOP. > With Debian, you'll never have to reinstall. Upgrades just work. While I am using Debian in my server at home, I've upgraded bunch of RedHat Linux machines from 7.3 to 8, 8 to 9, 9 to Fedora Core 1 with apt-get (that has been compiled for RPMs) without any major problems. Of course, you can do RedHat Linux upgrade with bood floppies/CDs, but there has been easier ways for while... > > read that debian use apt, how long did debian keep support?, RedHat keep > > releasing uptades for 5 years for each version. > > I don't know where you get that figure. This: ... > I haven't been paying all that close attention, but I'm pretty sure 9 > wasn't released in 1999, nor even 8.0 for that matter. I guess he was referring to RedHat Enterprise Linux. http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ says following: Stability 12-18 month release cycle and five years of support for every version. [end of quote] Downside in RHEL is that you have to pay those yearly fees, but thats the price you have to pay, if you want/need to run Oracle or some of the other close source applications, which they only support on specific Linux distributions, or you need to be certain that your platform is supported for next five years. Debian doesn't give you similar guarantees, since it all depends on how long some volunteers are willing to maintain old versions from their packages. Most common reply to this kind of comments is that you can always buy similar support for Debian, but www.debian.org/consultants doesn't list any big companies like IBM, etc. that could guarantee global support. Even www.progeny.com, which probably has some kind of support for Debian, doesn't have any figures which system administrator could use for making some rough calculations on expected expenses, when they make purchase orders. For these reasons, redhat.com provides convening one-stop service point, where you can purchases all that you need for next x years. -- Juha Ylitalo jylitalo@iki.fi <e-mail> +358 40 562 6152 <mobile> http://www.iki.fi/jylitalo <www> "Some tools are used, because its policy, others because they are good."
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