[PLUG] The bullet has been bitten

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Thu May 10 13:46:36 UTC 2007


Dan Young wrote:
> On 5/6/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
>> No ... what's different about Fedora is corporate support. The forums
>> are public, the processes are open, the innovation is rapid, etc. for
>> Debian, Gentoo, and CentOS as well.
>
> Debian is rapidly innovating?
>
> CentOS is repackaging what Red Hat provides. A great community
> service, but hardly innovation.
>
Both Debian and CentOS are tributaries of the same open source river. 
You really have to compare Fedora with Debian "sid", not "etch", which 
is where I started.

In any event, my initial goal in choosing Etch and CentOS 5 was to test 
the latest "stable" distros on brand-new hardware. As it turned out, 
neither was stable enough to use. As luck would have it, Gentoo released 
2007.0 on Monday and the machine is more or less up and running. The x86 
(32-bit) version hasn't hiccupped yet, which I think exonerates the bulk 
of the hardware. The x86_64/AMD64 version is flaky but better than Etch 
or CentOS. And it looks like there are some things that require a more 
recent kernel -- Gentoo's 2.6.19 is better than the 2.6.18 in Etch and 
CentOS, and Gentoo's 2.6.20 is better still. I'm running their 2.4.21 
kernel problem-free on my other two boxes, which are 32-bit, so it's 
probably going to get put into the new box as well. Then at least I'll 
have something I feel comfortable filing bugs against. :)

Gentoo is probably the best distro for people who are, like me, in the 
process of kernel/hardware testing. Most of the other distros have 
created monstrous kernels that attempt to support every piece of gear 
one could possibly own and don't really make it *easy* to recompile a 
kernel. Debian at least provides the capability of rebuilding kernels, 
although I couldn't figure it out the other day.



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