Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Which OS for new OpenACS.org

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Yet Another Distribution alternative is CentOS, which like White Box Linux, is a rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise source rpms, with all non-open-source Red Hat content removed, etc. Why you'd pick one over the other, I've no idea.

The same folks also do cAos, which is a different rpm based distribution, not based on Red Hat. Personally, I may experiment with cAos at some point because the Warewulf cluster folks recommend it, but every time I look again at all these random different rpm-based distributions, I become annoyed and am again inclined to stick exclusively with Debian.

One little anecdote I say recently: Someone mention that their group had installed Debian on their Beowulf cluster - more than 7 years ago. Despite two major hardware upgrades, no re-installs at all, just lots of "apt-get upgrade".

I don't know of any other distribution that has actually maintained a solid upgrade path for 7+ years. Red Hat never even came close - even back in the Red Hat 6.x days c. 2000 or 2001, long before they orphaned all their non-Enterprise users, upgrading from one point release to another often didn't work anyway.

It is nice though to see many of the rpm-based distributions finally adopting apt-get or yum, and attempting to give Debian some competition.