CentOS - Oct 2008 - Tired of Fedora, shopping for a new OS. Upgrade from F8 ? CentOS kernel versions ?

I've been a RH/Fedora guy since the RH8 days.  When Fedora came along, I
moved to it, but its been a bit painful beta testing software all the
time.   I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I found their package management
to be difficult... I do a lot of technical work, development and loading
and building special stuff.  I much prefer RPMs over other methods of
package distribution.

Presently I'm miffed with the Fedora community.  Back in July I blindly
upgraded to F9 because I was in need of a few things that it shipped
with.  Little did I know it contained KDE4 or more precisely a rough,
unfinished version of KDE4.  I stuck with it, however, and upgraded to
KDE4.1 and finally to KDE 4.1.2.

About a month ago I received a new laptop.  Being it was a new machine,
I did a fresh install of F8 on it, thus dumping KDE4.

While all has been well since then, I am watching the KDE4 release
schedule and noting that I don't think KDE4 is going to be done, ie
polished and ready to use until late spring, 2009.  I've also noted the
Fedora is going to abandon support for F8 before Christmas.  As F9
contains a very bleeding edge version of KDE4, I am loathe to upgrade to
it.   

Thus I am shopping for a new OS to solve this problem and the problem of
continually being a beta tester if one is an up to date Fedora user.
With Fedora it seems that one just gets a new installation working
nicely when support for it is dropped and the cycle starts all over
again.  I'd like to get away from that.

So... questions.

a) I am running F8 right now.   Most, but not all, of the package
versions seem about the same as CentOS 5.2.   Kernels are the notable
exception to this rule.  Could I forego F8 updates for a while, to leave
CentOS catch up, and then add the CentOS repository to my repo list and
"update" to the CentOS via yum ?

b) One of the things I really need are up to date (bleeding edge)
kernels.  For example, F8 has 2.6.26 kernels, whereas CentOS appears to
be running 2.6.18 kernels.  I do know how to build my own kernels, but
that is a pain.

Does someone keep a separate repository that has more modern kernels ?
Can yum be configured to use only specific packages (ie kernels) from a
specific repository ?

c) Is there any problem with using the livna repository for various
things that I might need ?  I notice that they don't have a CentOS
specific repository, but would it be OK to point to F8 or so and use
those RPMs ?

Thanks

I'm listening if you have any other comments or advice on my situation. 

LG

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com>
wrote:


> Thus I am shopping for a new OS to solve this problem and the problem of
> continually being a beta tester if one is an up to date Fedora user.
> With Fedora it seems that one just gets a new installation working
> nicely when support for it is dropped and the cycle starts all over
> again.  I'd like to get away from that.
>
> So... questions.
>
> a) I am running F8 right now.   Most, but not all, of the package
> versions seem about the same as CentOS 5.2.   Kernels are the notable
> exception to this rule.  Could I forego F8 updates for a while, to leave
> CentOS catch up, and then add the CentOS repository to my repo list and
> "update" to the CentOS via yum ?
>
It would not work too well.  For stability you would be better
installing CentOS-5 as the glibc, etc in F-8 are much newer than EL-5.
> b) One of the things I really need are up to date (bleeding edge)
> kernels.  For example, F8 has 2.6.26 kernels, whereas CentOS appears to
> be running 2.6.18 kernels.  I do know how to build my own kernels, but
> that is a pain.
>
CentOS is a bug-for-bug rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL-5
will always be 2.6.18 so this does not look this would be a good
match. Using bleeding edge kernels on CentOS-5 are up to the user to
build and debug. Not sure how many applications you would have to
update to work with a bleeding edge kernel: udev, hal, dbus, etc would
all need updates and the programs relying on them would need
updates... recurse until you run out of packages.

> c) Is there any problem with using the livna repository for various
> things that I might need ?  I notice that they don't have a CentOS
> specific repository, but would it be OK to point to F8 or so and use
> those RPMs ?
>
No.. you would need to use EL-5 repository.




-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> b) One of the things I really need are up to date (bleeding edge)
> kernels.  For example, F8 has 2.6.26 kernels, whereas CentOS appears to
> be running 2.6.18 kernels.  I do know how to build my own kernels, but
> that is a pain.
> 
> Does someone keep a separate repository that has more modern kernels ?
> Can yum be configured to use only specific packages (ie kernels) from a
> specific repository ?
Why not step up and offer to maintain a bleeding edge kernel in the 
centos-plus repos ?

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq

on 10-30-2008 12:51 PM Linuxguy123 spake the following:
> I've been a RH/Fedora guy since the RH8 days.  When Fedora came along,
I
> moved to it, but its been a bit painful beta testing software all the
> time.   I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I found their package management
> to be difficult... I do a lot of technical work, development and loading
> and building special stuff.  I much prefer RPMs over other methods of
> package distribution.
> 
> Presently I'm miffed with the Fedora community.  Back in July I blindly
> upgraded to F9 because I was in need of a few things that it shipped
> with.  Little did I know it contained KDE4 or more precisely a rough,
> unfinished version of KDE4.  I stuck with it, however, and upgraded to
> KDE4.1 and finally to KDE 4.1.2.
> 
> About a month ago I received a new laptop.  Being it was a new machine,
> I did a fresh install of F8 on it, thus dumping KDE4.
> 
> While all has been well since then, I am watching the KDE4 release
> schedule and noting that I don't think KDE4 is going to be done, ie
> polished and ready to use until late spring, 2009.  I've also noted the
> Fedora is going to abandon support for F8 before Christmas.  As F9
> contains a very bleeding edge version of KDE4, I am loathe to upgrade to
> it.   
> 
> Thus I am shopping for a new OS to solve this problem and the problem of
> continually being a beta tester if one is an up to date Fedora user.
> With Fedora it seems that one just gets a new installation working
> nicely when support for it is dropped and the cycle starts all over
> again.  I'd like to get away from that.
> 
> So... questions.
> 
> a) I am running F8 right now.   Most, but not all, of the package
> versions seem about the same as CentOS 5.2.   Kernels are the notable
> exception to this rule.  Could I forego F8 updates for a while, to leave
> CentOS catch up, and then add the CentOS repository to my repo list and
> "update" to the CentOS via yum ?
Actually, CentOS 5 branched from Fedora 6. At that point they did a freeze on
changes to the OS.
> 
> b) One of the things I really need are up to date (bleeding edge)
> kernels.  For example, F8 has 2.6.26 kernels, whereas CentOS appears to
> be running 2.6.18 kernels.  I do know how to build my own kernels, but
> that is a pain.
What do you need in the bleeding edge kernels? If you are looking at security
updates, those get backported very regularly. If you are looking for drivers,
that is a different story. The Enterprise distros tend to stay at the dull
side of the knife. The bleeding edge is not where you want to be when you want
a server up for "five nines".
> 
> Does someone keep a separate repository that has more modern kernels ?
> Can yum be configured to use only specific packages (ie kernels) from a
> specific repository ?
You have to build your own and accept the
responsibility.
> 
> c) Is there any problem with using the livna repository for various
> things that I might need ?  I notice that they don't have a CentOS
> specific repository, but would it be OK to point to F8 or so and use
> those RPMs ?
> 
There is only a problem if you don't mind breaking it. CentOS 5 was based on
Fedora 6. Fedora 8 is way ahead.  If you want something newer, CentOS 6 might
be out in mid-2009. It is speculated to be based on Fedora 10 or so, but I'm
sure that RedHat will make it as stable as possible. After all, the more paid
support contracts that you "don't" have to actually fix anything,
the bigger
your profits are.

You can try the live cd of CentOS 5 and see if it works with your
lappy.
> Thanks
> 
> I'm listening if you have any other comments or advice on my situation.
> 
You can have stability, or bleeding edge, but usually not both.
It is like asking for a car that runs like a Ferrari, but uses gasoline like a
Prius. You have to make choices.


-- 
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

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Scott Silva wrote:
> Actually, CentOS 5 branched from Fedora 6. At that point they did a freeze
on
> changes to the OS.
That is not true, there are plenty of changes to the kernel, including 
rebases's, updates, fix's and even new packages being added in and 
obsolete ones being removed.

CentOS-5 today has little in functional terms common to fedora6. There 
are still some leaf nodes from those days, but saying something like 
'freeze on changes to the OS' is just wrong.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> I've been a RH/Fedora guy since the RH8 days.  When
> Fedora came along, I
> moved to it, but its been a bit painful beta testing
> software all the
> time.   I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I found their package
> management
> to be difficult... I do a lot of technical work,
> development and loading
> and building special stuff.  I much prefer RPMs over other
> methods of
> package distribution.
> I'm listening if you have any other comments or advice
> on my situation. 
> 
You are the guy who is having a bit of a moan on the Fedora
list about KDE. How many patches have you contributed to 
Fedora or to CentOS? This is open source after all, you have
access to the source.

Regards,
Vandaman.