[CentOS] Redhat vs centos vs ubuntu

Lamar Owen
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:42:25 -0000

On Saturday, November 12, 2011 11:51:42 AM Craig White
wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-11-12 at 09:25 -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>
> > ... there is a learning curve to get
> > proficient at doing Debian/Ubuntu.
> ----
> ... There's only what you know, how you
> can adapt what you know and how well you can make it work for you and
> how much time you are willing to give to learning something new.

If I may expound a tad, and I will endeavor to keep this brief, it goes one step
farther than this.  It becomes a balance of "how much time and effort will
it take to adapt what you know to your task?" against "how steep is
the learning curve for something you aren't proficient in, but is already
known to do your desired task?"  And sometimes, if not most of the time,
it's a three-way balance with "what is the cost, monetary or otherwise,
to get someone else to do it?"

As an example, I have four relatively nice SGI Altix IA64 systems here.  I would
prefer to run CentOS on them, since I can't afford RHEL for them, nor is
RHEL 6 available for them.  I have the knowledge to rebuild EL6 on the boxes,
but I honestly don't have the time to work through all the details, even
though the geek packager in me desperately wants to try.  The latest Debian
Stable works quite well on the boxen, but my knowledge of Debian is somewhat
limited.  So, I have a three-way balance between:

1.) Pay the cost of RHEL, with the knowledge that RHEL 5 is the last for IA64;
2.) Maintain my own private or semiprivate rebuild for IA64 of EL 6;
3.) Install Debian and get the boxen doing something (and potentially generating
revenue), and climb yet another learning curve.

I chose 3 at the moment.  It was not an easy choice.