Re: Goodbye Fedora!

On Jun 8, 11:29 pm, Mladen Gogala <mgog..._at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:41:18 -0700, hjr.pythian wrote:
> > I don't, in short, see what the problem is.
>
> I find the problem in the fact that a well known and documented
> mechanism is being replaced by an undocumented one.

But that is exactly what 'being on the bleeding edge' is all about! The "mechanism" is 100% optional, and you can still use the tried-and- trusted, well-documented mechanism without one iota of change on your part.

So, the feature you're used to still works. The new feature you find unfamiliar and undocumented is self-confessedly new and experimental (which makes it a suitable addition to Fedora, because that's Fedora's brief) and entirely *optional*.

So I still don't see what your problem is.

As for you other comments...

Fedora 5 could only be installed if you managed to modify a file (gentclsh, from memory) during the file copying phase of the Oracle installation. Do it too late and the installation would fail. Do it too early, and the file wouldn't be there to be modified. You had to get it "just so". No other distro ever suffered from that problem. Hence my comment that Fedora has 'always been a bit of an iffy distro' as far as Oracle was concerned. I could also mention the Java bug in Fedora 8 which stopped the installer in its tracks unless you worked around it in a specific way and upgraded appropriate libraries. The same bug cropped up in OpenSuse, but required much less of a workaround.

The *facts* are that Oracle on Fedora 4, 5 and 8 (at least) required more workarounds and more pre-installation configuration than any other distro I've ever worked with. And that includes Ubuntu, which is a completely alien distro from Oracle's point of view.

That doesn't make Fedora a bad distro. It makes it what it says on the tin lid: cutting edge and experimental. One lives with the inevitable consequences, I think.

Regarding my comment about OpenSuse: I wouldn't recommend it because 10.2 is end-of-life and I simply don't know how well Oracle will run on 11. Also because I hate the customised Gnome GUI (so that's a personal bias). And also because Novell do deals with Microsoft, which makes them not something I'd want to bet my open source future on (so not exactly a technical argument, then). Slightly more relevant, perhaps: I think Oracle's support for SLES is half-hearted compared to RHES, but that's only gut-feel. The other factor to consider (IMHO) is that whilst Centos is compiled from the RHES sources and can therefore be considered at least quasi-supported, OpenSuse is not a recompilation of the SLES sources and therefore cannot be so considered. As a technically "known" platform on which to run Oracle, therefore, it's better than Ubuntu or Fedora, but much worse than Centos. Received on Mon Jun 09 2008 - 02:53:20 CDT