It is normally quite easy to mix packages from similar distros. I would recommend using a CentOS install but adding packages from Fedora as required. There will come a time when the Fedora packages have too many core dependencies but if you want to run latest and greatest you always have that problem.
Tracking updates can become a problem but again, if you were worried about staying stable and secure then you would not be using Fedora anyway. (Indeed I think CentOS-4 is still too new).
I guess it also depends how many machines you are looking after. I detest having to make changes on one specific machine because we have lots of CentOS boxes and doing things individually is not feasible.
John.
Hardy Beltran Monasterios wrote:
El jue, 28-04-2005 a las 15:42 -0500, Steve Bergman escribió:
Apologies if this ends up a dup, but there seems to have been a problem with my original subscription.
[ snip ]
On the positive side, looking at the errata, it looks as though CentOS has drastically fewer notices than Fedora, and I assume that is because there really are more problems (security of otherwise) shaken out during testing.
Obviously, not being forced to upgrade due to withdrawal of support with regards to security patches every 1.5 years is a plus.
So I welcome comments. If I switch my clients from Fedora to CentOS, they don't have the latest and greatest (and, for example, I need OpenOffice 2.0 ASAP for one of my clients due to it's Access-like interface to PostgreSQL), but how much advantage am I really looking at with regards to stability?
i.e. I know all the reasons that CentOS *should* be more rock solid stable. But is there a noticeable difference in reality?
It depedens what do you want to do, what do you need. There is no distro for all tasks.
In my particular case I prefer to use CentOS in the side server for their stability and more importan for me, the long support that this Enterprise class distro offer (by RH promess).
For my clients wich uses Linux in the side server my recomendations are the same. And by example I have a customer wich develops applications with PHP/Postgress/MySQL they can't afford the costly effort to upgrade his development/production/test servers and the worst case test his application with the new version of PHP and MySQL which we see in Fedora in almost each release. For them the "version stability" is a very critical issue.
But I tink that CentOS is not very useful in the desktop side, where we need each time use recent version of the applications. I think in the desktop side is not much important "version estability/freeze".
My self I use Debian for my desktop and CentOS for my servers. With Debian always can I get the newer "killer app" for Gnome.
Thanks For Any Input.
Sincerely, Steve Bergman