So what would be the down side to just walking away from everything RH-related now that Ubuntu has a free alternative with long term support? I thought perhaps when I mentioned it earlier there would be a flurry of responses pointing out functional deficiencies but so far there have been none. I would never have started using RH in the early days if it had not been freely redistributable. Now the clones are better than nothing, but it still seems wrong.
Functional deficiencies here we come:
1) No equivalent to kickstart: By that I mean, zero support for automated lvm on raid kind of disk partitioning in the debian-installer
2) No equivalent to 'rpm -Va' or any 'rpm -V'. No checksumming done on packages and their contents.
.... .... hmm....
the rest are all learn how to add automatic iptables on boot sort of stuff I guess.
If you move to ubuntu, be prepared for a lot more than just apt-get / apt-cache. There is no inittab. You do get to use 'service whatever start/stop' though from Intrepid onwards I believe. There is no root account by default. You must be prepared for a very different way to the Redhat way of doing things.
Christopher - who did the leap from Centos to Ubuntu and is now stuck in the Windows quagmire.