On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Linuxguy123 linuxguy123@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.