Apologies if this ends up a dup, but there seems to have been a problem with my original subscription.
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Hello,
I am currently using Fedora on most of my servers. It does pretty well. I do have occasional problems which seem to me to stem from poor QA.
For example, /usr/bin/enable <queue> coming back with "Enable: I don't know what to do!" after a cups errata upgrade when I would try to re-enable a printer. The "-c#" (multiple copies) option to lpr not working for serial printers due to a bug in the "serial" backend. (But to which a patch is applied to fix the same problem in the parallel backend). Finding my first flaw in the OS when I try to check the CD media during the install. The media check always fails. (Yes, there are going to be bugs, but finding the first one before you even get the installation media checked looks really bad. And, yes, the ide=nodma workaround fixes it.)
I was very hopeful about CentOS shielding me and my clients from silly stuff like this. However, looking at the RHEL source for the serial backend to cups, it looks as though the patch to make "-c#" work on it has not been applied to serial.c. And the media check still fails with CentOS unless I use "ide=nodma", just like with Fedora.
This is disappointing.
Now, I wish to make it perfectly clear that I *DO NOT* consider this to be the fault of CentOS, as I understand that the policy is to remain faithfully compatible to RHEL.
But if I ask RH about this, I know that I will get an "oh so politically correct" answer.
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?
Thanks For Any Input.
Sincerely, Steve Bergman