John R Pierce wrote: > indeed, I've heard Oracle flat out won't support you if you're running > on CentOS 4, even tho its functionally nearly identical to RHEL4 which > is supported. No-one wants to support too many things in enterprise environments (and RHEL/CentOS are enterprise grade linux distros). I have worked in that environment for quite some years (never directly with Oracle I am happy to say) and usually there can be some leeway. Sure, RHEL and SLES are ususally the only officially supported versions but there are levels of support. You would probably get support from most if you can reproduce the problem on RHEL, or if it is unlikely that CentOS is part of the problem. Of course, if you are a big customer and want to run CentOS, money talks :) There is also a big difference between supported as certified, supported as works-here, supported as we-have-no-idea-if-it-works-but-we-will-fix-it-if-it-doesn't. We would also many times just ignore parts of a platform. We can also ignore unsupported parts of a platform if we feel it is irrelevant. Even in enterprise environments you have the human factor for support and personal relations matters.... that is why many big companies stay with a product even if it is not perfect. They know what they have and not what they get, and they can live with the imperfections. So if a large Oracle customer told Oracle they wanted to run it on CentOS, Oracle would most likely support it. OTOH large companies would just run RHEL -- no real compelling reason for them to choose CentOS. So how intreresting is it to get Oracle to support it? It should run just as well or bad on CentOS as RHEL. If it is for a small customer, they could not affort much support anyway. For testing, development, stuff like that you don't usually need full support. -- //Morten Torstensen //Email: morten at mortent.org //IM: Cartoon at jabber.no morten.torstensen at gmail.com And if it turns out that there is a God, I don't believe that he is evil. The worst that can be said is that he's an underachiever.