On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Brent L. Bates <blbates at vigyan.com> wrote: > You might want to check out Scientific Linux: > > https://www.scientificlinux.org/ > > They include a number of things that CentOS doesn't, like `R'. I don't know > if or how many of the other items you are looking for are on their site. Just > check them out for yourself. They seem to try to be more up to date on some > things than CentOS. I hope this helps some. > I tried Scientific Linux and found I had to re-build the same things that I rebuild for CentOS, including R, because their versions lagged behind the cutting edge. I switched to Centos hoping that the larger user community would generate more contributions of updated packages for other things, like gnumeric or such. So far, that's not panning out, but I still have hope. I am trying to find my way into the rpmforge rpmrepo or rpmfusion or whatever it will be called. You can compare the stuff I had to build with it http://pj.freefaculty.org/ScientificLinux/5/i386/kups/packages/ and it is basically the same stuff I had to build for Centos: http://pj.freefaculty.org/Centos/i386/kups/packages/ For Scientific Linux, I even had to build Firefox, which required rebuilding yelp. Maybe people will find this thread and suggest I try the Debian off-shoots, like Ubuntu or Mint. I've been doing that too. I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop and it is closer to what I need than Fedora or CentOS. It has a slower-changing kernel than Fedora, but more up-to-date applications than Centos. However,I am not installing it in our labs or on public machines because I find it harder to secure. On a workstation that I use personally, it is OK. For someone making the switch from Windows to Linux, Ubuntu may be the preferred option. But in a lab or on a widespread basis, there are some things that hold me back. 1. The basic install of Ubuntu is less security conscious. There's no firewall in the default installation. (That is justified on the grounds that no public services are offered in the default configuration. The default iptables framework allows everything. However, users can easily install services, without realizing that there is no firewall.) It doesn't (by default) secure the bootloader with a password. I noticed that default users have more privilidges in Ubuntu than Fedora (they can use fuse file system). Without having a comprehensive knowledge of Ubuntu, I'm not sure how many other "gotchas" are waiting. Maybe I've not found the CentOS gotchas yet. 2. It includes too many invitations to ordinary users to add/remove packages. If somebody tries to run something that is not installed, the shell replies "you can install that if you type sudo apt-get install xyz". They can't do that, they don't have privileges. The Applications menu has an add/remove package program. I don't want users to be asked to do things for which they don't have privileges. The whole design of the package manager is to not be automatic, but ask for constant user intervention. Not good with many machines. 3. I do not have as much faith in the deb packaging process. For me, this the biggest reason I'm hanging around in the RPM distributions. I learned RPM building from the classic Maximum RPM, which is emphatic about keeping the 'pristine source code.' If you have never built a Debian package, you will will be in for a surprise. You can't even build a Deb package unless you manually untar the source code and create a directory inside it. My experience is that it is much harder to rebuild a debian package than it is to rebuild an SRPM. Most of the time, if you find an SRPM and you want to build it on your system, it is as simple as "rpmbuild --rebuild whatever.src.rpm". I can't find anything comparable to that for Debian. It is always necessary to open up the source package. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas