[CentOS] Getting ready for CentOS 5.4

Mon Mar 30 05:22:21 UTC 2009
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org>

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 01:17:03PM +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
> 
> > 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

This is a huge issue with SLES.  AutoYaST makes me very angry. :-)  I
can generalize my kickstart files to automate *some* parts of an
install, but leave things, say partitioning, to install time and it'll
prompt the installer for how they want to set things up.

No way to do that with AutoYaST.. it's either all or nothing. :(

> 
> 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.

Didn't Ubuntu switch to something like Solaris' SMF?  I actually like
SMF quite a bit and I imagine RHEL/Fedora will move in this direction
eventually....

> Christopher - who did the leap from Centos to Ubuntu and is now stuck in 
> the Windows quagmire.

And if you had to do it over again would you stick with Cent? :)

Ray