Re: Flavors of Linux

[Luedeke Andreas <Andreas.Luedeke@psi.ch>]

At the SLS we are currently using RedHat 7.3 for the control system
and several other RedHat flavours for dedicated systems
(mainly RedHat 9, e.g. for our Channel Access Gateways)

We, actually the whole Paul Scherrer Institute not only the SLS, are
planning to go to Scientific Linux. This is basically a free distribution
build from the sources of RedHat Enterprise Linux 
(https://www.scientificlinux.org/).

The main argument for our choice was the longer life cycle and the
rather conservative release policy. You don't want to deal with
"experimental" kernels and a life cycle (concerning support, patches,
security upgrades) shorter than three years is certainly not acceptable
to us. And you may not want to pay licence fees if you have your own
computing division.
I think if you share those arguments your alternatives are rather limited.

Andreas

--
Dr. Andreas Luedeke, SLS Operations Manager, Tel:+41-56-3104002
mailto:Andreas.Luedeke@psi.ch, http://people.web.psi.ch/luedeke