On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 at 9:12pm, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote
On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 04:35:27PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
I think you underestimate the amount of driver back-porting RH puts into
point releases. When I first got my dual woodcrest compute nodes, the
current CentOS point release (4.4) worked almost perfectly on them (a
network driver upgrade removed the "almost" from that statement). Are the
app libraries out of date compared to Fedora? Sure. Are you more likely
to have success at this with "server" hardware than more desktop oriented
hardware? Sure. But the point is that RH does roll a lot of new hardware
support into their enterprise distro as it ages.
That's the point - and the problem. Red Hat doesn't release stable
releases - it releases enterprise class releases and then changes
stuff, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically between point releases.
Don't even _think_ about a seamless upgrade from Red Hat EL3 to Red Hat
EL4. [I found, when I made a dual boot test system, that I couldn't
install RH4 first then RH3 - the ext3 file system had changed so
significantly that it wouldn't work - possibly something to do with SE
Linux attributes.] RH EL4 to RH EL5 ?????
Erm, I wasn't referring to EL3 or EL4 as point releases. Those are major
versions. I meant RHEL3u1, RHEL3u2, etc (or CentOS 3.1, CentOS 3.2).
There you *do* have seamless upgrades while still getting new and improved
hardware support.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
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