On 12/8/20 5:05 PM, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
On Dec 8, 2020, at 4:59 PM, Tim Cutts <t...@sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
On 8 Dec 2020, at 21:52, Ryan Novosielski <novos...@rutgers.edu> wrote:
It’s pretty common that if something supports only one distribution, it’s
RedHat-based. That’s also true of hardware vendors.
True, officially, but often not officially. Again, back around 2008 I found it
hilariously irritating. HP supported a lot of Debian activity in the
background, and hosted quite a lot of the infrastructure. Officially, they
only supported Red Hat, but I discovered on a visit to Colorado Springs that
they actually developed all their drivers using Debian, and then ported them to
Red Hat!
A year or two later, I remember noticing that the firmware update ISOs that HP
distributed were also Debian-based. Even though they only distributed Red Hat
RPMs on them. Duh!
Tim
-- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a
charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in
England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road,
London, NW1 2BE.
I should have been clearer too: this goes beyond just what they say they will
support, or what sorts of commands they’ll ask you to run to prove a hardware
problem, etc., but to your point, frequently stuff will be distributed only in
RPM, or only yum repositories will be provided, or whatever else I might not be
thinking of. And sure, I can work around that, etc., until one comes along
that’s a huge pain in the neck for some reason, or it’s based on a different
set of libraries, that don’t work well on the other distro, etc. There’s just a
limit to how much time I want to spend on stuff like that, especially if we’re
talking about stuff that really isn’t the focus of your business, like firmware
or something. On my own equipment, I run either Debian or Ubuntu, and we do
some Debian/Ubuntu in Singularity containers for the relatively few cases where
they are supported and RHEL/CentOS are not.
That said, if CentOS truly goes away, isn’t seamlessly replaced, a lot of that
could change.
This is another reason I should have mentioned in my previous diatribe.
The RPM package format and commands were also a big deal at the time.
Not quite revolutionary, but a big evolutionary step ahead of whatever
else was out at the time. My experience with Linux started in 1996 with
Red Hat Linux (not enterprise) version 4. All the research I did said
"Go with Red Hat Linux - their RPM package manager makes
installing/managing software way better than any other distro, so it's
perfect for a beginner" So as a beginner, I took that advice.
Also, if you spent $40 to by a packaged version of RHL 4, like I did, it
came with the Metro-X X-server, which was waaaaay easier to setup and
support A LOT more video cards than xfree86 did at the time, which was
another big selling point. Setting up X was much harder back then, and I
heard horror stories of people frying their video cards by putting the
wrong settings in their xfree86 config file. I'm not sure if they were
true or not, but I didn't want to find out the hardware.
Here's an article on Metro-X from 1997:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2299
--
Prentice
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