"Enterprise" Linux?

[Oko]

Originally Posted by fossala

I think Redhat is pretty crap.

And the alternative is what? Debian, Windows? It is Linux for the God's sake. Get used to it. It is crappy but there are many areas where you must commercial support. BSDs have no commercial support to speak of. I can do lots of things but I do not have 100 developers and access to source code to make MATLAB work on BSDs. I must run that software. It is as simply as that.
It is of course different if you do not need proprietary software. At this moment from about 30 machines which I control OpenBSD runs on 28 but it doesn't run on all 30.

[fossala]

At least Debian has working repos. I don't accept that I try and update repos in 2010 (was last time I used it) and I cannot update it because software isn't there. I have only used *NIX for 2 years but in that time the only time I have had this problem was with Redhat.

[shep]

Recent Assessment of Centos v Scientific Linux
The-clone-wars-centos-vs-scientific-linux/

[thirdm]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

So CentOS "Enterprise" Linux has been released:

If this is Enterprise class quality then I'd rather be using something else ....
</rant>

When they say "Enterprise" I think they just mean that the perl interpreter on it is the version that came out 10 years ago.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

An upgrade is apparently not supported and I don't have a GUI so I can't do a decent reinstall.

RHEL itself also does not support major version upgrade (for example from 5.x to 6.x):
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/b...ux/CentOSRisks

(I thought it can)

[Carpetsmoker]

I also found out that mainstream support for CentOS 5.6 ended in March ... before 6.0 or 5.7 were released!.

[shep]

Carpetsmoker:

I also found out that mainstream support for CentOS 5.6 ended in March ... before 6.0 or 5.7 were released!.

Are you sure about your dates? Centos 5.6 was not even released until April 8, 2011.
Centos-announce/2011-April

The Centos Developers focused on getting 5.6 out, prior to redirecting their efforts for Centos 6.0, based on a perceived need to maintain security updates for the extant 5.5 machines. Scientific Linux focused on 6.0 and the Scientific LInux 5.6 release occurred after the Centos 5.6 release

[Carpetsmoker]

I got it from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centos#Release_history

(Below the large table).

[shep]

I think the Wiki Article was confusing as far as minor/major versions. I think Centos version are somewhat like FreeBSD, ie it is usually easy to upgrade minor versions from 7.0 -> 7.1 -> 7.2 ....
The Centos FAQ indicates Centos 5 series updates to March 31, 2014
Centos FAQ
It looks pretty easy to upgrade within a Centos major version but upgrading from one major version to the next (5.6 -> 6.0) is not supported by the upstream vendor

If you are already running CentOS-5.5 or an older CentOS-5 distro, all
you need to do is update your machine via yum by running :

'yum update'

[J65nko]

According to Scientific Linux 6.1 and CentOS "MinimalCD" released

The CentOS developers have also released 260 MB installation ISOs on a MinimalCD for i386/x86-32 and x86-64/x64 systems. They contain software for the setup of a minimal system on which additional packages can be added using Yum.

I am not sure whether that solves the issue reported by Carpetsmoker

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

So how exactly am I to upgrade my (...)

The freebsd-update is also not available for the FreeBSD 9.0-BETA, but at least there is a working make build/installworld working mechanism

Originally Posted by http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2011-August/026181.html

At this time FreeBSD-Update is not available, in part because of the
above issues (libs bump still coming, and encouraging testing of the
installer... :-).

[Carpetsmoker]

At this time, that means is will be available in the future. In any case, FreeBSD 9 is still beta, not release.

[vermaden]

.. also about CentOS/RHEL, CentOS team recently released a 6.0 Minimal CD ISO image (290MB) which includes rather cut CentOS 6.0 system, but after installation we end up with about 590MB of used space and what we got? Alomost nothing, it even does not include wget (but curl is there), there is no compiler, no ncurses, no ... nothing actually. At least LVM is available.

Compare that to minimal FreeBSD install which includes (with base/manpages/kernel datasets) complete C/C++ compiler also BIND, sendmail and and FTP server, latest ZFS v28 and DTrace and all that on 230MB[*].

OpenBSD and NetBSD probably would take even less space.

[*] Modifications:

# rm -r /boot/kernel/*.symbols
# cd /boot/kernel && gzip -9 kernel

[Carpetsmoker]

Our server has a lot of "junk" such as gtk, large parts of gnome, etc. installed because it's required by some packages such as vmware tools and GraphicsMagick.

I also ran into a few surprises by the lack of basic tools such as find and tcpdump in the default install...

[Carpetsmoker]

With systemd there can be no shred of doubt left: Linux has abandoned all serious resemblance to UNIX. This may actually be a good thing, UNIX is far from perfect. In this case it's not. Linux has also abandoned all semblance to sanity.

More on that later ... First I must write down my absolutely wonderful experience upgrading Fedora.