> We want to install LINUX on our G5 in LPAR mode. I'll make the comment that this should be a temporary measure at best and move on. You will not want to run this way in production.
> 1) What LINUX distribution is the most popular for the S390? > Advantages/disadvantages? SuSE has had a significant lead in terms of middleware certification and stability on 390 for a while, although SLES 8 is less so than previous releases. Red Hat was late to the game, and has not obtained many of the certifications yet, but is making progress. Debian is newer to the game than either, is making strides in both cases, and is somewhat more stable than either of the other two competitors. SuSE is less religious about the purity of the open-source components (they will package OCO code in the default install) than RH or Debian. In terms of price, Debian is the hands-down winner (free download, low cost CDs available), with RH in second place. SuSE is the most expensive -- there is no option to obtain their distribution without support, locking you into their pricing and support model. > 2) The extra LPAR that we have setup, has an IOCP definition > that shares ALL disk drives with our > OS/390 production LPAR. How can we ensure that LINUX > will not touch our production disks? Do NOT do this. If you don't want Linux touching it, don't put it in the IOCP for that LPAR. The command line parms that tell Linux what devices it can use do NOT prohibit the kernel from sensing everything defined to the LPAR. If some idiot wants to, he/she can bring a device online to the Linux system and destroy it with no prompting and no notification to OS/390. -- db
