> Which zLinux distributions are you using, and why did you > pick that one?
1) Marist 2.2-vintage distribution Because people still ask questions about it. 2) SuSE 7.0 Because people still ask questions about it. 3) SLES 7 Because there are a lot of early adopters who haven't upgraded to SLES 8 yet. 4) SLES 8 (assorted patch levels) Because most people running Linux on Z and 390 are on this release. Because many customers run IBM middleware on this release. 5) RH 7.2 Because many corporate users have RH Intel site licenses and prefer to stay with a single vendor or distribution enterprise wide. Because many corporate users have RH maintenance contracts that include "all future releases" and thus don't have to pay extra for the maintenance contract on the Linux on Z system 6) RH AS 3.0 Because many corporate users have RH Intel site licenses and prefer to stay with a single vendor or distribution Because many corporate users have RH maintenance contracts that include "all future releases" and thus don't have to pay extra for the maintenance contract on the Linux on Z system Because I need to support customers with IBM middleware on RH Because I have to support Tivoli products, which can't seem to understand that Linux != RH. 7) Debian Because it's inexpensive, stable, and well-maintained. Because it's usually more up to date than RH Superior package management and deployment capability. Most packages built for RH "just work" Because I rarely need the IBM middleware for research purposes. > Also, can anyone explain what Red Hat was thinking when they > wrote "IBM > zSeries & s/390 subscriptions include the ability to run and > support up 25 > Enterprise Linux AS instances/images per subscription, per > engine"? My speculation is: two reasons. Reason 1: They have relatively few S/390 and zSeries customers (a problem of their own making if you actually listen to their field sales people) and thus need to extract the maximum revenue from each customer to stay in the game. Reason 2: Support people capable of dealing with S/390 hardware are not inexpensive or easy to find. Something has to pay for this. (this is true for SuSE as well). OF course, you do have alternatives to their support (can't dodge the maintenance, but support is another story). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
