On Jan 9, 2005, at 7:56 PM, Post, Mark K wrote:
Let me preface my statements by saying that I am the architecture maintainer/developer for the S/390 port of Slackware. Debian, is a _very_ good Linux distribution. It has a tremendous community of maintainers/developers. If ISV certifications is not an issue for you, you won't be sorry for choosing it. Also, just because the stable branch tends to "lag" somewhat, doesn't mean you have to stick with that. Debian's "unstable" branch is fairly current, and equal to or better than most GA software from a lot of companies.
Current "unstable" should be released as "stable" Pretty Darn Soon now. No, no actual date yet. But soon. I would certainly recommend working with Sarge RC2 right now (caveat: it might actually be broken, since it's been a while since RC2; but if you try RC2 and it doesn't build, let me know and I'll make a build of the latest daily release for you). Sarge (3.1) is quite stable and much more modern than Woody (3.0).
Also--and this is a bit of an issue for me, anyway, because I've put a fair bit of time into testing debian-installer on Sarge and trying to help out with issues we've discovered on S/390--if your Linux box has network access, *I* at least have never had to go through the contortions that SLES 9 is requiring from some people on the list. If you installed Woody, well, Sarge is a lot nicer to install. And if you haven't, in my opinion, debian-installer makes Debian at least as easy to install in a server/no-X environment as either SuSE or RedHat and can be done with a much smaller footprint. SuSE now needs 2 3390-3s to install, I think; I can install Debian in 400 cylinders and run an actual application too, *without* having to manually trim anything from the default minimal install. Debian-installer works fine in 64MB of memory--and would work in less if anyone had had the time and energy to work on a lowmem install for S/390--rather than the 256MB SuSE requires. Once installed it can run in a lot less than that.
If your S/390 cannot see the Internet but it is on an IP network inside your company and can get to something with a CD or DVD drive, then not long at all after the Sarge release, we should be able to sell you a VM-friendly Debian installer system. I might do an LPAR version as well that used a local x86 (or whatever--just something with a few gigabytes of disk free that can run a web server) as the installation mirror, along with an IPL tape--if there is demand for it.
Adam
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