On Dec 21, 2011, at 10:27 AM, Nick Webb wrote: > Billy- > > On Tuesday, December 20, 2011, William Kreuter <bil...@drizzle.com> wrote: > > It was because I was going to use the U.W. site > > license, and I thought that 5.5 was current on the UW > > site. I just now checked, and 6.2 is now current; 5.7 > > is also there. > > 5.5 and 5.7 are really the same as far as I can tell; 5.7 just has a newer > set of packages. You could think of the differences like a service pack in > the MS world.
Yeah, that's the goal. New features, new hardware enablement, bug fixes, etc., go into each minor revision up to a point, but it should be entirely possible to run a 5.7 kernel on a 5.0 system and have things still Just Work(™). But only the latest point release or two continue to get security fixes, so if you're currently locked to 5.5, you're not getting any further CVE fixes, meaning a potentially exploitable machine. > > Is there any reason why I should prefer 5.7 to 6.2? > > Some commercial products aren't certified on 6.x yet, but barring that I'd go > with 6.x if at all possible. Me too. RHEL5 is quickly approaching "maintenance-only" mode, and the package list is already quite stale, so there are a number of modern web applications and/or other miscellanea that require gobs of additional package replacements/upgrades/alt installs of more infra to get working. Much less of that with RHEL6, at least for the time being. Same thing will happen over time there too though -- the perils of trying to maintain an entirely stable distro down to minor versions of all components for multiple (7-10) years... Amusingly, if you know what my job is, I don't use RHEL5 for anything at all, I use mostly RHEL6 and Mac OS X… :) -- Jarod Wilson ja...@wilsonet.com
