On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 11:29, Don Gould - BVC wrote: > What was the outcome of the meeting about distros at the uni? What the hell, I was there and I have leaked it out already to a select few :)
The meting decided that the IT department should maintain mirrors of three distributions: Fedora, Mandrake and Debian Stable. Fedora and Mandrake were chosen because of the widespread use of Redhat and Mandrake on desktops. For "mission critical" applications it was decided to go with the "enterprise" (NCC-1709?) offerings from SuSE and Redhat; No one wanted to try and keep the likes of Matlab, Oracle, or Peoplesoft working on the frequently updating Fedora or Mandrake distributions. The support for Debian Stable came as a surprise to me. The Uni has a number of little boxes that monitor the network and run as Web, FTP, DNS… servers. Those at the meeting thought it was not worth paying for the software to run on those boxen, so the enterprise versions of Redhat and SuSE were out. Debian is obsessive enough about not introducing new features, maintains security, and does not update too frequently that it seems like a good fit. As I am one of the few on campus that runs a Debian box this came as a bit of a shock. Still, it looks as if Debian has found its niche\ldots -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
