On 01/04/11 15:04, Steve Holdoway wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 14:29 +1300, Chris Darby wrote:
>
> My personal view is that those who run a production platform on gentoo
> should be avoided, not the least because their ability to customise the
> release is more than negated by the support gained by testing of a
> standard product by users on a day to day basis.
>
> $0.02 from an old fart...
>
> Steve
>
Chris - thanks for your input on the list...
Choice of the distribution to use on your own computer is many and
varied. The choice is
based on how much tinkering and fiddling you want to do, and how much
you just want
"use the computer for stuff like browsing, watching videos and playing
games"..
My "pick" for the OS which requires the least administrator intervention
is ubuntu..
If you want to do the maximum amount of administrator intervention - gentoo.
As someone who writes software commercially, - ubuntu. Developers do not
earn money for
the company by spending their time maintaining machines. Developers earn
money by writing
software.
=====
However, the choice for a commercial user is not clear.
If you have a linux based product, and want to provide users with the
ability to do updates,
I am not sure what one would use....
Like, you could pick a nice "solid" distribution (say Centos 5.5). In
addition to the distribution, you have
an application. You then roll out application updates (on a quarterly
basis, or as customers request features).
Then in 2 years time, you decide to update the OS - centos 5.5. is quite
old. How does one update the OS on
thousands of boxes - when some are operating with a small "dialup
capacity" internet link.
In that case, you go - well lets write our own "linux distribution" and
update everything. Which is quite a bit of work
for the company to do - many hours of developer time can easily
disappear into rolling a custom linux distro.
A custom linux distro is "great" - you can get the build size down to
tens of megabytes, which is easily rolled out..
openwrt seems to have real potential for a commercial user - but the
build process for all linux distros appears
to be poorly documented (or it was last time I looked)..
Cheers,
Derek.
--
Derek J Smithies Ph.D.
Christchurch,
New Zealand
-- "How did you make it work??" "the usual, got everything right"
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