I agree. What I meant by not offering more value than debian was about the OS itself. Ofcourse the training materials are a plus. I do believe that some big entity as a government needs to create its own training certificate, just like what malysia did.
* Desktop distro: First I see that it should be a matching distro as the server one, which means fedora (or something based on it) if we choose redhat, or something based on debian if we choose debian/ubuntu. As we have a very large number of distros, let me summerize from my POV what we need for the distro: - to be light: we got lots of outdated hardware in the government. We need to use it and bring it back to live. Less hardware specs means less cost and less hardware upgrades. I suggest we drop any distro that is based on KDE, gnome, or unity. I suggest xfce, lxde, or something like that. - ease of use: and hopefully if it looks like windows XP. Yes this what we unfortunately need. - important updates rate: we need low volume of updates, most governmental agencies have very limited bandwidth. - depending mainly on GUI and the CLI intervention should be relatively minimal. This is what I got in mind till now. Thanks, Ahmed -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: I totally agree, Debian is my personal favorite as well. But to be objective, Ubuntu has the advantage of having some training material and courses from Canonical, and does not require being tied to another company, so you can get the training, and save the updates subscription fees. ---------------------- Mosab Ahmad Entrepreneur in the make Cell : +201119942443 E-mail : [email protected] LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/mosab github : https://github.com/mos3abof On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Ahmed Mekkawy <[email protected]> wrote: Hi All, When I talked about standerdizing a distro to suggest for the engineering syndicate issue, some guys suggested others. So I thought about opening this thread to say why did I choose it and discuss the alternatives. I'm sending this from my mobile so please execuse my previty. * Server distro: I guess the real alternatives we got is redhat, centos, ubuntu and debian. Let me summerize shortly my openion on each of them: - redhat: technically competing. The good thing is clear training pathes. But on the other hand I don't believe we need to be tied to another american company. Paying monthly subscriptions for all the government servers as long as paying for training all the staff is not a pleasant idea for me. Remember that the syndicate project title is technological independance. - centos: I don't believe that centos is good enough for governmental servers. Enough that the security updates are too slow which could cause disasters. - debian: this is my personal choice, technically competing, excellent security updates, very stable. And best of all, it is an independant, very large, and very distributed contributers group which ensures we don't be dependant on a certain company or even country. - ubuntu: from my POV, ubuntu server doesn't give any real value more than debian. Except being dependant on a company instead of contributer group. This can be better in some aspects like having official support. But I believe we don't really need that. Will send another email for desktop distros -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
