With the non-existence of SL8, I (and others) have been investigating
alternatives to EL. For the present, I have settled upon Ubuntu LTS,
that more or less has the same niche as EL, with the regular non-LTS
Ubuntu being similar in niche to Fedora. This posting is not an
advertisement for Ubuntu, nor am I affiliated with Canonical (just as I
am not affiliated with Red Hat nor IBM). The summary below discusses
why I have migrated my machines from SL and what I have observed that
may be useful to others who face the lack of SL for EL8 and are not
necessarily enthusiastic about the other available without fee binary
bootable installable (not just source) EL8 distros.
My wife had to get a new touchscreen (writing by hand with a stylus)
laptop, and thus I started the migration with her machine as EL7 would
not suffice for her hardware and application needs. A month or so past,
the screen (internal to the laptop cover) on my machine failed -- a
circumstance that motivated to examine alternative Linux distros. Given
the major surgery required to replace the lid, I ordered an identical
machine now only available in refurbished (with a warranty) from a
reputable web-based source. Removing the hard drive from the failed
machine (SL7 current), I installed it in the new machine and copied all
of the non-distro directories and files to a 2 Tbyte external USB drive.
I then installed a new 2 Tbyte hard drive into the "new" machine,
removing the MS Win 10 SSD drive supplied with it in the event the
machine would need to be returned. (On the laptop in question, this is
a simple procedure; I do have an "anti-static" work-surface mat with
wristband.) I had installed a bootable ISO installation image of Ubuntu
20.04.1 LTS on an external USB "thumb drive", and proceeded with the
installation. Because I wanted a custom partitioning of the hard drive,
there were a few false starts; having done this, I can offer some advice
to anyone interested.
I have configured the machine with MATE from Ubuntu, and installed all
of the utilities I had used on SL plus some that seemingly were not
available for SL 7. Naturally, yum, yumex, etc., are replaced by
various apt utilities, but the functionalities, if not the actual CLI
commands or GUI steps, are equivalent.
The only peculiarities I have found to date are that unlike SL, LTS
assumes that everything must be done via sudo. As I prefer both su and
an Xwindow GUI root screen, I had to modify some of the LTS
configuration files to do this, but it is quite simple (in the current
LTS). Both of these functionalities now work. The support and help
lists are much more cumbersome than this SL users list, with a formal
style guide, etc., moderators, etc., although there are no style
configuration files that work with LaTeX, MS Office (and thus, for the
most part, LibreOffice), etc., unlike most journals and professional
refereed conferences to which I submit work.
As far as I can tell from workstation (not server) use, Ubuntu LTS works
as well as SL, seems to be stable with regular security updates, and has
the same utilities, etc., that any modern stable Linux distro does.
Moreover, unlike EL, LTS seems to support more hardware variants and
keeps more "current" allowing "current" production releases of utilities
to function (such as the current production Texstudio). It has also
been stated than unlike SL, LTS allows for upgrade-in-place to the next
major LTS production release. The caution for this procedure is to
nonetheless backup all non-distro directories and files to an external
device so that things can be retrieved if something were to go awry.
Take care. Stay safe.
Yasha Karant
