Something to consider, do you *need* support? Consider what you have available, what you bring personally to the party, and be prepared to be brutally honest.
Simon, this isn't supposed to be personal, but you sign your job title as "IT Manager". Now there are a lot of different types of IT Managers, varying from technical boots-and-all small-team people, to people who are just adept at managing an IT staff and who have limited skills. What other IT resources in-house do you have? Is there a reasonable body of staff that are happy with helping you support a number of Fedora systems and are sufficiently competent (and that is where the brutally honest bit comes in) to do emergency package downgrades where something is broken by a Fedora update? Alternatively, are you like many organisations today whose IT budget has been squeezed to death, coping on limited staff resources and having to rely on external consultants for any depth of skill? Are a lot of your IT people just the ones who would agree to work for you for the money that was offered, and are spending few of their leisure hours attempting to improve on their skills? Consider what your needs are -- do you need a supported distro or not? My company has more computer technical people than we know what to do with, and so we probably do not. I can point at other organisations trying to run large data centers full of rack mount systems with limited IT staff resources and they absolutely need supported distributions, no questions asked. No people-savvy consultant would recommend Debian, or RHEL, or Tao, or White Box, or Fedora, without having a serious look at your needs and requirements first. -- Del -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
