Hi Folks,

I'm about to upgrade an old RH 7.3 box and I'm trying to decide if Fedora's the way to go or if I should bite the bullet and plunk down some money to buy a RH Enterprise license. I know this is just a matter of opinion, but any insight would be much appreciated. I also have some specific questions.

Here's the overall setup I'm looking at:

The server will host a very low-traffic commercial site, our company's revision-control system (which is accessible from outside our firewall), and some other administrative stuff (some of which is accessible via the Internet and some isn't).

This is strictly small-time, but it's reasonably critical to my small company. And, of course, for the last couple of years, it's been running on a RH 7.3 license which I had a RedHat Network subscription for so I got update notices and so on. That's all ended quite a while back, of course.

We have another system that has an Enterprise license so I know what that gets me (warnings about security problems, updates, support, and so on).

Is it easy to deal with updates on Fedora? As in: No problem downloading them during working hours and such?

I understand up2date works with Fedora, but apparently a lot of folks prefer other tools. Any experiences you'd care to share?

Thanks!

John

I believe Fedora will work just fine for you, but I suggest trying it on a test box. To me it's not so different from Redhat 8 or 9 but it has lots of new features and packages. If you want to go the enterprise way, you can use CentOS. It's essentially Redhat Enterprise Server without the Redhat logos and it's free to download.

You might want to take a look at << www.FedoraLegacy.org >>. It's the same community that runs the regular Fedora. Rather than installing a new system, you can keep the old one more-or-less up-to-date.

As keeping Fedora updated, I've never used up2date... Only yum or apt. I think both work great. The only reason to choose one over the other is what repositories you want to access and what they support. You can even have both installed, as long as they don't point to repos with conflicting packages. There are a ton of official mirrors, so you can usually find one close-by that you can access anytime you want. There are also a host of unofficial mirrors that supply all the official packages, plus a number of third party packages.