Hello,

My company wants to switch all the desktop machines to a open source / free O/S. Right now I am using Slackware along with another person and I am suggestion Slackware for the following reasons:

- proven stability
- proven standards (everything does not change from one ver to the next)
- proven performance.
- plus I can use custome tagfiles.

Our network admin, new to Linux wants to use RedHat 8.0 Professional. In fact he is pushing for it. I suggested we test Slackware, Mandrake and Gentoo.

He wants to use Redhat because he found out about the "Kickstart Install" and thinks it will make his life easier. Plus everytime he looks up license he see's RedHat and thinks that it is the best distro... poor guy.

Any thoughts on:

- best distro for office PC envir.. ?
- Redhat licensing for RH8.0 Pro... - is it from for companies to use ?
- options RH8.0 w/ or w/ out "KickStart" ?

Thanks.

The company I work for sells software for linux (among many other platforms), and the only distro of linux we officially support is Red Hat. I don't know how typical we are, but considering how Red Hat is (I think) the most popular distro, you might run into this situation with other software vendors too.

This doesn't answer your question directly, but it's a thought.

How many desktops are we talking about here ? You have to think setting up the likes of a hundred or more Slackware machines would be totally different from setting up the same amount of Redhat machines.
Though they can all be tinkered and tailored to the needs of the company but you would also think its in the best interest of the admin and ease of administering all the machines.
Just explain and if you can show him the other options out there.
The one thing I can think of that Redhat has over the others is:

1. Popularity which means more users, which then means more likely to get better/faster support or responses.
2. The company can recieve support from Redhat if purchased, etc.
3. Somewhat easier to use over most other distro's for regular users.

You have to consider Redhat is still the overall leader, they must be doing something right. Your best bet though is to find out what exactly what the admin wants, compared to what the company wants and then proceed then to present the other alternatives, that is where the pro's and cons come to play.

You don't have to be a guru to kickstarted any other distro beside RH, there are tools available, in fact I just read an article in the latest issue of Linux Magazine on how the kick start works, they used RH system, but the article implies the use of any Linux distribution. So I suggest you to grab a copy of Linux magazine December issue from news stands here is the index of material there http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-12/toc.html The first article System Cloning.
But I am not saying screw RedHat and throw Slackware everywhere, tricky is right, when you are an enterprise you must think support beforehand, if you are the one to provide support for Slackware in your company kudos to you!!! But most enterprises are looking for support from the vendor

Thank you all for your input,

My company will NOT want to pay for support from RH, that is why we are moving to open source from Windows. The people providing the technical support for linux in the office will be myself and the network admin who has never used linux.

I am install RH 8.0 this weekend to test it out, I would prefer Mandrake or Slack over RH.

Whatever you do - don't use gentoo for office desktops.If you do the support yourself you might want to have a look at debian.Their mailing lists provide better support than most commercial distros for free and system maintenance is the easiest of all distros.Plus it runs on most machine architectures that are out there.

HAHAHAH - a friend here at work just started using gentoo , we would never think about using it as the standard but we were just playing around.

He has been installing it since yesterday it is almost done the install.

Yeah - it takes me about 24 hrs. to get from stage1 to kde.Watch out for trouble with xfree 4.2.1 if you use kde.Might be fixed by now.

Are you looking to provide desktop OS only, or servers as well?
As much as I've been on my anti-RH kick as of late, they do supply different flavors of the OS for different box types: Standard and Professional (haven't seen this myself, but I hear it exsits) for desktops, and Advanced Server edition.

I hate to admit it too, but for a desktop OS you cannot really go with anything but RH or maybe SuSE.

Personally I despise RedHat and their kludge ridden bloated OS, but when looking for third party commercial software for linux you will generally find the list of supported distributions is RedHat and SuSE.

I would suggest the slackware machines for server side.
RedHat, Suse or Mandrake for desktops..
Slackware isnt difficult, but if your company has let's say 100 workstations.. u dont want to install slackware on 100 machines..takes a lot of time ..