Dear All,

I am new to linux .... I want to clarify following points.

Q1. The difference between Fedora ... and Redhat Linux ...?

Q2. Is it wise to use Fedora O/S for Mission Critical work .. ?

Q3. Is fedora cetified for business critial apps (Eg. Database/Mail/etc) ... ?

Pls advice !

Thanks,

Thiwanka.

Welcome to LQ

1. Redhat is based on Fedora Core technology but undergoes a lot more testing and development so that its suitable for Enterprise class environments. Fedora Core is constantly evolving and undergoing continuous development so never really reaches the same stability as Redhat.
2. Don't know the answer to that one. I guess it would depend on how critical the work is. Personally I would just go for Redhat if I was doing something very important.
3. I've never heard of Fedora being certified for business critical apps

There are a few Redhat rebuilds that are either free or cost a lot less than a Redhat subscription. The most popular is CentOS.

RHEL needs a subscription in order to use up2date and have support.
Fedora is free.
So wait for the others that will give you probably much more answers then mine.

RedHat is more guaranteed to work and be more stable because they go through extensive testing before it is released. Fedora is more bleeding edge and has the latest packages. However it is not guaranteed to work. But that doesn't mean that it will not be stable, which it trully is. I heard some big name ISP's use Fedora. RedHat uses Fedora as their experimental OS, which they release to the public to abuse and find bugs - eventually the new bug fixes will make the programs run stable for a while before they add them to the new RedHat release.

Slackware is great, clean, and slim. Awsome for firewalls, webservers, email, databases, everything....

Fedora Core is perfectly suitable for a Desktop/Workstation, word processing, coding, accounting, databases. You may wan't to be one version back on fedora core... FC4 or 5, but not a bleeding edge FC6 if its out. I had some strange graphics issues on my FC5 install (fixed easily enough). And you can't put faith your machine will boot after a #yum update all or a yum update on a kernel package.

Just avoid using untried and true stuff like wierd experimental filesystems etc, and #yum update all, if a package has a vulnerability, redhat, fedora, and slack are all good about patching it, and you can just update that specific package.

If a server, go text only environment, ssh, no GUI xorg or windowmanager. If a workstation, gnome and KDE are the standard. mp3 and dvd/windows codecs is easy enough to fix in any distribution with a bit of googling, but Fedora doesn't support it well out of the box. (so if you give it to a CEO and they wan't to play their blockbuster movies on it, be sure to take that into account)

Debian is ok, and PCLinuxOS is the next thing to windows as far as working out of the box.

Notice I didnt realy mention redhat - redhat is great if you wan't to pay some support guy 200$ an hr to run your IT department.

Fedora is used as the testing ground for RHEL - this means that RH itself is stable and fully tested (and uses slightly older packages) whereas Fedora is described as being bleeding edge. It's this way by design.
I have seen reports of lots of people using Fedora in production environments, however, the caveat to that is that your mileage may vary.
If you are really worried about using a bleeding edge distro in a mission critical environment, don't use it - use something a little more stable.