Hey there all,

I have some quick questions. I am looking for a linux distro for a small server I am going to put up. Nothing fancy, but I would like to be able to have it be a file/print/web/bugzilla/svn server.

Anyway, I am between CentOS and Fedora. I like Fedora for the fact that it has GCC 4.0 and I will also be compiling on this quite a bit. But, I like CentOS because, being a knock-off RHEL, has a bunch of the administrative GUIs built in. (For Samba, Printer Sharing, Apache setup, etc.)

My question is, does Fedora have these things? I would be waiting for FC4 (yummy GCC update!), and am wondering if it will even include these GUIs for server setups.


Thanks in advance!

-men$an

Yes, fedora has these guis. They are selectable during install, so you may install them if you wish. Of course they are not required, especially if you don't have X installed on your server.

Excellent, good to know, thanks.

Also, what are the main differences between Fedora and RHEL as far as features go?

Secondly, I was wondering if there is any comprehensive documentation on Fedora like there is for RHEL? The CentOS site hosts a copy of the RHEL docs because it is so similar to RHEL, would these RHEL docs be applicable to Fedora as well?

Thanks,
men$an

1) The main difference between RHEL4 and FC3 is that you pay for RHEL4 support.

FC3 tends to be somewhat more advanced/buggy than RHEL4. RHEL4 is essentially FC2 with the bugs fixed.

If you need some hand holding or don't want to deal with technical problems, then get RHEL4. Otherwise, if you don't mind running into an occasional technical problem, then use FC3.

2) The RHEL4 manuals work fine for FC3 and can be found at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/.

So, RHEL 4 is FC2 based? Then FC4 will be 2 major iterations beyond RHEL4? Would this mean that it would have pretty old GCC, MySQL, Apache, etc? or are those updated through up2date to be what is currently out?

The relationship between Fedora and RHEL was address in an interview with Michael Tiemann a while back (see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/t254939.html).

Here is some of the Fedora stuff, but it’s worth reading the entire interview:

“...Fedora is Red Hat's user-innovation toolkit. Let me explain the difference between Fedora and Enterprise Linux, and then it will be obvious how they fit together. As I said, Fedora is the best of what works (or almost works) right now. In three to four months, there's a new best--some packages will be dropped, others added. Enterprise Linux has different properties: a release cycle of 18 months instead of 3-4, and a 7 year support lifecycle, which means that any technology we select into Enterprise Linux must be stable (unchanging) and supportable for a long time. There are lots of great technologies in Fedora that work today, but which we cannot yet commit to support for 7 years. Those technologies will remain in Fedora, maturing until we can make that commitment or find an alternative that can be supported in an enterprise context...

...Many people bought into our Enterprise Linux model, then immediately wanted to us to make all sorts of roadmap decisions that were inconsistent with the long-term support model. Because of the mess around our Fedora communications last year, people didn't understand that the place to innovate--for customers and the community alike--is Fedora. They tried to push changes into Enterprise Linux, and we pushed back. Now, people understand what Fedora is, how it works, how it relates to our future Linux products, and this has accelerated what we've been able to do with Enterprise Linux...”

I'd say RHEL 4 is based a lot more on FC3 than FC2. If you look at the package versions in RHEL 4, they are quite similar to those in FC3 e.g. GNOME 2.8.