ever migrate from Fedora to Scientific Linux or CentOS?

[Paul Johnson]

We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
work to keep them up to date.  I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when
the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle.  If I could
do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine.
 The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us.

So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to
see about these longer lived Linuxes.  Got any advice?  I expect some
of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.

I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with
RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess).  I
don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies."  I don't want
one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to
KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window
manager and desktop than Gnome).

Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for
academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life.  But I
worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such.
gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to
Brazilian radio stations.  Nothing else can, it appears.    So If I
switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.

I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5
system onto one of the other RPM based distros.  It appears to me that
CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just
try to run an upgrade by installing their packages.  Maybe remove
fedora-release RPM and see what happens.

In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because,
well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.  Last
time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc
were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways.  When we
went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build
newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted.
 One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole
toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on
them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more
work.

So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
a one year old distro, it was very handy.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas

[Paul Johnson]

On 10/31/07, Arthur Pemberton <pemboa(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  > We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
>  > work to keep them up to date.
>
>  Do tell, what packages of yours require recompilation every kernel
>  upgrade? That seems a bigger issue. 
These are the modules I need to build whenever the kernel changes.
Sometimes I can get nvidia from livna, sometimes it is not ready yet.
I build these as RPMS, so usually there's just minimal work to run
rpmbuild and then copy the RPMS onto the server where yum finds them
for the workstations.

nvidia
openafs
ipw3945

>  Also, why aren't you using (what I believe to be) freely
> available
>  Fedora build systems to automate the process - regardless of your
>  final choice of distro.
>  
Tempted to say WFT are you talking about, but I'm trying not to cuss.

What do you mean? I mean to say.




>  Good luck.
>
>
>  > --
>  > Paul E. Johnson
>  > Professor, Political Science
>  > 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
>  > University of Kansas
>  >
>  > --
>  > fedora-list mailing list
>  > fedora-list(a)redhat.com
>  > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>  >
>
>
>  --
>  Fedora 7 : sipping some of that moonshine
>  ( www.pembo13.com )
>
>  --
>  fedora-list mailing list
>  fedora-list(a)redhat.com
>  To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>  

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas

[Rudolf Kastl]

On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
>  work to keep them up to date.  I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when
>  the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle.  If I could
>  do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine.
>   The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
>  re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us. 
for external kernel modules id recommend taking a look into dkms.
saves you alot hassle.

regards,
Rudolf Kastl

>  So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to
>  see about these longer lived Linuxes.  Got any advice?  I expect some
>  of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.
>
>  I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with
>  RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess).  I
>  don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies."  I don't want
>  one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to
>  KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window
>  manager and desktop than Gnome).
>
>  Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for
>  academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life.  But I
>  worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such.
>  gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to
>  Brazilian radio stations.  Nothing else can, it appears.    So If I
>  switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
>
>  I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5
>  system onto one of the other RPM based distros.  It appears to me that
>  CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just
>  try to run an upgrade by installing their packages.  Maybe remove
>  fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
>
>  In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because,
>  well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
>  interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.  Last
>  time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc
>  were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways.  When we
>  went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build
>  newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted.
>   One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole
>  toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on
>  them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more
>  work.
>
>  So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
>  RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
>  a one year old distro, it was very handy.
>
>  --
>  Paul E. Johnson
>  Professor, Political Science
>  1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
>  University of Kansas
>
>  --
>  fedora-list mailing list
>  fedora-list(a)redhat.com
>  To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>

[Les Mikesell]

Paul Johnson wrote:

>  Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name
> (for
>  academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life.  But I
>  worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such.
>  gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to
>  Brazilian radio stations.  Nothing else can, it appears.    So If I
>  switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble. 
Both SL and Centos will use RPMs built for RHEL for things not included 
int the distro.  I don't know much about SL - but Centos is very timely 
about making updates available after RH releases them.

>  I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or
> F5
>  system onto one of the other RPM based distros.  It appears to me that
>  CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just
>  try to run an upgrade by installing their packages.  Maybe remove
>  fedora-release RPM and see what happens. 
That's probably possible, but I would do a clean install so you know 
exactly what you'll be running for the next several years.

>  In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros
> because,
>  well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
>  interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.  Last
>  time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc
>  were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways.  When we
>  went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build
>  newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted.
>   One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole
>  toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on
>  them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more
>  work. 
Centos5 is going to have apps nearly identical to what FC6 had at the 
time it was released.  And they'll stay at that rev with only bugfix and 
  security updates for years.

>  So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
>  RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
>  a one year old distro, it was very handy. 
Centos5 isn't bad today, but the apps will likely seem outdated in 
another year.   But, in the fedora/RH world you have to take wild and 
crazy changes in the kernel and device drivers if you want a new 
firefox.  What would you like your disk drives named today?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell(a)gmail.com

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
>  work to keep them up to date.  I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when
>  the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle.  If I could
>  do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine.
>   The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
>  re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us. 

Yah, most Fedora users will warn you against such if you ask
preinstall. If you're asking whether or not you can simply upgrade
from Fedora to CentoOS, I'm pretty sure the answer  is no. You can
migrate by doing fresh installs, ie. redeploying the system however.

Do tell, what packages of yours require recompilation every kernel
upgrade? That seems a bigger issue.

Also, why aren't you using (what I believe to be) freely available
Fedora build systems to automate the process - regardless of your
final choice of distro.

Good luck.


>  --
>  Paul E. Johnson
>  Professor, Political Science
>  1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
>  University of Kansas
>
>  --
>  fedora-list mailing list
>  fedora-list(a)redhat.com
>  To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>  

-- 
Fedora 7 : sipping some of that moonshine
( www.pembo13.com )

[Michael Semcheski]

On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
>  re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us.
>  ...
>  In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because,
>  well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
>  interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.
>  ...
>  So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
>  RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
>  a one year old distro, it was very handy. 
I agree very much with your sentiment.  On our servers we run
Scientific Linux.  The desktops run Fedora.

The servers are great, but admittedly we use a much smaller set of
software.  With the desktops, its either do updates frequently or do
them 500 at a time.  I'd be a lot happier if the kernel was updated
less frequently (like with the server.)

Right now, I think the happy medium might be with the latest SL, and a
few applications like Firefox and Thunderbird compiled by hand in
/usr/local/...

[thomas cameron]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:47 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
>  We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
>  work to keep them up to date.  I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when
>  the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle.  If I could
>  do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine.
>   The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
>  re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us. 
If you like RPM based installs, and you like the work Red Hat have done
around Fedora, why don't you reward them for it?

You can get RHEL for less than a buck a day:

https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html

See the Basic subscription for RHEL two sockets or less.

In doing so, you are funding Red Hat, and Red Hat pays many hundreds of
F/OSS developers.  You get updates, bug fixes, new versions of RHEL when
they come out, and so on.  Everyone wins.

Just my two cents.
-- 
Thomas Cameron, RHCE, RHCI, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane?

[John Summerfield]

Michael Semcheski wrote:
>  On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
> > The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
> > re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us.
> > ...
> > In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because,
> > well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
> > interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.
> > ...
> > So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
> > RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
> > a one year old distro, it was very handy.
>  
>  I agree very much with your sentiment.  On our servers we run
>  Scientific Linux.  The desktops run Fedora.
>  
>  The servers are great, but admittedly we use a much smaller set of
>  software.  With the desktops, its either do updates frequently or do
>  them 500 at a time.  I'd be a lot happier if the kernel was updated
>  less frequently (like with the server.)
>  
>  Right now, I think the happy medium might be with the latest SL, and a
>  few applications like Firefox and Thunderbird compiled by hand in
>  /usr/local/...
>   

Currently I care for SL5 (my current desktop at home), CentOS 4 (desktop 
at work, and a server at home) and WBEL 4. Oh, and a RHL 7.3->CentOS3 
for theboss@home. I should also mention some FC and an OpenSUSE10.2 laptop.

I would have no concerns about SL5 or CentOS5. Choose based on package 
selection; SL5 may have the edge for you. Both are built from RHEL5 
source with minimal changes, but SL5 has extras for the scientific 
community.

There is no reason at all why you can't install SL, and use packages 
from the CentOS repos, RHEL users do it fairly regularly.

I think SL supports Atheros wireless out of the box, and includes real 
Java and some other stuff important to scientists.


The main difference I see between SL and CentOS is the size of the 
communities and work force; Essentially, SL is done by (I think) two 
people (but I think they're paid to do it) whilst CentOS, like Fedora, 
is chiefly done by volunteers.

Both are supported by mailing lists, and I reckon if one's using 
RHEL-Clone then hanging out on the relevant RHEL list is also appropriate.

There used to be Tao linux, and google may still know of it. It merged 
with CentOS a while back.

WBEL is basically "what we use here, built from RHEL source. You may use 
it, but don't come here for help." It was an okay choice when I 
downloaded it, but I see no reason to prefer it now.

You could also look at SUSE, and maybe evaluate it. it's rpm-based, and 
yast really is very nice. There's no SUSE-clone that I've noticed, but 
OTOH the licence fees may be fairly modest for academe.

Academe should also check out RHEL prices; I haven't for some time, but 
I think one can run RHEL for a modest cost (and get extremely modest 
support).



As for upgrading, I think that all that's needed to upgrade from FC to 
Tikanga-clone is to boot the media and go for it. That might be some 
required magic (upgradeany os some such), and one should check ("rpm -qa 
--last | less") for packages that didn't get upgraded and explore why 
not. likely some will be orphaned, but those could be a problem however 
you do it.

FC3->Tikanga-clone should be about the same upgrade as the (supported) 
Nahant->Tikanga, and FC6->Tikanga like Tikanga->Tikanga, and I think 
that's supported too.



-- 

Cheers
John

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Please do not reply off-list

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:47 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
>  We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much
>  work to keep them up to date.  I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when
>  the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle.  If I could
>  do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine.
>   The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less
>  re-installs)  have lost some of their charm for us.
>  
>  So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to
>  see about these longer lived Linuxes.  Got any advice?  I expect some
>  of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions.
>  
>  I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with
>  RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess).  I
>  don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies."  I don't want
>  one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to
>  KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window
>  manager and desktop than Gnome).
>  
>  Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for
>  academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life.  But I
>  worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such.
>  gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to
>  Brazilian radio stations.  Nothing else can, it appears.    So If I
>  switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble.
>  
>  I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5
>  system onto one of the other RPM based distros.  It appears to me that
>  CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just
>  try to run an upgrade by installing their packages.  Maybe remove
>  fedora-release RPM and see what happens.
>  
>  In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because,
>  well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't
>  interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world.  Last
>  time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc
>  were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways.  When we
>  went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build
>  newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted.
>   One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole
>  toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on
>  them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more
>  work.
>  
>  So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS.  Wish the
>  RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on
>  a one year old distro, it was very handy. 
----
I haven't migrated from Fedora to RHEL/CentOS and I've never used
Scientific Linux.

I would recommend CentOS over Scientific Linux only because they are so
vigilant about upstream compatibility and releasing updates.

It's conceivable that you could migrate from FC5 or FC6 to CentOS-5 by
as you say, removing redhat-release and redhat-release-notes and
installing the relevant corresponding packages from CentOS or Scientific
Linux - see http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/MigrationGuide

Also note my notes about migrating from RHELv5 to CentOS-5 near the
bottom.

It's conceivable that some rpm's from FC6 are newer/higher numbered than
RHELv5/CentOS-5/SL-5 and that may cause some issues...I simply wouldn't
know what they might be because I haven't done any.

It probably would be safer to boot from CD's/DVD and using

linux upgradeany

at boot but yum can undoubtedly handle the migration and it would appear
that you have the technical savvy to handle any bumps in the migration
path.

I would agree with you that the relatively short cycle of Fedora is an
issue and RHEL / CentOS / Scientific Linux obviously gives you the
longer cycle with the obvious problems that stable per RHEL means you
don't typically get the latest gcc, etc.

In my circumstance, I have thus far been using Fedora on desktops and
have used a fairly elaborate kickstart system to wipe the hard drive and
install / configure Fedora so completely that when completed, the box
can be dropped into the user's office and plugged in. I have thus far
balked on the idea of trying to upgrade in place but I am thinking I am
going to experiment with the migration from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 via
yum...obviously with the fallback position that I can always grab the
box and run the kickstart install.

Craig