[PlanetCCRMA] Why CentOS?

[Roy Vestal]

Good question, and I hope I'll keep the flame war from starting.

<Linux Administrator hat on (I.E. "Day Job")>

Fedora is roughly on a 6 month life cycle. In other words, a newer 
distro is available roughly every 6 months, i.e. 9 is out now, only 
roughly 2 years after 6. During this life cycle process, the core of 
distro, mainly the kernel version, glibc, and a few other packages will 
and have changed. After 3 versions have been released (roughly 1 1/2 
years), the oldest version(s) of Fedora go "legacy" and development 
seems to all but stop, i.e. Fedora 9 is about to be released and when it 
does, Fedora 6 will go legacy. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/ReleaseProcess

Contrast this to the release cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's 
release cycle is roughly 3 years, and the life/support cycle is 7 years. 
During this life cycle, security updates, patches, and what not will be 
applied, but the core of the distro, the kernel version, glibc, etc will 
not change in version. This creates a very stable enterprise class 
distribution. For example, the life/support cycle of RHEL 4: 
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_61_7357.shtm

CentOS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is compliant with the 
GPL of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=2
http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=13

</Linux Administrator hat off>

<Small Business/Studio Owner hat on (I.E. "Night Job")>

For me personally, in my business, I need a distro that is on a more 
stable release schedule than Fedora for my Audio workstations. My office 
machines run Fedora as they need the "bleeding edge" software updates, 
like Pidgin and Open Office.

As I like the packaging method of Planet CCRMA and the mailing list has 
been incredibly helpful, I wanted to stay with Planet CCRMA. The 
discussion of getting Planet CCRMA and CentOS working together started 
sometime last year (summer maybe?), at least to my knowledge. It appears 
that more than I have a desire to make it work. And sometime later 
Fernando and Arnauld picked up that task and thought it was a good idea 
(now I'm not sure if they thought of it first or someone on the list). 
The cool part is, if it can start working on CentOS, then there is a 
chance those that want to purchase RHEL will be able to get it working 
as well.

</Small Business/Studio Owner hat off>

I can't speak for anyone else on the list, but this is why I am looking 
into CentOS.

HTH

bhaskins at chartermi.net wrote:
> The last thing that I want to do is to start a flame war but I'm curious and
> may be missing something here.
>
> Why would one choose CentOS over Fedora?
>
> On my equipment, Fedora 8 has been the best Linux installation to date and
> I have used/tested most of them starting with .98.
>
> I really do wish that I could find some good documentation on pulse audio though.
> When it works it's fine, then it often stops working for reasons that I have not
> been able to figure out yet.
>
> _______________________________________________
> PlanetCCRMA mailing list
> PlanetCCRMA at ccrma.stanford.edu
> http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/planetccrma
>
>