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I really miss Debian's package management!

The shop I inherited a bit over a year ago was Debian, but what I saw was that they had resorted to Debian Testing to get things to work on newer hardware and in some cases had just bypassed hardware (putting Intel NICs in Dell servers to bypass Broadcoms, for instance). We gave it a shot for a while but circumstance led us to a series of 15-20 Redhat/Fedora installs and the last Debian install was retired two weeks ago.

My sense was that we could have kept using Debian, but that we would need to spend more time swimming in the river of Debian culture and communication. With Fedora, I don't think we have spent as much time wandering through Wikis. If we had other platform needs like ARM, obviously our equation would be different. Happily we do have much of Debian package management with apt for rpm on almost all those boxes. I haven't tried synaptic under Fedora yet since the one machine where I would like to use it is x86_64 and apt doesn't handle multi-arch/lib installs yet (at least for RPM), so that machine is stuck in yum/up2date land.

I worked a bit in the office yesterday with a pleasing result. I had cause to want to move a test/demo Web site off of my desktop Dell running FC1 into a drive-less Shuttle XPC. It dawned on me that I might as well do a clean FC3 install on my desktop rather than build up the Shuttle and move Web, PHP, MySQL, et cetera, I just pulled the 3Ware RAID1 FC1 config out of the Dell and stuffed it in the Shuttle. Booted up, anaconda went through about 20 unconfigure/configure dialogues for various chipsets, and I had to reconfigure IP, but then had a running system.

Anaconda has taken its knocks, but that was pretty good. I don't have a good sense of how well other current distros would do at that, but I have to wonder how well I would have fared 3-4 years ago with any of them.

Ah, and having a usable x86_64 under Fedora == good. We just managed to justify a quad Opteron solely on the basis of issues with addressable memory (the new box will have 32GB). Where would we be without x86_64? Granted we'll wind up compiling a bunch of stuff by hand, but having a usable distro for basics will make that go a lot easier.
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Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.