Re: [Lilux-help] Inventory as of 01/07/2004

The experience we have with most of our Plan-Net customers is that they are not ready to pay the 1250 € for SuSE SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) nor the more expensive RehHat distribution. We try to convinde them to pay a copy of SuSE Linux Professional (~95 €), with success, but since there is no such RedHat distribution, we don't install ANY RedHat Linux on ANY of our customer's servers. I would be surprised that RedHat is still the most used distribution in Luxembourg on servers. Maybe true historically, but this is no more the trend, then consequently not the advice to give to our members. SuSE is used by IBM and Sun, supported by Oracle, ... I am a previous user of RH and have all goodies, and even a red hat, but with the lost of RedHat for end-users, I can't use it professionally anymore. The server edition is just too expensive. By the way, I red that the last desktop edition of RH is not even able to be installed on ANY previous RH distribution. You have to start from a newly formatted partition. I can't sell this to anybody. Sorry for RH. I think we should split Linux distros classification in three parts: 1) Fully supported commercial editions (SuSE SLES, Sun JDS with maintenance contract or RedHat Linux) 2) Commercial editions with limited services such as limited help-desk or online updates (SuSE, Mandrake, Sun JDS...) 3) Community supported editions (such as Fedora, Debian, Gentoo...) By the way, I don't even know exactly where to put Slackware, IBM Linux nor Knoppix in there. This top-level classification is the one that is the most relevant to professional customers: is it really backed by a great name ? What are the evolution path ? What guarantee do we have on availability of services and updates ? ... No customer will go for class 3 distros. No are ready yet to face the price of class 1 up to now, so my experience is that professional users are all using class 2 distros at the time. Thinks can change for sure, especially with Sun JDS that is billed ~80 €/seat with limited service, backed by a very famous computer company, and that is fully supported with an optional maintenance contract. Just my 0.5 eurocent. Patrick Useldinger a écrit : -- Brent Frère Private e-mail: Brent(a)BFrere.net Postal address: 5, rue de Mamer L-8280 Kehlen Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg European Union Mobile: +352-021/29.05.98 Fax: +352-26.30.05.96 Home: +352-307.341 URL: http://BFrere.net