[conspire] Re: x86-64 and 2.6 kernels (was: Fedora Core 3 for a Celeron Dell desktop box)

[Rick Moen]

Correcting myself:

> Actually, the conventional corporate rules of the game _exclude_
> Fedora Core (any version), not to mention Debian, Kubuntu, MEPIS, etc.
> from the "enterprise" category.  They're talking about a system with a
> guaranteed binary programming interface over at least 3-5 years, plus
> paid support and updates even if they suck. 

Actually, I've just checked RH's documentation, and they promise a
_seven_-year support life (product life) for each release.  Novell
promises a minimum product life of five years for Novell Linux Desktop 9,
and seven years for SLES9.

The reason RHEL4 (as opposed to RHEL3) isn't working too well for
x86-64, so far, is a lot of little bugs on that CPU platform, notably 
spottily missing 32-bit libs.  Thus the momentum behind SLES9.

Which is really kind of annoying, in part because RH has been, for all 
of people's grousing about some of its doings, a much better friend of the
open source / free-software community -- which can be seen, among many
other things, in the fact that I can lawfully give anyone a copy of
RHEL3 or RHEL4 (whose software contents are 100% open source), but the
same is not true of SLES or Novell Linux Desktop, on account of
restricted proprietary components.