intertwingly

It’s just data

Revisiting RedHat


I switched to Debian in 2003 given the uncertainty at the time for RedHat.  Eighteen months later, I switched to Ubuntu as I found the unpredictable release cycle of Debian to be an issue.

Clearly Fedora weathered the storm and has not only survived but thrived.

I had occasion to try Fedora again yesterday when debugging a GCP/JAXP issue.  The problem turned out to be the version of libjaxp1.3-java included in the distribution was incompatible with the version of GCJ included in that same distribution.  That’s the second distribution packaging bug I encountered relating to GCJ on Ubuntu.

Apparently, RedHat based distributions put more attention on Java than Debian based distributions do.

Anyway, I was curious to see what had changed since I had last looked into a RPM based distribution over five years ago, and the answer in retrospect was totally obvious.  The difference between two 2009 vintage Linux distributions is much smaller than the difference between a 2009 vintage distribution and a 2003 vintage distribution, even of those distributions came from the same place.

Oh, there are differences.  On Ubuntu, the Terminal application is an Accessory, on Fedora it is a System Tool.  Yum totally closed the gap with apt-get, but package names are different, for example ruby1.8-dev on Ubuntu maps to ruby-devel on Fedora.  Shutting down wasn’t obvious on Fedora, at least not until I logged off.  Sudo is preconfigured on Ubuntu, not so on Fedora.  Yum default to “No”, aptitude to “Yes” on “Is this OK?” types of questions.

But those differences are cosmetic.  The true differences are in the version of the packages.  Fedora 11 gives you Rails 2.3.2 and Ruby 1.8.6 whereas Ubuntu 9.04 provides Rails 2.1.0 and Ruby 1.8.7.  Ubuntu provides Firefox 3.0, Fedora provides Firefox 3.5beta4.

Given that I’m likely to continue playing with GCJ for a few more weeks at least, I might even consider switching.  The only two showstoppers I’ve seen are both temporary.  VirtualBox doesn’t seem to know how to install Guest additions on Fedora 11, and Firebug won’t install on Firefox 3.5beta4.  I’d also miss the new notification system that debuted in Jaunty.