As anyone who knows me must certainly understand, I’m a huge geek. I love Linux (I should, seeing as I’m a System Administrator specializing in Linux). At Davis we’ve made it a point to use CentOS as our Linux distro of choice for server operations. It just works well, and since it’s got binary compatibility with RHEL, it makes it very easy to find binaries (in the form of RPMs) that run on CentOS with no problems. It just simplifies things. Add to that the excellent support cycle for patches (5 years) and you’ve got an OS that is perfect for our needs. Of course, Red Hat recently released RHEL 5, so the CentOS devs are hard at work creating CentOS 5 from the tarballs. That means any new servers that go in this summer will be able to run CentOS 5, which will be nice (though I’d be displeased they’re still on Firefox 1.5 if I used a GUI on servers). Of course, I may not be here when its time for servers to be rolled out, so who knows?
It seems that Ubuntu has also recently released betas. Ubuntu is my favorite Linux for desktop usage. In fact, I’ll probably use Ubuntu when I get a laptop for seminary. Every release it improves by leaps and bounds, I’d happily recommend it to anyone who wants an alternative to Windows with this one caveat: If you’re a gamer, stick with XP.
Random Bloggings 