Re: Developing under Ubuntu
Andrew Thompson wrote:
On Aug 31, 11:43??pm, Harold Shand <sh...@no.such.domain> wrote:
...
Fedora is RedHat (they're both hats, get it?).
I do now you tell me.*
* Know that a Fedora is a hat and thereby get
the connection.
..Fedora is the free version.
Aha! I had stupidly assumed that every 'name' of
a Linux OS was available as a free version.
Fedora is sponsored by RedHat, and many of RedHat's developers work on Fedora.
It is used by RedHat as a bleeding edge testbed for potentially new components
to include in their mainstream RHEL product. One main difference is that Fedora
is completely derived from FOSS (this can be to the detriment of Fedora in some
cases) whereas RHEL may include non-FOSS components. The development/release
cycle for Fedora is rapid. A new release comes out every 6 months. Support is a
max of 13 months. So you have to do a major upgrade once a year if you want
security updates and bug fixes.
One of the areas where, IMHO, Fedora suffers from its obsession with FOSS is
Java. Because Sun release Java under a license which is too restrictive for the
Fedora management they won't include Sun's Java. In the past this has lead them
to package the abomination called gcj. The situation improved somewhat with
JPackage. This provided an external mechanism for you to build your own Java
RPMs with Sun's Java which were compatible with Fedora and could be integrated
with the Fedora "alternatives" mechanism. I'm not sure what Fedora now include,
it may be OpenJDK but I've not checked recently what state OpenJDK has reached.
RedHat's main product, RHEL is only supposed to be used in conjunction with a
support agreement from RedHat. The software is actually free, what you pay for
is support. You can download a 30 day evaluation copy of RHEL and use it. You
are supposed to remove it after 30 days if you don't purchase support, but it
won't stop working. You won't, however, be able to access the RHN download
centre to get any security updates. You can also freely download the source for
RHEL and build it yourself. There are a couple of free distros. of RHEL which
do exactly this, Centos and White Hat. They also provide updates by downloading
and building the RedHat update source.
RHEL's emphasis is on reliability and stability. It's used on production servers
all around the world where admins. need to know the systems will keep running.
It has a much longer product testing and development cycle (roughly every 2
years for a new release) and will be supported for 7 years.
If I decide to go with it, I will be looking to
use the free version.
There are many free distros. Choosing one is an art. Asking for recommendations
on a Linux NG is one of the best ways of starting a flame-war on Usenet. Many
distros. have live CDs which you can download, burn and boot from. These allow
you to get an idea of how the distro. runs without having to install anything.
One thing you will almost certainly find is that the distro you prefer to begin
with won't be the one you are running in a years time. You will most likely
start with the one with the L&F which most closely resembles what you are used
to (Windows presumably). Over time you will more than likely gravitate to a
distro which offers you more flexibility and control. It's wise to stick to the
mainstream distros. They have better support, so bug fixes come out quicker,
and new hardware is likely to be supported on those distros. first.
Your choice of CPU (Intel dual core) is most likely 64bit. If you mean the
Core2Duo, it is 64bit and should run pretty much any 32bit or 64bit Linux
distro. With a 64bit distro and 64bit JDK you can access large amounts of RAM
in Java. The largest system I currently have has 32GB, of which I can access
every bit in Java (although this system is Opteron not Intel).
Be aware, though, that Sun have still not produced a 64bit plugin for browsers.
Whether they ever will is unknown. Some distros provide a 32bit execution
environment with their 64bit distros (RHEL is one, don't know about Fedora)
which allows you to run 32bit apps. Although it's not supported by RedHat this
does allow you to install and run a 32bit Firefox RPM. There is also a plugin
wrapper (nspluginwrapper) which allows you to run 32bit plugins in a 64bit
browsers. RedHat now provide support for this in RHEL5.
If your choice of distro. doesn't include a Sun JDK and you want to use that
together with an IDE your simplest option is probably to download and install
one of the Netbeans/JDK bundles. This will give you both Netbeans and the Sun
JDK.
--
Nigel Wade