[SBE] Career advice needed

[David R. Wilson]

To add a bit to this.  I have used a bunch of distributions also.
I found CentOS (5.3) to be a bit behind the curve on some of the Perl
stuff I needed to run some recent versions of other programs.  I
downloaded and installed what was necessary.  It was not any significant
problem.  The updates on somewhat rare occasion have nixed some of the
changes or additions I made, since they were not listed in the RPM
database.  That also was not a big deal to fix.  The good point I am
aware of is the long support time for that version of the OS.

I have been using a fair number of Fedora releases (Red Hat's
development stuff) and been pretty happy with that.  It is cutting edge
and sometimes I find some new and improved bugs.  I find it quick to get
fixed, but also the support cycle (1 year is about all that is
supported) is a bit on the puny side.  

Most of the other releases (and probably a handful of others mentioned)
I have run and not had any significant objection to.  Suse's update
mechanism is not one I prefer, but it works fine.  Anything related to
Debian (which Ubuntu is related to) is also fine.

As long as you remember a few commands, which work with very minor
variations across most of the Linux releases and most varieties of Unix,
I don't think the differences are worth a lot of worry.  For those that
are well versed in different Unix varieties, there might be some
preferences for the BSD or Sys5 layout.  I never really cared which one
was in what flavor of Linux.  

The thing that I found more relevant is this:

[root at buzzfire ~]# uptime
 20:39:57 up 462 days, 13:25,  3 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.11, 0.09


That was after spending 4 weeks of debugging some drivers on another
operating system that I have heard called the 'you moved your mouse
please reboot operating system'.

One of the bigger problems with Linux for me is that you forget what you
did years ago for a particular bit of code or task.  Taking notes are
worthwhile.  The other thing that must be mentioned is there is quite
often many ways to fix a problem or do a task in various flavors of
Linux.  


Dave


On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 15:19 -0400, Cowboy wrote:

> On Thursday 24 September 2009 11:33 am, A9xw at cs.com wrote:

> >  Red Hat linux seems to be the best avenue.

> 

>  Depends what school you go to !!

> 

>  CentOS ( red hat enterprise minus support ) is not too unpopular

>  for business machines.

>  My main-stay is Slackware, as it more closely resembles the real BSD

>  unix derivatives ( like QNX ) I work with.

>  Debian is pretty much the parent of the SystemV linux derivatives, 

>  like Ubunto and Mandrake.

>  Red Hat is a *nix unto itself. It does run on the linux kernel, but isn't

>  so representative of the 60 or so OS that run over that kernel.

> 

>  Some Linux OS's can be bought pre-packaged.

>  All can be downloaded one way or another as Open Source.

> 

>  Red Hat is commercially supported by Red Hat.

>  SuSE is commercially supported by Novel.

>  Blue Cat is commercially supported by LynxOS.

>  Others are supported by various individuals and organizations.

> 

>  Remember, Linux is a kernel.

>  There are a miriad of operating systems that run over that kernel,

>  all of them unix-like systems, but only the kernel is properly called "Linux."

>