[Beowulf] A press release

[Geoff Jacobs]

Gregory Warnes wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/1/08 3:25PM , "Mark Hahn" <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
>     > Hmmm.... for me, its all about the kernel.  Thats 90+% of the
>     battle. Some
>     > distros use good kernels, some do not.  I won't mention who I think
>     is in the
>     > latter category.
> 
>     I was hoping for some discussion of concrete issues.  for instance,
>     I have the impression debian uses something other than sysvinit -
>     does that work out well?
> 
> Debian uses standard sysvinit-style scripts in /etc/init.d, /etc/rc0.d, ...
> 
>      is it a problem getting commercial
>     packages (pathscale/pgi/intel compilers, gaussian, etc) to run?
> 
> I’ve never had any major problems.  Most linux vendors supply both RPM’s
> and .tar.gz installers, and I generally have better luck with the
> latter, even on RPM based systems anyway.   
> 
> 
>     the couple debian people I know tend to have more ideological motives
>     (which I do NOT impugn, except that I am personally more swayed by
>     practical, concrete reasons.)
> 
> My ‘conversion’ to use of Debian had little to do with ideological
> motives, and a lot more to do with minimizing the amount of time I had
> to take away from my research to support the Linux clusters I was
> maintaining at the time.
> 
> Side note, one very nice thing about debian is the ability to upgrade a
> system in-place from one O/S  release to another via
> 
>     apt-get dist-upgrade
> 
> Much nicer than reinstalling the O/S as seems to be (used to be?) the
> norm with RPM-based systems
> 
> -Greg

I did in place upgrades for RH8 machines to RH9 using APT-RPM, back in
the day. I'm not sure about Yum, as I just haven't had cause to use
RH/FC in some time.

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs