[Beowulf] centos5 as cluster os

[Joe Landman]

Geoff Jacobs wrote:

> Of particular interest
> rpm -qa equates to  dpkg -l
> rpm -ql equates to -L <packagename>
> rpm -qf equates to dpkg -S <filename>

Ahhh... Rosetta stones ....

> Trust me, Debian based distros are the next best thing to crack cocaine.

I will take your word on that particular comparison ...

What sold me was when I needed to build a new kernel to add support for 
something.

On Centos:  A nightmare (not that there is anything wrong with Centos, 
its just what Redhat does to the kernel build is enough to make a grown 
hacker cry), can't easily generate rpms for it.  Make rpm sort of does a 
generic RPM without really packaging up headers, sources, module links, 
... correctly.  There is no real kernel make package and trying to 
insert a modern up-to-date kernel into the .spec is an exercise in masochism

On SuSE it is even worse.

For all intents and purposes, if you need to deviate far from the 
supplied kernel version, you are basically toast unless you do *lots* of 
things by hand.  This makes things like Fedora look nice as they build 
the modern kernels for you, albeit not necessarily with the options you 
want.

With Ubuntu (Debian for all intensive porpoises) you pull your kernel 
source, make changes, patch what you need/want, build your config (all 
of which you have to do on the others anyway to make sure it will build 
correctly) and

	CONCURRENCY=4 make-kpkg buildpackage

and whammo, a working, correctly built, linked, set up .deb .  You 
didn't even have to think hard.

It just works.

It is a shame that make-kpkg doesn't have an RPM target.  I guess I 
could use alien to convert it, but ... they just make life to darned easy.



-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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