[Beowulf] [External] RIP CentOS 8 [EXT]

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 12/8/20 5:05 PM, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
>> On Dec 8, 2020, at 4:59 PM, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> On 8 Dec 2020, at 21:52, Ryan Novosielski <novosirj at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> It’s pretty common that if something supports only one distribution, it’s RedHat-based. That’s also true of hardware vendors.
>> True, officially, but often not officially.  Again, back around 2008 I found it hilariously irritating.  HP supported a lot of Debian activity in the background, and hosted quite a lot of the infrastructure.   Officially, they only supported Red Hat, but I discovered on a visit to Colorado Springs that they actually developed all their drivers using Debian, and then ported them to Red Hat!
>>
>> A year or two later, I remember noticing that the firmware update ISOs that HP distributed were also Debian-based.  Even though they only distributed Red Hat RPMs on them.  Duh!
>>
>> Tim
>> -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
> I should have been clearer too: this goes beyond just what they say they will support, or what sorts of commands they’ll ask you to run to prove a hardware problem, etc., but to your point, frequently stuff will be distributed only in RPM, or only yum repositories will be provided, or whatever else I might not be thinking of. And sure, I can work around that, etc., until one comes along that’s a huge pain in the neck for some reason, or it’s based on a different set of libraries, that don’t work well on the other distro, etc. There’s just a limit to how much time I want to spend on stuff like that, especially if we’re talking about stuff that really isn’t the focus of your business, like firmware or something. On my own equipment, I run either Debian or Ubuntu, and we do some Debian/Ubuntu in Singularity containers for the relatively few cases where they are supported and RHEL/CentOS are not.
>
> That said, if CentOS truly goes away, isn’t seamlessly replaced, a lot of that could change.
>
This is another reason I should have mentioned in my previous diatribe. 
The RPM package format and commands were also a big deal at the time. 
Not quite revolutionary, but a big evolutionary step ahead of whatever 
else was out at the time. My experience with Linux started in 1996 with 
Red Hat Linux (not enterprise) version 4. All the research I did said 
"Go with Red Hat Linux - their RPM package manager makes 
installing/managing software way better than any other distro, so it's 
perfect for a beginner" So as a beginner, I took that advice.

Also, if you spent $40 to by a packaged version of RHL 4, like I did, it 
came with the Metro-X X-server, which was waaaaay easier to setup and 
support A LOT more video cards than xfree86 did at the time, which was 
another big selling point. Setting up X was much harder back then, and I 
heard horror stories of people frying their video cards by putting the 
wrong settings in their xfree86 config file. I'm not sure if they were 
true or not, but I didn't want to find out the hardware.

Here's an article on Metro-X from 1997:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2299

-- 
Prentice