I am working in a university and I am maintaining several servers installed with RedHat 6.2, 7.2, 9. Since RedHat will not give support at all these version soon, I am considering whether to go for fedora or rhel 3 or other linux distribution (eg. debian).
I'm afraid I cannot help you answer your specific questions very well yet, as I have not had the chance to play with Fedora much yet myself. However, I can emphatically recommend this: SWITCH TO RHEL 3.
Since you are a university, you can qualify for Red Hat's academic pricing. Get the details here:
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/education/
The basics are that you get RHEL-AS for $50/year per server and RHEL-WS for $25/year per desktop. If you have more than 40 or 50 machines, you can get a site subscription which will allow you lots and lots of AS and WS licenses for a flat fee which IIRC is around $2,500 annually. This academic pricing makes RHEL3 unbeatable in my view.
Brief comments on your Fedora questions:
1) Could I put it into simple words, Fedora is just like RedHat 6.2, 7.... 9, except it doesn't have any further rpm patch update from redhat? And rhel 3 is a continuation of rhel 2.
Fedora is what you would have expected to see as Red Hat Linux 10. Patches can be obtained via up2date, yum, or apt (all three are supported), and the patches are provided by "the community". Of course this community still includes a bunch of people who work at Red Hat, but Red Hat, Inc. does not officially provide support for Fedora. RHEL3 is close to Red Hat Linux 9, I think.
4) I am also serious considering migration the RedHat servers to other linux distribution such as debian. But I think the migration would be difficult. Any suggestion or comment?
Depends on how much you know about Linux in general, and how much time you have spent learning Red Hat specifically. Switching will take some time and effort and learning; figure out how much you think that will be, compare to the specific benefits you expect to get from switching, and do the math.
5) a stupid question, is Fedora as stable as RedHat 9? I think so.
Yes, I think so. But at this point my information is mostly second-hand, from reading most of the thousands of posts made to fedora-list since the launch. My own experience with Fedora, as mentioned above, is limited but has been very good. I would not expect you to have problems with apache, innd, and perl, or any other strongly-mainstream products like those.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
