On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Ed Hill wrote: > On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 03:18, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > > if that's the case, how many students are going to be interested > > in the more stable but certainly older technology of RHEL on their > > desktop? to which release of RH does RHEL currently correspond? RHEL 3.0 is pretty close to RH9+. > > Hi Rob, > > Probably quite a few grad students, post-docs, and professors will be > interested. Theres a lot of researchers using Linux for data reduction > who really don't care about bleeding-edge stuff. They just want a > stable, secure, and up-2-date platform for their desktops, servers, and > beowulf clusters. > > For instance, we have dozens of users matching that description in our > department. Another reason to stick with the slower-moving product is support for commercial software. I kind of doubt that we'll see products like Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, SPlus, CPLEX, etc. staying fully current with a fast-moving Fedora product. They'll be supporting the OS that they can get support for themselves, namely RHEL. And they will be very happy with the longer life cycle. I haven't decided which way to go with my work machines, but this is an excellent alternative for academics, and makes RHEL a very viable option for me. > > Ed > > -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
