We chose SL for the same reasons.

In general I get the feeling we are getting in a catch-22 situation. SL
delivers us stability and easier maintenance, but at the price of
increased instability or even a lack of support on newer hardware
because of the older kernels and the delay in backporting of newer
kernel features. I have no idea what the answer is, but I do have the
idea the problem is increasing.

For now, we just try to get our customers to stay away from the latest
and greatest hardware.

(As an aside: it turned out Fedora core 8 also didn't work on this
particular model).

Roelof van der Kleij
IT dept. Gorlaeus Laboratories

Chris Cooke wrote:
> On 30 Jan 2008, at 23:58, John Summerfield wrote:
>
>> Roelof van der Kleij wrote:
>>> Maybe fedora is the way to go for desktops?
>>
>>
>> It might be. Fedora has newer technology; if you're developing 
>> software to deploy to next RHEL, that makes sense.
>>
>> OTOH it's higher maintenance. It will fail more often - new 
>> technology has its risks, you need to upgrade more often to remain on 
>> supported releases and your users will spend more time learning their 
>> new desktops.
>
> Yes, we're moving in the other direction because of the need to 
> upgrade Fedora so often. By the time we've ported our system 
> configuration software to a newer Fedora release and upgraded a 
> thousand plus machines to it, a Fedora release has a lot less than a 
> year left before it's out of maintenance. This puts us in some 
> difficulty as we only have time for an annual OS upgrade. We've used 
> Fedora for several years but we're now moving to Scientific Linux to 
> get the extra support period.
>
> -- Chris.
>
> Computing Officer, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.