On 28/03/05 22:16 +0530, Rony Bill wrote: <snip>
Proprietery versions of Linux are not free so keep that in mind too. The free versions may not have all features, so take care. Try out some flavours before making the final decision. Which distribution of Linux is proprietary? RedHat and Novell sell support for their enterprise/professional versions. The source is still there, if you want it.
There is no major difference in the free (unsupported) stuff and the supported stuff in terms of available features. The unsupported versions generally have far more features than the ones that ship with support contracts.
Dear Devdas, I think you are not entirely accurate here. The reason being most enterprise Linux suppliers such as RedHat and Suse, provide a revised Linux kernel and utility enhancments over this customised kernel.
These technical enhancements would require a lot of insight into the Linux kernel, and is something which is not economical or academically exciting to the average Linux System administrator.
However yes I do accept that the average Linux user may not need all those nifty features, which makes Fedora Core 3 as good as a Red Hat Ent server.
Take care, Paul Alapatt
Features are a function of packages (and versions) and their compile time options. The difference between most different distributions is package management tools, frontends and default settings. Not a very big thing for a good administrator, a major thing for a bad one.
As for advocacy, there is an advocacy howto on http://www.tldp.org/
Devdas Bhagat