Submitted by James A. Peltier (not verified) on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 20:46.
As a systems analyst for a University in British Columbia I find myself always playing catch up with the latest enterprise releases. It takes us an average of about 1 month to build the scripts, test them and overall certify an environment before deployment. We only support long term supported distributions for just this reason. From that perspective I could see how it would be nice to have coordinated releases. It would give people a change to test and certify all the versions nearly simultaneously. We could track compatibility issues between the distributions and work around them prior to them being released and report back to the "upstream provider". This could benefit others extensively.
On the flip side, Ubuntu has a *long* way to go for enterprise deployment. RedHat and Novell have been far ahead of Ubuntu in this space. It seems that Ubuntu suffers from what I call "Windows syndrome". The Ubuntu team has focused so much time and energy on the *user* Desktop that the *enterprise* desktop deployment experience is very difficult. Preseed is no where near autoyast or kickstart in terms of ease of use, and Ubuntu only seems to support a subset of Debian's preseed.
It would be nice if there was more collaboration between them to ensure a better experience for us administrators too!
BTW: If anyone knows how to tell preseed to only delete GNU/Linux partition types please let me know. Autoyast and Kickstart do this incredibly easy but I can' find it anywhere in the preseed documentation.
Ubuntu vs RedHat vs Blah Blah
As a systems analyst for a University in British Columbia I find myself always playing catch up with the latest enterprise releases. It takes us an average of about 1 month to build the scripts, test them and overall certify an environment before deployment. We only support long term supported distributions for just this reason. From that perspective I could see how it would be nice to have coordinated releases. It would give people a change to test and certify all the versions nearly simultaneously. We could track compatibility issues between the distributions and work around them prior to them being released and report back to the "upstream provider". This could benefit others extensively.
On the flip side, Ubuntu has a *long* way to go for enterprise deployment. RedHat and Novell have been far ahead of Ubuntu in this space. It seems that Ubuntu suffers from what I call "Windows syndrome". The Ubuntu team has focused so much time and energy on the *user* Desktop that the *enterprise* desktop deployment experience is very difficult. Preseed is no where near autoyast or kickstart in terms of ease of use, and Ubuntu only seems to support a subset of Debian's preseed.
It would be nice if there was more collaboration between them to ensure a better experience for us administrators too!
BTW: If anyone knows how to tell preseed to only delete GNU/Linux partition types please let me know. Autoyast and Kickstart do this incredibly easy but I can' find it anywhere in the preseed documentation.