fc2 or not, that is the question...

[Jay Daniels]

after finding out you will have to upgrade to a new version of fedora
every 3 months, I question my decision on using fedora.

i am seriously considering ol' faithful slackware for the server since
it still has apache 1.3... and a few apps i want to use require 1.3.

i had serious problem compiling apache 1.3.(latest), mod_perl and php
4 on this fedora box.  honestly, it's a pain in the arse the way all the
packages are split up into different rpms and the way pam is currently
setup.  i did finally get everything working, but only after
extracting libpam.la from an older version of pam-devel.  this was
required for the current php 4 and the configure options I wanted.

note: i still don't know what the .la file is or why it's missing from
the current pam-devel, but php required it to compile.

probably would have saved many hours by going ahead and switching to
slackware.  downloading the iso's now, but i still haven't decided.
slackware 9.1(as i understand) does not support smp, but compared to what
i went through with apache and compiling the above from source, it
seems trivial to adjust the slackware kernel source and recompile.

"i left a lot of stuff out of the apache config and would have to
recompile yet again to get everything going."

i still have fedora core 1 on my laptop and may update it to fc2.

just wanted to know, has anyone else had such problems when compiling
from source on rpm based distributions and are you (like me)
considering your options since fc1 is at the end of the road?

for these reason and many others, i still think Redhat made a mistake
going the fedora route.  JMHO, i also think fedora has it's place -
separate from RH.

a few years ago a friend told me, "all you need is slackware 3.0"  he
runs an isp and all his severs run slackware.  i'm beginning to
believe him that slackware may infact be the most customizable distro
when it comes to compiling from source and only installing what you
need.  please don't say, i recommend slack 3.0 - read that line again.

in anycase, over the years i have tried many distros, but i always
seem to go back to slackware.  i really don't care about having to
compile from source as long the compilation goes flawlessly.  i don't
mind keeping up with security issues myself, since i really don't need
to run that many programs anyway.  the base os, apache, mod_perl, php,
mysql, mutt, and an mta is about it.  the rest of the tools i mainly
use are web based applications.

it's been a fun ride, i may be back next week - who knows... but i
want to try other distros and get your view on this 3 month stratigy
of RH's fedora core distro's?



jay