RHEL 2.1 compatability question.

[Shaun T. Erickson]

Radke, Theresa A wrote:

>I've run into the RHEL nightmare and dell systems just recently and have
>come up with the following:
>
>1.  If you modify that operating system in any way then you invalidate
>your service agreement.
>2.  That operating system has been customized to run the hardware in
>your dell, try installing over it and you'll get errors.
>3.  you can't find the correct versions of anything to install,
>including oracle grid version.
>  
>
This system is going to be my primary computing environment server, and 
no one will log into it. It won't run anything esoteric. I should think 
that I could at least download and compile my own versions of things, to 
provide services such as dhcp, dns, samba shares, mail, etc., yes? Heck, 
I could just install FreeBSD 5.3, or Debian, if I wanted to, yes? I 
don't particularly care what Dell thinks of my choice of OS, as they 
don't provide support for what came with it anyway, with the support 
level I ordered - just hardware support. I just want a stable OS, that's 
easy for me to keep up to date, to give me a solid foundation to our 
computing environment here. We're a small shop (~25 people) and I 
inherited a computing environment that's a tad flaky, so I'm rebuilding 
all the basic services on this new machine.

    -ste