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Organizational Battle Ubuntu vs Gentoo vs RHEL & Fedora

July 27th, 2008

Comparison The Following Three O.S in an Organizational view.

Ubuntu

Red Hat Enterprise & Fedora

Gentoo

Linus Trovalds in 1991 had written a Unix-like kernel. It was at that stage of not much use with very few utilities and s/w that came along with it , and was labeled Linux. Free Software Foundation (Richard M. Stallman, founder (started 1985)and president of the FSF) had developed several tools and applications(Under the GNU Project) by this time and was embedded into Linux. From there on to now it has attained great levels of stability ,security and portability.

Requirements Of a Corporate Organization : (priority wise ordinated)

1. Security

2. Technology

3. Performance and Reliability

4. Investment and Management

5. Installation And Troubleshooting

6. Backup and Recovery

Ubuntu “humanity to others” :

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro. It was created by Marc Shuttleworth and sponsored by Canonical Ltd. It at present as of today Its average hits per day for the past 12 months is 2305 and in the past month as of today is 1989 - quoted from www.distrowatch.com as on 26-07-08.

There are several variants which include

Ubuntu (Desktop & Server Edition) – Gnome desktop

Kubuntu- KDE Desktop

Xubuntu , Gobuntu , Edubuntu , MID edition.

Technology & Support :

Ubuntu is primarily a Debian based OS ire it was built on the foundations of the Debian OS. It is maintained by Canonical Ltd. And is contributed by developers all over the world. It has regular patches and updates with a complete distro update of every 6 months. Even though it has a few driver issues it beats the rest in this criteria as the updates are more often and support for the new hardwares are given quicker than the other distros. Ubuntu Supports only i386 and amd 64 which is quite a downside. The Supported the Servers for few of the SUN Microsystems and System 76 has been certified by Canonical , it also is compatible with several Hp Dell and IBM. Canonical provides technical support for a nominal rate.

Technology Rating : 3/5

Support Rating : 3/5

Security :

The Security is maintained by the packages that come built in with the O.S. It often has security patches to keep up with the threats involved , updates almost everyday.

The Security packages include

Iptables 1.3 – Used to maintain network security.

AppArmor 2.1 - creates security profile and maintains access restrictions of programs.

Ufw 0.16 – (Uncomplicated Firewall) An easy to use local-host based firewall.

Even though AppArmor is easy to use , when it come to setting up profiles it will take similar time as to that of SELinux. Also If an entire Server is concerned it is not as secure as SELinux. For few applications running AppArmor will serve better. But SELinux can be installed later.

Security Rating : 3.5/5

Backup and Recovery :

Ubuntu Server Edition by default provides backup tools like Bacula 2.2 and BackupPC 3.0. With these tools Backup can be done efficiently making mobility and parallel backup possible. No client side software is necessary also compression techniques are provided.

Backup and recovery : 4/5

Investment :

The Ubuntu Distros are free hence only the hardware cost is to be considered. If Official support is required then a fee of 2750$ per year for server and 900$ per year on desktop is provided. As far as client system are concerned it supports almost all the latest hardware. Since it works fine on older system a lot can be saved.It is an ideal option for client systems. Also over 40 languages are supported which makes its mark on any country.

Investment Rating : 4/5

Installation And Troubleshooting:

The Installation is easier than any other O.S. It provides a Gui Installer with few easy steps involved.But the Installation lacks flexibility by default. Various logs created from time to time helps in making troubleshooting easy. For Software installation , The Advanced packaging tool is provided as the base , it simplifies the installation configuration of the packages with aptitude , and Synaptic acting as the GUI front end makes the installation and package retrieval a lot easier. Their site also has a very good documentation.

Installation Rating : 3.5/5

Troubleshooting : 3.5/5

Performance And Reliability:

All Linux distos work well on minimal system configurations and Ubuntu is none the less. The minimal system requirements for it has been listed as 256 MB ram with 4 GB of disk space.It is not the quickest of all distros though. Ubuntu based on Debian which is considered one of the most stable had good stability , but instabilities even though are quite rare they do occur. These crashes when reported are patched quickly.

Performance Rating : 3.5/5

Reliability Rating : 3.5/5

(In my next post i`ll write about Gentoo)….

Continue to Gentoo

Tags: Distros comparison, Fedora, Gentoo, linux, Red Hat, Ubuntu
Posted in Techie ozzie blogs, Uncategorized | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “Organizational Battle Ubuntu vs Gentoo vs RHEL & Fedora”

1. Distro Comparison for Organisations at FSLog Says:
   July 31st, 2008 at 8:26 am

   [...] Ubuntu [...]

2. OZ » Blog Archive » Organizational Battle Ubuntu vs Gentoo vs RHEL & Fedora Says:
   August 12th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

   [...] Organizational Battle Ubuntu vs Gentoo vs RHEL & Fedora [...]

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