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Organizational Battle Ubuntu vs Gentoo vs RHEL & Fedora

Part 2                                                                                                                        (Read From Part -1)

Gentoo (A type of penguin) :

Gentoo , this is the fastest swimming penguin. This distro is popular for the tweaks you can perform on it making it the most customizable of all. It is maintained by Gentoo Foundation. It was created by Daniel Robbins. Designed for adaptability and performance utilizing minimal system resources. Version 1.0 was released March 31^st 2002. Latest Version is 2008.0 Code-named “It’s got what plants crave “ released on July 6 2008.

Technology & Support :

Gentoo provides a wider implementation than Ubuntu on several type of systems. It is supported on several variants , these include - alpha, amd64, hppa (hppa 1.1, hppa 2.0), ppc (G4, G5, power3, power4, power5, ppc, ppc64), SPARC (sparc32, sparc64) x86 (x86, i686). This make it a perfect choice where in different variants of system implementation. The drivers support as of now has had considerable improvement. Linux 2.6.24 kernel specific hardware drivers have been added. The forums and irc also provide excellent support. However it lacks the Official Support which is a downside form an organizational view. The hits in www.distrowatch.com is 510 as on 28-07-08.

Technology Rating : 4.5/5

Support Rating : 3/5

Security :

Gentoo is a Secure OS with minimal threats. It embeds Some of the best Security protocols in the O.S. The best part is the GLSA- Gentoo Linux Security Advisors where the bugs and patches are listed http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/index.xml. This can help the System Admin to a great extent. SELinux is present by default which make this a better chose for servers running multiple applications. Setting up SELinux could be a bit tedious which , but in the end it has a better enforced security. The Hardened-PHP secures the applications and web pages. The buffer overflow protection is given by ProPolice (SSP).

Security Rating : 4.2/5

Performance And Reliability :

Gentoo is an O.S that was created with performance in mind. The O.S is named after Gentoo the fastest swimming penguin. Gentoo is source based and is compiled with optimization for the specific architecture .This makes it faster than the other distros. Gentoo is quite reliable. No major crash occurs. Some application crash does occur but once the bug is reported the developers issue the patch soon. System hang is a rare scenario almost never occurs.

Performance Rating : 4.7/5

Reliability Rating :4/5

Installation And Troubleshooting:

Installation is the difficult part of Gentoo. It Comes with a gnome live CD installer but it is quite buggy and crashes. The best way to install is manually. GLI 0.6.6 is the Gentoo installer. In the earlier versions commands had to typed and given in the docs and download > compilation >installation had to be performed which took days. Gentoo has the Portage Package Management System similar to the BSD ports collection. The packages are built from Source code which make them optimized for the machine and hence perform faster , but this is time consuming. Trouble shooting is not tedious with log generation and bugs can be reported , which aids the developers in creating the patch. No official support is available though.

Installation Rating : 2.5/5

Troubleshooting : 3.5/5

Investment and management :

Gentoo is a free O.S which can be downloaded form the Internet http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml. Since it works on multiple platforms the organization has the flexibility to choose the Hardware. Investment has to be made for Linux Professional for maintenance since no official support is available.

Investment Rating : 4.5/5

Management : 3/5

Backup and Recovery :

Several Backup and recovery tools are present like any other distro these packages can be downloaded. Their compatibility with various architecture can be viewed in their site. http://packages/category/app-backup. This aids the Admin in using the right tool.

Backup And Recovery Rating : 4/5

I will post about Fedora in my next blog…

Continue to Fedora

Tags: Fedora, Gentoo, linux, Red Hat, Ubuntu
Posted in Techie ozzie blogs, Uncategorized | Comments (3)

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

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