Where I can get a full copy of FREE Linux with all necessary packages?

[Hanry Zhou]

I am a HPUX administrator with quite some years experience, but not too much on Linux (redhat or compatible ), However, I have been told to get a free Linux for an application which we have alredy have license with in a Production environment.

Would anybody please let me know where I can get a freel Linux software, and if it is all possible?

[Chhaya_Z]

Hi,

  I did not understand your question, do you want a free Linux OS?  What are your necessary packages and requirements?

For example Fedora (sponsored by Red Hat), Ubuntu, and lots more are free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

[tony j. podrasky]

Hello Hanry Zhou;

1. GOOGLE "download Linux" and then go to the site to download the iso version and burn it to DVD. (FREE).

2. Go on eBay and buy a DVD for less than $5.00 - including shipping - and save yourself the hassle of what is involved with #1.

WARNING: if you've got other disks (with data on them) in the computer you are going to use to load Linux on, either be VERY CAREFUL or else disconnect those disks first. When you load Linux it will give you the option of writing to one specific disk or formatting ALL OF THEM.

[Hanry Zhou]

We are going to run a Oracle diagnostic application on the server. They don't want to spend money, so wanted to use FREE Linux OS. I am not sure if free O.S would run into any problem. So, ask you advice.

[Matti_Kurkela]

In addition, I feel CentOS should be mentioned: it is a clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux, with the RedHat logos and any other copyrighted content (mainly artwork and branding) replaced. It should be practically 100% binary-compatible with the corresponding RedHat versions. Some third-party applications may check whether or not they're on a real RedHat system by examining the /etc/redhat-release file; but as you can edit the file, such checks are usually easy to work around.

This is possible because RedHat Enterprise Linux source code is open and free. With RedHat, you pay for support and easy access to enterprise-quality updates.

if your needs are simple and non-critical, you may choose to use CentOS instead: it is completely free but there will be no paid support personnel to help you if you have a problem with it. If you need help with it, you would have to ask for help from the user community... like this forum for example.

[tony j. podrasky]

Hello Hanry;

Well, I don't consider $5.00 as "spending money". If you were to tell your boss you need $2,000.oo for a new server I could see him getting upset - but $5.00? You can't get a decent lunch for $5.00!  :-)

I think you're going to spend a lot more time (time = money) to find the Linux ISO, and then burn it to a DVD.

AFA running into problems;

Back in 2003 I loaded RedHat Enterprise on my computer. I did a little tuning and it has run flawlessly for 9 years. Never a crash or hiccup.

I just bought a new computer. I've tried running Fedora 16 / Linux Mint / SUSE / Unbuntu on it. It has been a complete nightmare: it hangs, stalls, does things sometimes, then doesn't do those same things the next time. It has so many buggy utilities on it that do interprocess communications that there is no telling which one is causing the problem. I've gotten around the bugs by killing off all the processes I don't use. Of course, that has caused a lot of utilities not to work - but at least I can run my X LESSTIF environment without it hanging.

Another problem is when I selected the "install everything" option - they must be using a previously unknown-to-me definition of "everything" - because "everything" isn't there. I constantly run into problems with utilities that won't run because they are missing something. I can't even run the C compiler!

Now, I freely and openly admit that I have been "out of the loop" on Linux since the 2003, and the new version is a lot different than the ones I've played with since the 1990's - but just go to one of the Linux forums and see some of the complaints about it. I reboot, logged in as "me", and did a "ps aux" of my processes. I GOOGLEd some of them and found that gvfs causes a lot of problems. Just now I GOOGLEd "gvfs problems" and it returned with 190,000 entries...

It is my feeling (again this is what I believe - other may disagree with me) that you will have your hands full with getting the Oracle diagnostics application to work on a platform you are familiar with. Just coming up-to-speed on Linux is going to be a major endevor for you.

regards,

tony j. podrasky

[Jan Soska]

Hello,

as mentioned above, we can recomend Centos linux for any usage. We you it for 4 years, no problem found yet. Patches are available generally in hours after RH releases them.

Only problem was with Centos 6 - it came more than year later then RH enterprise linux... but now is here and works fine.

Jan