Office of Museum Technology FLMNH Linux Pages

Choosing a Distribution

We initially selected Fedora Core as our Linux distribution of choice. Fedora benefits from the long history of Red Hat Linux as a stable platform, while providing a completely free Operating System. Fedora is supported by an active community.

After using Fedora Core in pseudo-production for over a year, we learned that the short lifespan of each Fedora release makes it difficult to manage in a server environment. While looking for an alternative, we discovered the CentOS project. CentOS is derived from the same source code as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), maintains the same release numbering and schedule as RHEL, aims to be binary-compatible with RHEL, and each release has a long lifespan.

We have also had good luck running Ubuntu Dapper Drake for our desktop Linux systems or anywhere that the Red Hat flavors were too far behind on package versions. The Xubuntu distribution is a very nice choice for older hardware that cannot handle Gnome/KDE or current versions of Microsoft Windows.

Project Web Sites:

• Red Hat - http://www.redhat.com
• Fedora Project - http://fedoraproject.org
• CentOS : The Community ENTerprise Operating System - http://www.centos.org
• Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings - http://www.ubuntu.com
• Xubuntu - http://www.xubuntu.org