Full disclosure, I cut my teeth on Slackware and Redhat in the mid 90’s. I even tried Yggdrasil once. That being said…
I fully fail to understand the allure of Ubuntu or it’s Mommy distro, Debian. Yes I know Ubuntu is supposed to be the “world peace” of OS’s but that lie has been exposed many times. An arrogant .com millionaire started it and he directs the mostly moronic design decisions. What’s to love again? Their website barley mentions Linux.
Debian might be a good design but rpm isn’t all that bad. WTF (why) do we need an entirely different package mgt. tool? Can we really not learn to live with or at least contribute changes to the existing standards? I’ll fight over that one… RPM was WAY here first.
Moving on; this applies to Hadoop in the realm of “what os should I install to carry my Hadoop cluster?” The obvious answer, IMHO, is CentOS. It’s free, it’s driven from the designs of a commercial business and it’s the development platform for most Hadoop contributors. Even if that last part wasn’t true, it’d still be the best choice.
CentOS is derived from the source code published (as required by lic.) by RedHat. It claims binary compatibility and a $0 price tag. Some of you are thinking that this is evil by association. Allow me to correct your thinking.
RedHat must make money to survive. In order to make money, they must offer something more than a “free” os. As it turns out, the best way to do that is contribute their “cool new” features, fixes and patches to the community. It’s also required by the EULA. 😉 So now we have a for-profit company contributing “cool new” features to the kernel and distribution. And we can reap those rewards for free via CentOS. Why wouldn’t you use them?
~~ GM 