Nathan England wrote:
> All,
> 
> Possibly a dumb question, so I apologize ahead of time!
> 
> I Know admittedly little about Red Hat or Fedora.
> If I decided I want to learn as much about Red Hat as possible, should I 
> get an official Red Hat release or is Fedora similar enough that I could 
> learn how Red Hat does things? Is there enough difference that I would 
> have a problem going back and forth between desktops with Fedora and 
> servers with Red hat?

Nathan -

I work for Red Hat, and my e-mail address at work is thomas@redhat.com. 
  Follow up with me and I'll set you up with a 30-day eval of Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux so you can play around with it.  Also see 
http://www.redhat.com/docs for complete documentation for Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux and the other kit we sell subscriptions to as well.

The main difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora is that 
Fedora is our rapidly changing, unsupported community distribution. 
Fedora completely kicks ass - it is its own distro and stands on its own 
merits.  I run it at home and on many of my development boxen.  It is 
likely not a good fit for enterprise computing environments only in as 
much as it espouses the "release early, release often" mentality. 
Enterprise compute shops don't want to change more than once or twice a 
year.  With Fedora, you might get three kernels in one week.

Fedora is the upstream project for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  That is to 
say that the code which winds up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is 
developed and tested with and in the Fedora community.  Everything we do 
we do in the community - we want to make our fixes and improvements 
available to the world as soon as possible.  Once it's gone through 
Fedora development and community QA, we then do an internal audit, QA, 
hardening, signing and distribute the code in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora releases every six months.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases 
every two years.  So when Fedora 3 released, it was basically the 
version of Fedora from which Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was built.  When 
Fedora 6 released, it was the version of Fedora from which Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 5 was built.  Fedora 11 will likely be the build from 
which Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is built, and so on.

So if you wanted to get an idea of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 runs, 
Fedora 6 might be a fair example, but it's been EOL for ages.  The 
latest version of Fedora, Fedora 10, is not going to be very 
representative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, as it is actually built 
from much newer code.  There are significant changes in Fedora 10, 
including a new virtualization engine (KVM), newer window managers, 
newer sysadmin tools, and so on.

Please let me know if I can be of service to you or PLUG.

-- 
Thomas Cameron
http://people.redhat.com/tcameron
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