Course Software Requirements

to fully benefit from this course, at least one linux distribution installed.

you will learn some more details about many available Linux distributions and the failies thy can be considered to belong to.

focus on 3 major distribution families.

Focus on Three Major Linux Distribution Families

The Red Hat Family

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) heads the family that includes CentOS, CentOS Stream, Fedora and Oracle Linux.

Fedora contains significantly more software than Red Hat’s enterprise version.

CentOS Streams and CentOS are more often for activities, demonstrations, and labs because there is no cost to end user and there is a longer release cylce than Fedora. CentOS 8 has no scheduled updates after 2021. the replacement is CentOS 8 Stream.

the difference between the two versions is CentOS Stream gets updates before RHEL, while CentOS gets then after

  • 3.10 Kernel is used in RHEL/CentOS 7, while version 4.18 is used in RHEL/CentOS 8.
  • it supports hardware platforms such as Intel x86, Arm, Itenium, PowerPC, and IBM System z.
  • it uses yum and dnf RPM-based yum package managers
  • REHL is widely used by enterprises which host their own systems.

The SUSE Family

We use openSUSE as reference distribution for SUSE family, as it is available to end users at no cost.

  • kernel version 4.12 is used in openSUSE Leap 15.
  • RPM-based zypper package manager
  • includes YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) for system administration perposes.
  • SLES is widely used in retail and many other sectors

The Debian Family

the Debian distribution is upstream for several other distributions, including Ubuntu. Debian is a pure open source community project (not owned by any corporation) and has a strong focus on stability. Ubuntu aims at providing a good compromise between long term stability and ease of use. Since Ubuntu gets most of it packages from Debian’s stable branch,
it also has access to a very large software repository.

  • kernel version 5.8 is used in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
  • it uses the DPKG-based APT package manager (apt, apt-get, apt-cache, etc
  • Ubuntu has been widely used for cloude deployments
  • while Ubuntu is built on top of Debian and is GNOME-based under the hood, it differs visually from the interface on standard Debian, as well as other distributions.