Linux

isginf manages installations of several Linux distributions with varying level of support:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Ubuntu

All of these can be installed on desktop computers and compute servers or cluster nodes.

Comparison

The following tables visualizes the benefits and disadvantages of the different distributions:

	Red Hat EL	Ubuntu
Currentness	low	high
Reliability	high	fair
Support by isginf	full	best-effort
Supported releases	current and previous	current and previous (LTS) / current
Upgrade cycle	3-4 years	2 years (LTS) / 6 months

isginf generally recommends Red Hat Enterprise Linux for desktops and servers.

Installation

Installations are deployed automatically over the network. ITCs can request an installation through our installation request form.

Supported Hardware

In general we are able to install any of the supported Linux distributions on all 64 bit platforms as long as the kernel supports the relevant hardware.

Updates

Software is generally updated and installed during start-up. Systems should be rebooted from time to time to apply the updates.

Desktop

All Linux flavors that are fully managed by isginf are configured to use individual KDE and GNOME configurations to avoid conflicts. These are in ~/.gconf_<os> and ~/.config_<os> for GNOME and ~/.kde_<os> for KDE.