Hi guys - we are looking *hard* at purchasing a new z800 0FL machine to run Linux as our primary host computer at work. This is a great idea I think, but I could really use some advice on the distributions.
First, pricing... glancing at SuSE's sight, I see what appears to be restricitve licensing (can only run on one machine image?) and some high pricing ($16K for a single image?). Either I am looking in the wrong place, or they have lost their minds. I even saw something that seemed to indicate the license was per year. Not acceptable. Which irritates me a lot because SuSE is my favorite distribution, and the SuSE V7 release I have here (which does not appear to have the kind of restrinctions) is simply too old. Redhat does not seem to post pricing at all for390 images, and reading the last 800 or 900 messages in this newsgroup I am not all that enthused with them anyway. Which narrows things down pretty much to Debian, I think. (TurboLinux says they don't sell in the U.S.) There is also ThinkBlue, but it appears to be two years old as well. In any case, my ideal distribution would have zero restrictions regarding licensing (except of course, for the individual licenses of individual software packages and so forth...) and support available, if I want to pay for it. I understand that IBM says they support ever distribution avaiable for 390, at a cost of course, but I want to get more opinions. So... which distributions do you guys prefer, what kind of costing an I looking at, and if we decide to go with Debian, has anyone got any experience with it in a production environment? Thanks -Paul Raulerson
