> I thought the original > poster wanted a "self contained appliance" that ran Oracle. > The concept of an "appliance", to me, is "no user servicable > parts inside", so to speak.
All true. The first problem appears when you start asking questions about backup, or database automation, or system monitoring. Then we're back to the question of ISV support for the appliance OS, and the accompanying whining about what distribution is present. Case in point: If your backup system is TSM, and you use the TSM client on Debian, and you find a problem, IBM support hangs up on you (not literally, but you don't get any help) because Debian isn't in their supported OS list. For play guests, that's OK. For production data guests, that's not acceptable. > The fact that the > user's company was a SuSE or RedHat shop would not be very > relevent to this particular Oracle distributation. See above. It also comes back to the question of training for admins. If you smoke the RH pipe, the system management techniques are different than if you smoke the SuSE pipe. J. Random Admin that is running this stuff from a cookbook gets cranky if it doesn't "work like it said in the book" forever and ever. Then you get into the discussion of adding disk space, or some other stupid thing, and we're back to separate implementations for the RH and SuSE crowds. It'd be REALLY nice if the various RH versions got with the program wrt configuration management. > What am I missing? Is there some problem with distributing > Debian (or CentOS or ...) with other bundled software? Not at all. Like I said, it's not a technical problem. It's a human problem. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390