Wikipedia dumps Red Hat for Ubuntu

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, has finished the porting of its IT infrastructure - including most servers and desktops - to the Ubuntu variant of Linux. Wikimedia has been running on a mix of Red Hat development and commercial Linuxes since it was founded seven years …

[J]

"where most of the iron is actually located"

I digress, but it's funny that we use this term "iron" to refer to machines that probably don't have much of it, at least nowadays. Do they? Looking at my desktop and thinking about it, I don't see where iron goes in there. Don't seem to me like servers are much different, but...

Maybe it's like calling memory "core", and having "core dumps", I guess...

[Bart Reagan]

Ubuntu win

First, I would like to congratulate Ubuntu on a great win. I have one question; Why run a Windows desktop to run Quickbooks. I am running Quickbooks under VMware Server with an Ubuntu 8.04 host.

[Jim]

Re: Ubuntu Win

"I am running Quickbooks under VMware Server with an Ubuntu 8.04 host."

But if you have one person who does the books and nothing else then why run an OS as a virtual machine on top of another OS? Assuming x86 architecture, you now have to support 2 OSs and what is the saving? KISS?

[Richard Stubbs]

@ Bart Reagan

My guess is they want a dedicated box to stop anyone at any point *cough* Jimmy Wales *cough* rolling back to a snapshot when the account left for the day to fiddle the accounts .... and lets face its its their only windows box so the account is also flat out testing IE for them!

[Charles]

@Richard Stubbs

This assumes the Windows machine is even networked. If it is nothing but the accounting computer, all it would need is a local printer and it could probably exist happily (not to mention safely) in isolation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for Ubuntu

As much as I have never thought the distro was much in the server department compared to others, it's still nice it won and maybe I'll have to try the server edition again sometime.

[Anonymous Coward]

No surprise

Style over substance in both form and function, then.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about?

Wikimedia has always used Ubuntu. There is no 'Red Hat'. All edits to the contrary will be reverted.

[Richard Lloyd]

Wouldn't CentOS have been easier?

If they'd mainly been on Fedora (and I'm guessing RHEL too) before, then wouldn't a migration to CentOS be the more obvious choice? Not only is it free to install, but you get 7 years of free updates matching those released by Red Hat for RHEL. At work, we've moved virtually all our Linux servers and desktops to CentOS now (previously they ran Fedora) and apart from having to track a few desktop apps manually (e.g. Firefox 3, OpenOffice.org 3), there's very little difference in the day-to-day admin of Fedora vs. CentOS - far less so than Fedora vs. Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoopie Linux for Linux

It is ridiculous; rpm for apt-get slightly different config files, we don't need no recursive egrep, we can remember where all the config files are now.

Good luck to them, you never know they may start to mix it up, and run both flavours all Ben and Jerry style of them.