Software compatibility between Fedora and Red Hat
If a piece of software is tested and verified to run successfully in Fedora, can we safely say (unconditionally) that it will also run successfully on a Red Hat-installed machine?
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
October 20, 2009 8:00 PM
UPDATED:
October 27, 2009 12:00 AM
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Answer Wiki:
While the answer depends greatly on the software, it's my experience that a Fedora package generally installs and runs well on an RHEL machine.
The caveats are that RHEL and Fedora seem to do dependencies differently, so while one will require package A as a dependency for installation, the other may require packages X, Y, and Z, which may cause conflicts with installed versions of said packages. The other catch is that the Fedora package won't be updated by yum/up2date on RHEL, so you may be exposing yourself to stability and/or security issues with an aging package.
Generally speaking, rather than install a package from a different distribution, it would be better to build the software from source yourself (and possibly package it up, and share with the community).
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lI would also add a caviat that if your application has kernel hooks there may also be issues. Fedora releases have a kernel that is several versions ahead of RHEL, which is currently at 2.6.18.