[LAD] (Somewhat OT) Advice needed on distro choice

[Raymond Martin]

On September 23, 2009 02:26:03 pm Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> A number of system here, including the ones at the Casa
> del Suono are to be upgraded in the coming weeks.
> 
> At the moment they all run Fedora 8, so the first choice
> would be to go for Fedora 11. But:
> 
> * None of them will run Gnome or KDE.
> * Most will be headless anyaway.
> * I want access/privilege control to be based on
>   user and group ID and nothing else. Privileges
>   will never depend on the user having a local
>   login or desktop session.
> * I'm prepared to have to spend some time configuring
>   udev, pam, /etc/fstab etc. etc. etc.
> * What I certainly *do not want* is some parallel
>   access control system that would interfere with
>   the above, or that could modify/bypass/enhance
>   in any way what has been configured there.
> * I'm *not* really prepared to have to waste any time
>   reconfiguring the Kit family. Consequently I don't
>   want to see any of them.
> 
> So what distro should I go for ? Having to spend weeks
> compiling everything from source is not an option.

If you look at the distro list at http://www.linux.org you can see
a number of potential candidates (Power User distros).

From a first glance a few seem possible to me: Slackware, CERN linux, CentOS 
(RHEL-based), Scientific Linux (RHEL-based), 64 Studio, amongst others. Which 
of them has a stock rt kernel is a good question (which general/regular
distros have an easily accessible rt kernel?).

Good luck.

Raymond