Best non Enterprise Linux for Cadence IC 6.1.X

[Bernd]

Hi,

I'm curious about your actual experience with non Enterprise Linux
distributions for Cadence DFII 6.1.X
Which distribution works best:
- Debian
- CentOS
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- openSuse

Any inputs are appreciated.

Bernd

 

[Andrew Beckett]

Bernd wrote, on 07/27/09 13:17:

Hi,

I'm curious about your actual experience with non Enterprise Linux
distributions for Cadence DFII 6.1.X
Which distribution works best:
- Debian
- CentOS
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- openSuse

Any inputs are appreciated.

Bernd

Bear in mind that Cadence do not test on ANY of these distributions. Only the
distributions listed in
http://www.cadence.com/rl/Resources/release_info/Supported_Platforms_Matrix.pdf
are "supported".

Bernd, I know you know that, but just making sure everyone else realises that...

Regards,

Andrew.

 

[Bernd Paysan]

Bernd wrote:

Hi,

I'm curious about your actual experience with non Enterprise Linux
distributions for Cadence DFII 6.1.X
Which distribution works best:
- Debian
- CentOS
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- openSuse

Any inputs are appreciated.

Just a bit background:

CentOS is RHEL without support, it is supposed to be binary compatible (and
since it is built from the same sources, it very likely really is). So since
Cadence does not test on community distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora
and OpenSuse, CentOS is probably the distribution with minimal amount of
fuzz to get Cadence running (if there is any fuzz to be expected - my
experience is that old, no longer or just barely supported Cadence programs
have problems on community distributions, not new ones; and they have those
problems on the community distributions *first*, because the enterprise
distributions are based on community distributions, especially Fedora and
OpenSuse).

The pros and cons for using enterprise distributions are the following:

+ The support is long, you can get security updates for the same software
running basically unchanged for years and years
+ Software vendors don't have moving targets
- The software you run is soon outdated, given the pace of development
- Support for new hardware is backported for some time, but not for the
whole lifetime of the enterprise edition - so you are stuck with outdated
hardware
- All those backports are done outside the actual development process of the
base software, by employees of the enterprise Linux distributors, outside
the usual review path (the patches themselves are reviewed, the backport
isn't).

The problems I've so far seen with community distributions were all related
to when those distributions pulled the plug to some ancient backward
compatibility stuff (usually 10 years old), and in turn broke a similarly
old Cadence program. Therefore, my advice is: Don't run old Cadence programs
on new distributions.

I personally prefer OpenSuse, because that's a distribution sufficiently
similar to SLED/SLES not to cause big troubles (just the unavoidable
troubles two years earlier - so you are warned), and it is well prepared for
desktop use, so the designers don't need another computer for e-mail and
web-browsing. Fedora is also similar to RHEL, but RedHat frequently puts too
untested stuff inside so that Fedora users are beta testers. I like the
Factory in OpenSuse and Testing in Debian better - there you *know* that you
are testing hot new stuff.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/