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End of Life for Red Hat 7.x, 8.0
thelenm writes "Red Hat announced today that the 7.x and 8.0 distributions have reached their errata maintenance end-of-life. Red Hat 9 reaches its end-of-life on April 30. The options for those who want to stick with Red Hat are Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Fedora Project, as described on their Migration Resource Center page. Or of course, you might take this opportunity to select another option." This day's been a long time coming, but it's finally here.
Windows 98 = 8 years of support. I'd rather have 8 years of support for a buggy product than this.
Why is debian always the "other option" when there are lots of alternatives?
Out of curiosity which of you out there will be effected by this? Is it more in the home or in the office? What services are you depending on these "older" systems running and what changes have you done to take care of them? I am just curious to hear from people out there.
SuDZ
Or you could chose an alternative here. Considerably more options.
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
http://distrowatch.org/
It seems to me that there are TONS of viable options...
I'm really rather dissapointed by this. Although I wasn't too impressed with the way that Redhat liked to play games with the files and directories in /etc (among other things), I've always been pleased with how easy it was to get a RH distro installed and running. After just making the switch to Debian and going through the agony of selecting packages with an ackward selection tool, I appreciate RH's RPM system even more.
How long will Fedora be providing RPMs for RedHat 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0?
My blog
Red Hat is easily the most accessible distro to the average Joe. It's easier to set up than debian and it's had good support. If Linux is to gain greater acceptance on the desktop, we need more distributions like Red Hat.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I'm using Redhat 9 and at home and work - a I have been interested in having a look at Fedora. But on my limited bandwidth it just takes TOO LONG and I don't need everything on the ISO. Does anybody have information on doing a online install, so only packages I need will be downloaded.
Windows!
/me puts on flame suit covered in asbestos...
Paul Thurrott called it "The Alpha, the Omega, the XP to your Fedora!"
Progeny has already announced two updated packages, one for tcpdump and one for cvs. Can't find a public announcement, but they were sent to subscribers a few days ago.
It'll be interesting to see what the future holds for Red Hat, though, as well as a few other things. With Win98SE losing its support come June and RH9 come April, I wonder how many will migrate to something different and how many will stick it out, hoping nothing catastrophic happens to their legacy platform of choice.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
I'm not shure, if this really was a smart move.
;-) )
Community support will definitely go down.
Even Micro$oft got big in the enterprise OS market by way of their consumer OS.
($ sign added after I figured I didn't critisize MS enough. Hopefully this will please the mods.
Progeny offers software updates for users of Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0, as part of their Platform Services offering.
Get a free ipod.
The new pricing policy really hurt RedHat and Linux at our school. What folks had been promoting as a cheap alternative to MS software has now closed ranks on price. It took a pile of work to get admins to understand that "RedHat = good", and the fact that "RedHat" as they know it now costs money has been enough to push a variety of departments off the Linux path.
I know they have to make money, I just wish it wasn't at the cost of marketshare. It would really make my life easier if I could port more people to Linux or OSX.
For those that are used to RH and don't want a big change, there are many distributions that are compiling the RHEL source and making their own distro. Thank you GPL!
Whitebox Enterprise Linux
cAos
Tao
just to name a few
I moved my machine, but not yet the server. In my research lab to Fedora. I look after about 10 Linux boxes + the group server.
I am very impressed with the Fedora because:
1. Yum is very simple, I even have it installing/updating from a local mirror (in the UK)
2. NPTL has made a real difference, compile time is much quicker than RH 8 and programs run smoother.
3. UTF seems better sorted than it was under RH 8 ( a joke as far as I was concerned)
4. Many more useful packages are included.
5. Out of the box, so to speak, USB worked wonderful for my digital camera and my Sharp Zaurus.
The only thing I would comment on, is that due to the frequent new Kernel releases, I'm not doing wonderful on my UPTIME. I'm losing out to the department IT geek (a windows bloke). Mainly because he's running 2000 and can't be bothered to update.
I would like to re-iterate, for the average Linux home/work (not gaming) user, Fedora is not the flop it was purported to be. I think it it great, by far the best distro I've used. (I haven't done a server install yet though).
RH9 was the only Linux distro (and the first) that
I ever tried. It was ok, the only reason I don't
use it anymore is that 1024x768 resolution
wouldn't work on the computer I was using at the
time.
When I get another harddrive for my current
computer, it'll definitely have Fedora on it
before you can say "Put it on your main drive,
you Windows Troll!".
I set up yum recently on Red Hat 8.0 and pointed it to the appropriate repositories - a free way to get backported security fixes for 8.0. A shame that Red Hat never mentioned this as an option in their e-mail to all the RHN subscribers...
Has anybody found that running up2date on Fedora core 1 has been a trying experience lately? I realise that this is the lazy way of keeping a machine patched, but up2date has been a great facility since redhat 8.0 (I had a bad experience with 7.3). I think their (fedora) site is having trouble coping with the load.
I really hope that Fedora core can fill the shoes of Redhat 9! Time will tell.
I have a feeling that the shameless Debian plug will generate more discussion than the subject of the article -- and yes, there is another option. ;)
Am I the last remaining Slackware user?
> Why? I mean... why does RedHat have to be all corporate and crap now?
... free. Thanks Red Hat.
Well, they are a company that answers to shareholders. They have to 'be all corporate and crap now' because it costs them a money to backport stuff, manage and communicate the updates, etc. Unlike Microsoft, they don't have $50 billion in phat l00t sitting around to support an old OS like Windows 98. I salute them for supporting 7.0 and 8.0 for as long as they have. Truly commendable.
Currently I'm running Fedora, for free, with *very* quick update turn-around, again
Either you are intentionally in denial, or just spreading FUD. Which is it?
And this same week Microsoft just added two years to the WIn98 EOL. I have a RH9 server that gets no support after April this year. That doesn't make me happy. I have a backup with Trustix standing by, but they haven't been real stable either. I'm looking at possibly picking Win2k3 as I know it will have support for 5 more years guaranteed. Redhat needs to step up and offer something to paying customers that want to stay with RH9.
I guess the Linux community can stfu about the great support.
Was this inevitable? Why should anyone be surprised? They are only keeping on the line that is making them money, like any normal company would, no? I guess this is a product of their staffing level reaching a critical mass; a level whereby their own popularity has killed off their product line. Bandwidth costs, and plain old time and money are an unavoidable part of the Free Software mentality. Good will don't pay the bills! However, it is sad nonetheless. Plenty of smaller distros left that can afford to keep themselves going until they become so popular they have to become commercialised in one way or another too. Let's hope this isn't a sign of things to come.
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
Two of my servers are still 7.2, while both are updated up to today and both secured as possible.
Up to recently I still had one 6.x but machine died and that was the end of it
latest kernel
proftpd instead of vsftpd
samba 3.0
apache 2.0
opengroupware (in testing mostly)
mysql 4
qmail instead of postfix (or it was sendmail)
latest cups
openldap
squid
etc, etc
No one stopped support, just up2date from redhat doesn't work anymore (I have 5 enterprise server licenses but not even once I used up2date), all apps and services are still compatible, and all of them are still patched and updated, which is far more than someone could say about NT
Sorry, but as such I don't see difference
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
To moderate or not, that was a tough one. :)
... ALL DAY. :)
There is now a very good chance my next server purchase will just be that X-Serve with the G5. Um, yeah, I'll be in the computer room
why does RedHat have to be all corporate and crap now?
... how ironic!
Because they're a corporation, stupid! They are in business to make money, not to please the opensource community.
Oh, wait... the only reason they're where they are is because of the opensource community, right?
Bah - who needs' em?
Hope that Progeny offers their patching service and support for Enterprise Linux as well as RH 7 and 8.
none the less they didnt have to drop their lower product line and Red Hat 9 came too soon. Red Hat 9 was a good deal for some people and it hurt when they said everyone has to go fedora (not totally stable and supported) or Red hat enterprise level. Oh well though, luckily im not dependant on it and there are other oses to try
From a redhat customers perspective this is bad. To many this is the exact reason they moved away from microsoft.
......
Redhat hasnt been my distro of choice for quite some time, but for many people it is the "only" linux they know of or use.
Personally i hope novell/suse take advantage of this and prevent people from moving back to the evil empire.
And although I personally use gentoo on my systems and I know people who use debian, I wouldnt recomend a non-experienced admin use either, and most linux admins are really windows admins which is why you see so many linux boxes that get broken into
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
guess it was too much money being spent without any inflow, so it had to stop.But didnt expect it to stop so soon. Always thought that RH was someone who would provide support as long as possible.
Lord of the Binges.
I don't understand Red Hat. A few friends and I brought Linux into the respective companies we worked for. We went with Red Hat because they supported us hobbyists, as well as offer professional support. Now they're dropping support on all of the hobbyist level releases faster than Microsoft dropped support on MS-DOS.
Good work, Red Hat. I'm going to go elsewhere, like Suse. I need to research this stuff before I load it on production machines, and playing with new releases while sitting at home is where that happens. And the faster you drop support, the faster I'm switching. See ya!
And in my workplace, I'm still waiting for my machine to be upgraded from Red Hat 6.2 to 9.0. I wonder if I'll even get to 9.0 before April 30.
>Meanwhile Microsoft EXTENDS support for another two years for three OSes that were developed and > followed by another OS before this Linux variant even came out. Dear Troll, whom somehow got modded as Interesting: Microsoft has been milking billions and billions of dollars from an illegal monopoly for well over a decade. To date, they still have not suffered any retroactive punishment for a decade plus of illegal activity. They have so much money in the bank, they could fund thousands of years of $100,000/yr open source effort ... just with cash!
So you are lauding them for supporting Windows 98 for a few years, and then being pissy about Redhat, a company which GAVE AWAY those version of the operating systems to a lot of people, for finally discontinuing support on something that OTHERS CAN SUPPORT because they have access to the source code. (Gee, can't do that with Microsoft! Can't backport your patches for them!)
Get a clue! Redhat still has a free OS available to you. Go ask Bill Gates for a free copy of Windows 98.
And that is why the put the community distro in the community (OMG! How Shocking!)
And obvioussly they spend ALOT of time getting fedora to be as rock solid as it always has been. It lacks a bit of polish that we are all acustomed to, but it was thier first release...
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
Gentoo makes me so much more productive.
Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings.
Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!
Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom.
I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs.
Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo.
Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo.
I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with
a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with
the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE.
...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan...
You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell...
I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that
problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead
of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the
system wasn't designed for).
All the other distros are soooo out of date.
Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours.
Let's face it, Gentoo is the future.
OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!
Reminds me of a comment from the Linux to FreeBSD wipe-your-disk 'upgrade':
How does one moderate an entire article as flamebait?
It supports a floppy based install from the 'net. Even across dialup...
Install of a 'minimal set' is much smaller then most any 'traditional' linux distro. And you cant beat the ports system.
But i hear debian does the same sort of thing with a floppy boot install....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Leave it to Billy to post as "Anonymous Coward".
I might add that the "preview" button ownz me, apparently.
This is the kind of response I was looking /. is full of crap on other distros and jokes, it's simple replies like this that help us general Linux users.
for when I wanted to know whether to move my
works computers to Fedora.
Once my Redhat 9.0 subscription stops, I think I will try Gentoo, it sounds like a good OS, very unique with a long and challengin install.
/. nickname...
But then, I will have to change my
... in order to keep getting security fixes for my RedHat 8.0 i386 box?
I think FedoraLegacy is not there yet, am I wrong?
Hey Microsoft will now support it til 06 right ?! Thats 8 years of support. With the Evil RedHat people Dropping support in only 2 years Does that mean Microsoft good, RedHat Evil ? (Oh the Humanity !)
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
What the hell is with all these people bitching? You can upgrade to Fedora for free.
"Waah, redhat isn't supporting my free OS even though they've released a free upgrade for me"
I don't think you are identifying problems with .deb vs .rpm, you are just dissatified with the debian installer. Red Hat just groups their packages into catagories and puts icons next to them (undoubtedly, this is what you would need in order for selection tool to not be "awkward". Plus, they have a much smaller repository (perhaps there would be less "agony" if Debians was smaller).
.deb system is as easy or hard as the installer makes it. Just look at Lindows and Xandros, both .deb based; the Xandros installer makes Red Hat's look difficult by comparison. However the Debian people usually count on their user-base preffering choice and precision during installation (isn't that what GNU/Linux is all about?).
In the end, the
Hey, if you shell over $699, they damn well better give you some sort of support. :)
Or, you could give Gentoo a shot. Even SuSE is still a viable option.
I'll throw a plug in for whitebox linux.
It's RHE3 isos without the support (and with different brand graphics).
Not sure what the differences between Fedora (RH9) and whitebox (RHE3) are. Sure would appreciate enlightenment though.
Okay guys, when it was announced that Microsoft was pulling the plug on a much older and obsolete product, we all aimed our pitchforks at them. Are we going to do the same for Redhat?
"Derp de derp."
A good friend of mine just got started in Linux and chose SuSE Linux. I've been using Redhat 9 since last year, and had never seen SuSE, so it was a lot of fun to set it up together. Once we got past the FTP install (I'd never done that before), it was a dream. I mean it really blew me away. It found his TV tuner card (Winfast 2000 XP Deluxe, I think) automatically and put a link to a tuner application on his desktop. He literally logged in for the first time, double-clicked and was watching TV, color, sound, everything. This was amazing to me, as I spent two weeks trying to get my Audigy 2 and winmodem to work with RH9 way back when, before finally giving up and deciding You Can't Get There From Here.[1]
It's really slick, polished, and the installer (YAST) is the first thing I've ever seen in a Linux distribution that would make me willing to spend money.[2] This weekend I'm going to wipe RH9 and give it a try. They even have a live-eval CD image if you want to try it out first, before giving up HD space.
[1] Eventually fixed, but if I hear "emu10k.o" one more time I'm going into orbit.
[2] Plus the lizard thing is cute.
...for another option.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Do people around here have a short term memory or something? Red Hat may be ending their support, but these versions can still get support from somewhere else.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Well, Debian hasn't screwed up KDE either, but that's besides the point.
I'm not arguing that Red Hat should be held as the quintessential RPM-based distro because they are the best, I'm saying they were the first and are therefore the representative of the group.
"ain't" is not a word
I'm presonally a little bitter. It's definately not been "a long time coming". Specifically, I purchased 2 seats of RHN last March. I was led to believe that I would receive "paid-for support" for those two machines for 1 year. But now, the one running rh7.2 is no longer supported. Yeah, I could update it to rh9 to get my remaining 3 months, but I'm not going to do that... because I'm feeling bitter. That is a firewall machine that currently doesn't even have a monitor and keyboard attached. When I go to the trouble to get it out onto a table with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, I'm also going to go to the trouble to switch to Debian. Did I mention that I'm feeling a little bitter?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Install
The installer lacks LVM and RAID, and asks me for a bunch of information it should be able to get itself - ie, the modules appropriate for my hardware. That's why PCI exists. Likewise X confuration is still pretty ancient - why ask for specs of my monitor? 99% of monitors can be DCC probed, so why not try that first?
Ease of Use (apt-get)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora include up2date, which handles RHN, apt-get, and yum repositories as well as local disk directories in one handy tool.
Stability
Stability? If I want a modern Linux I can install on a machine and keep running for the next five years without having to install anything more than security updates and errata, RHEL looks pretty good. If I don't want to pay for support, I can use whitebox, which is based on RHEL source packages simply rebuilt.
Debian's a great distribution and makes a lot of valuable contributions to open source. it has some advantages too - eg, a much larger base of packages than RHEL, Fedora or Whitebox.
But the rampant Debian evangelism wherever someone even mentions Red Hat gives me the shits, as does the mistaken impression that because Red Hat includes some tools to make things easy rather than forcing people to learn a bunch of stuff right off the bat, that it somehow makes RH any less of a power users distro.
I have to ask the same question. Why are people so freaked about Fedora? I downloaded it, installed in in place of my trusty RH8, and it's great. Looks like RedHat 10 to me. Up2date's caused zero problems for me, and everything else is slick as a whistle, too. The only difference is that I no longer worry about whether my RHN account is still active. This is a great distro. Why are we all having fits about having to find another one?
How about some useful information, other than this "gentoo rulez, you suck!" nonsense...
Like, remotely upgrading a live redhat 8/9 machine to fedora.
Does anyone know who is making (free) AMD-64 distros, and how they stack up against each other?
Crappy? Are you kidding? I've tried every distro that has an iso available for download, both linux and BSD and now I have slackware on ALL my machines. It has good hardware detection, and EVERTHING works the way it's supposed to. Sure you have to edit a few config files by hand, but once it's set up it's better than everything else out there, including red hat, which was always kind of annoying to me anyways.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Both posted almost the same second. It's only fair that they get the same positive moderation (and distrowatch is an excellent site too). Leave them be.
I'm sure I'm not the only person that loses goodwill when I have to explain to my boss why he has to write another check for something he thinks he already bought. I suspect that this move will lead to a hell of a lot of unpatched Red Hat 9 boxes sitting around after April 1st. Red Hat has made it difficult to keep boxes secure by charging for updates. Savvy sysadmins have already installed apt-for-rpm, or something similar, but Windows shops that tried out Linux for fun are going to feel burned.
Anyway, I lobbied for Mandrake at the beginning, but the PHB wanted something he had heard about. But I think I can use the specture of us needing to pay for the top corporate up2date subscription as a way to argue for Mandrake. 9.2, here I come.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
Backport? Excuse me? The OSS community is doing the work. RedHat, unlike Microsoft, only packages and resells other work.
You college educated?
"This day's been a long time coming, but it's finally here"
Since when is 2 months notice a "long time coming"?
Isn't it obvious?
I would consider Debian Stable to be one of the few server-performance-oriented GNU/Linux distros out there, so I would probably try to compare it to FreeBSD, Solaris[x86], and Windows Server. Honestly, as far as they go, the installation really isn't very bad at all. As long as you're somewhat familiar with the unixesque command-line (and you really ought to be if you're running a server), its actually a very easy installation by comparison (and by installation, I mean from CD-Bootup to deployment). Even Windows Server can be very annoying if you're working with the more advances services and you don't know what you're doing.
For a moment, I thought they ment the end of life for Red Hat, not the old distros...
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
"I admit I'm a lazy jackass after being spoonfed by RedHat for seven year"
Yes you should have to fight with an operating system. No amount of what we know about them should we ever use to make them easier to use. I wish there was something harder than debian and gentoo. Oh, wait. I've got it. A new distro. Code Your Own Linux. "We don't even give the the source. Write it youself you little girly man."
Now would be the time to mention the Transition Service offered by Progeny. They will start offering updates as of May 1, 2004 for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, and 9.0...
Their service is $5/mo per server. We have 3 RedHat 7.3 servers that are still in testing (just ready to go live) and these systems will be around for a long time to come...I can assure you that we will probably be buying one of these licenses for each of these systems...
What RedHat really needs to do is offer an upgrade path from RedHat Linux/Fedora to one of their server distros...
Or maybe Microsoft has a viable business model... and RedHat didn't.
And why do people use it, recognise it, and even list it officially in dictionaries? Stick to the hacker/cracker nomenclature jihad, you sure ain't got the skills for this subject.
Then again, the classic fallback for those with no rubuttal for an argument, the attacking of grammar.
Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, will sell students its Red Hat Academic Desktop product for $25 and sell schools its Red Hat Academic Server product for $50, including online software updates but no telephone support.
The products will be offered first in the United States, but will be available internationally by the end of the year.
Why does it seem that Fedora is getting dismissed out of hand here? I installed it' it looks great. Why are you not taking it more seriously?
...looks like Red Hat has gone the way of Valhalla!
Yeah, go for the long, painful install. It's geek masochism! It's good for you!
The bootable Gentoo CD barfed on my not-uncommon scsi card (Adaptec 29160N). I stumbled around the temporary filesystem until I found the modules and loaded them myself, exited the shell, and somehow the installation continued. But then I got serious lockups until I passed the NOAPIC option to the kernel at boot time. Funny that I never needed that with RedHat, but maybe code optimized for a dual Athlon MP exposes some tricky timing/interrupt issue, hey?
Anyway, I wouldn't expect my mom to be able to install Gentoo. It's definitely for the masochist geek. Mom runs Redhat 9.
Slackware. Looks promising. Only noticed two annoyances on my brief test so far. First, it doesn't set up each user in their own group. Second, it uses LILO rather than GRUB.
Have to investigate the user per group thing, see if it would break much to switch a Slackware installation over to that. For booting, I tried installing GRUB, and something wasn't happy--haven't had time to investigate that yet.
Gentoo. Didn't have time to go through all the install steps, so have to come back to this one. It seemed to me I was doing a lot of things that would be common to many people installing it, leaving me wondering why the heck I'm having to waste my time. A good install should only make me do things or specify things concerning the ways my setup is going to be different from other people's.
SuSE. Not a contender until YaST is released under a free license.
Mandrake. I've never been impressed by them in the past, and so haven't really looked into them since their financial troubles. Still, probably worth another look.
I am using Red Hat 7.3, and would like to move to Debian. But Debian "stable" (Woody) is just too old for me - I need the 2.4 kernel (for USB capabilities and performance, among many other things). Debian "testing" (Sarge) has 2.4, but it (according to the Debian docs) doesn't receive as high priority for security updates. I don't wish to "roll my own" set of packages from stable/testing, so what to do?
Well, I am assuming that Sarge will be moved to Stable sometime in the next year, so all I have to do now is wait it out with RH 7.3 until that happens - so, I have subscribed to Progeny to tide me over. It seems like the perfect solution, if you already have stable systems using RH and don't want too much of a change too soon. I get the feeling that Sarge will be much closer to 7.x than Woody is, so when Sarge comes out it should be less painful in terms of package versions.
Plus, the Progeny support costs the same as RHN did - $60/year. And you get to give a big message to RedHat by taking your money elsewhere.
Just my 2 cents.
If thats what you think of Gentoo, wonder what you'll have to say about Linux From Scratch? www.linuxfromscratch.org
Besides the rpm, apt-get, and source based package management distros, isn't there still the sysv init versus the bsd init difference between a lot of them?
For starting and stopping services, I know that at least Redhat uses the 'service' command, at least Suse uses the 'rc command', and other distros may or may not use other commands.
Then there's initd versus xinitd... xinitd seems much better to me.
I am pretty sure that it isn't a REAL big deal, but when you have used one style for years it can definately be a preference to stick to...
There ought to be a handy-dandy simple chart of things like this for (at least most) all the distros. And what the majority use versus who the rebels are on each. Or maybe there is one?
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
People always post this thing. It practically shows up in every Slashdot post now.
The fact is that Gentoo is bringing lot of young blood into the Linux community and at a perfect time. They might be uber l337 and all that but give them a couple years, they will learn.
so he had an Laptop with his other acount next to him and is just trying to doubble his karma!
id imagine that when you get high karma you can mod your other acount up so that the slashbots will mod it up even more because of groupthink.
bloody crafty and yet simple enough to fool a hare
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
>a company which GAVE AWAY those version of the operating systems to a lot of people
They got the os and and the apps for free. So giving it away isn't a big deal.
> for finally discontinuing support on something that OTHERS CAN SUPPORT because they have access to the source code
Which is pretty ironic. If others can support it, why can't RedHat? Patches they get would mostly originate from that same community. And for free, mind you.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Many posts are drawing a parallel between this action by RedHat and Microsoft's eol'ing (or not eol'ing) Win98.
1) Yes, they are both doing this for the same reason: MONEY
2) No, it's not the same because THIRD PARTIES CAN SUPPORT REDHAT. If you want to start your own DEAD RH support company, go ahead. You have the full source.
3) No, it's not the same because YOU CAN UPGRADE FOR FREE. Go download it. No one is left behind here.
4) No, it's not the same because NO ONE IS LOCKED IN. If you want to jump off of the RedHat ship, nothing is stopping you - you're not stranded. Copy and run those same binaries on debian, gentoo or roll-your own, anytime you want to.
Anyone try Linux From Scratch?
:-
www.linuxfromscratch.com
I tried Gentoo and was very please. I'm going to try LFS next.
Beware of Sun Solaris 9 on dual boot systems.
It rewrote my Master Boot Record!
So much for Gentoo, all that compiling took just as long as my Micr$oft install.
SuSe is coming along.
FreeBSD has a great mascot, I'll need a pitch fork in the but to get around to trying it out.
Xandros looks like an easy spoon feed. etc...
News flash. Americans want too much money for unskilled labor. Tariffs only help with local markets, not global markets, so that doesn't work, and it's bad for consumers anyway. Go ahead, vote for Dean. He has a plan to destroy the US economy.
I have RH9 but I'd like to ditch it, since it's passe now. What do you recommend for me? I care about: ease of install (I tried Debian before and gave up), a decent system for installing new software and having a decent amount of pre-installed stuff. I don't particularly need to have the latest kernel (nor do I want the oldest one in the name of stability). Any thoughts? Thanks.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
You guys where so up in arms when Microsoft dropped support for 98 after 6 years, and now look at this 1 year, and 400 comments less and probably 200 less flames.
I recently installed Mandrake that uses the 2.6 kernel and I was blown away. I connected my digital camera and it popped open a window that had all the pictures in there. My RAID, which has never worked in linux before, worked just fine. My mp3 player was able to run right out of the box. This is in stark contrast to Windows XP, in which I had to get online and find the drivers in Japanese. Mandrake is the distro that will get on desktops sooner than later.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Bob (resembles Pyro but with Luke Skywalker's whiney voice): "Waaah! They're dropping Redhat!"
Tom (resembles Emperor Palpatine but with Magneto's charm): "Come to the dark side, Bob!"
Bob: "The dark side? What's that?"
Tom: "BSD."
Bob: "But that's evil! All my penguin friends tell me so!"
Tom: "You're friends are flightless waterfowl that smell of herring. You are better than that. You have the potential."
Bob: "But it's not under the GPL!"
Tom: "Just pretend it is. There's nothing in the BSD license preventing you from fully and completely treating it as GPL."
Bob: "But it wouldn't really be the GPL. I would know and wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Tom: "We have gcc..."
Bob: "You do?"
Tom: "...and all the other GNU software in ports. Even glibc."
Bob: "Wow, I never knew. No wait! You're trying to trick me! I happen to know that BSD is development in a 'cathedral' like environment, instead of the politically correct chaos of the 'bazaar'."
Tom: "Words, words, just words. Yes, we have some procedures we adhere to, to prevent random code from entering the system, but is that any different from Linus holding the keys to the Linux kernel repository?"
Bob: "But BSD users are elitist!"
Tom: "Yes, we are. But you are worthy to join us. Look in your heart. You know you are better than flightless antarctic waterfowl."
Bob: "Hmmm, I guess you're right. But what about the software? What about my GNOME and MPlayer?"
Tom: "We have them too."
Bob: "But what about my NVidia card?"
Tom: "We have NVidia drivers."
Bob: "Opera? Java? Oracle?"
Tom: "Yes."
Bob: "Well okay then. I guess I'll switch."
Tom: "Fine. First I need you to sign this contract in your own blood. Then you need to renounce all that is good. Finally, you have to wear these horns..."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Most people associate EOL with the complete disappearance of support for the product, as the true power of open source has not fully caught on yet. Why don't we beat people over the head with this?
I feel that because we don't make a big deal about 3rd party support for open source linux distros, people form an unfounded negative perception of the community. Come on guys!
Its good to know that when using these linux distributions that your OS will be supported and maintained for years to come.
Unlike some OSs like Windows which only provide support for 3-6 years
How long was RH9 supported for? Released March 03, killed April 04. Wow, a whole year. I'd hate to have to reinstall the OS on all my companies workstations that often.
Yes,I agree entirely! I have been running Debian and Mandrake for years and when Core 1 was realeased for Fedora I grabbed it. Fedora is the best distro that I've used plain and simple. It just installs and works and I mean everything just works. Then I configured it to how I like it. I put apt on it and life is just as good as with Debian except Fedora set up all my hardware with proper drivers and literally everything just works. Apt repositories aren't quite as large as Debian's but they are grwoing fast and have anything that a typical power user would need.Come on people! Red Hat is the good guy, they can't afford to give everything away so give them a break. They are taking money from this area to apply to advancing Linux in other areas where its needed. So back off of them a little bit. They've done a lot for the community and will continue to do so.Oh yea and don't only read the article, but look up some info on you own. Slashdot will distory your views sometimes and researching your own information will lead you to better decisions.
Regards,
Steve
This asshole posted a link to distrowatch.org while the website itself sports a 468-pixel wide DISTROWATCH.COM banner. I say mod him down.
Oh yea and don't only read the article, but look up some info on you own. Slashdot will distory your views sometimes and researching your own information will lead you to better decisions.
Sorry bout the typos, it should read:
Oh yea and don't only read the article, but look up some info on your own. Slashdot will distort your views sometimes and researching your own information will lead you to better decisions.
Regards,
Steve
We don't run a lot of linux boxes, maybe 12 total. This is a heavy microsoft shop except for the Solaris/Oracle backend on the SAN.
I have enough trouble keeping the linux boxes around as it is, they are always looking for reasons to remove them.
Now I have to either ask for money (not going to happen) or rebuild all the boxes using a new distro.
Either option will make Linux look bad to may management and really hurt my chances of expanding linux at my company.
Very sad.
I've covered a much larger set of options including Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat Enterprise, the Progeny transition service, etc, etc. The article is available at: http://seifried.org/security/redhat/20031230-redha t-support.html.
It's also available on a rented slashsite, which I doubt can take a slashdot style beating, but if you want to post comments feel free: http://security-site.seifried.org/article.pl?sid=0 3/12/31/067227.
The solutions I cover include:
Because Slashdot is full of blind Debian zealots, whose mission in life is not to improve the outdated distro, but to just promote it no matter how antiquated it becomes.
Security fix backports are almost always done by the distro vendors. When there's a fix in, say, the latest version of openssl, Red Hat takes it and backports it to all the different versions used in 9.0, RHEL, Fedora etc. Under no circumstance do they simply push out the new version.
Install Gentoo.
It incrementally updates itself.
Just type:
emerge sync
emerge -u --deep world
and Gentoo will update all your packages to the latest available. There is even the excellent 'etc-update' command, that helps you merge in any changes to config files.
It's great not having to download a couple of 600MB ISOs every time an update is available.
I'm the Linux Console Jockey at my company and was looking for a cheap alternative after the RedHat end of life. I decided that a move to RHEL3.0 would be the best bet. The ES edition regularly cost $350, but RHN has a special until the end of Feb. for only $175. I can't beat than price and to be able to stay with RedHat makes all the difference. No need for unoffical updates or moving to an entirely different distro. I'm happy and the boss is happy with the price. Plus giving some money to RedHat for their great product is nice after looking at what we pay MS for their crap.
wait a second. you mean that you cannot make money when you give away your product for free? get a clue people, we live in a capitalist society. meaning, you exchange goods and services for money, not goods and services for free!
When last I did look at Debian, though, it seemed to me that their security updates were rather slow in being released. This was enough to scare me away from Debian for a while. I know I'm getting a bit off-topic here, but are there any Debian users who could comment on that aspect of Debian?
What do you expect from software that comes with a "social contract"?
How much louder do you need it to scream "This disto is a joke!"?
Ahh, time to sit back and watch the Gentoo and OS X zealots fight it out.
My OS is better than yours!
Is it still true you have to be infected with HIV in order to use OS X?
I fully expect to see all the people complaining about Microsoft's (former) decision to end support for Windows 98 to complain here, also. To not, would be hypocritical, and this is Slashdot, the place thats devoid of hypocrites.
After all, these versions of Red Hat are much newer. And now, Microsoft is extending support for Windows 98.
Why not? Installation isn't particularly hard. The worst parts are:
Partitioning your drive. But then, if you can't do this, you probably shouldn't be running a server or you would redo it after time with another distro anyways. With desktops, swap and root are all you really need (I prefer swap, boot, root) - maybe a seperate var/home.
Hardware: If you know what hardware you have, it still isn't much of a problem. Realtek, Nek2k-pci, 3com, Eepro100. That handles most the network cards I deal with. Other hardware should be easier to spot.
After the initial install... typing apt-get install X, or dpkg --install package.deb... not hard
Seriously, it's only really bad for people who are afraid of a little text and CLI.
One of the things that has really annoyed me about debian is when I can't get a good source/deb package but there is an RPM.
Then one of my coworkers discovered this...
apt-get install alien
It seems to handle RPM's quite nicely...installed several pieces of software that wouldn't go from source (including Gimp2) and others.
Oh, the other thing that gets me is dselect. You can do a little better:
apt-get install aptitude
RedHat has in the recent past tried to make it crystal clear that if you want a long period of support, long time of provided updates, and a long product lifecycle in general, that you shell out for the 'enterprise' editions. 2.1 is a 7.x era product and is still well supported and remained the 'latest product' (as defined relative to the RedHat enterprise offering) for a long time. The release of RHEL3 has done nothing to slow that support down, and it looks like these enterprise editions will be similar to MS product lifecycles, which is reasonable. So this move is consistant with their strategy. Their take is that the 'freeloaders' will buy into the Enterprise product line, and if they don't, they weren't worth the effort to appease in the first place. Perhaps a tad short sighted in the scheme of things (bad public image is apparent), but they have failed to really break out of their state as a fledgling company with their old strategy, and, from the business perspective, had little choice and not much to risk. They hope to make RHEL a corporate standard, and therefore being short on new features relative to the community will not be so obvious, and then the companies can feel good about long lifecycles and their 'latest and greatest' Red Hat.
Of course, the bad thing is that these *extremely* short lifecycles will be held up high by the likes of MS as examples of how RedHat will leave you out in the cold long before MS will. Even if not completely true, it has enough truth in it for MS to put a strong, believable, verifiable spin on the situation. That is the consequence of this strategic change that they will have to face. And don't try to make it sound like 7.x is *ancient*, it feels that way to the Linux community because that is the pace it is used to moving at, but in a company, it is still a 'new' product.
I personally use Gentoo, but in professional work I deal primarily with SuSE and RedHat, and for both technical and business reasons, I think SuSE has managed to get things right. With SuSE, they have a much more complete, coherent feeling solution. Things just work. Their strategy to all sorts of things is far more flexible once you appreciate it. And with the Enterprise edition, they have enough partnerships in place to truly offer a comprehensive solution. In dealing with RH Enterprise offerings, it is essentially RH9 with some spit and polish. No extras, nothing you couldn't really get from any free distribution, with only RH support to differntiate it. SLES, however, includes a few niceties, such as an included, well behaved, supported JVM. Sure, you can download those for free, but it is important in such a product to have a complete solution out of the box.
Couple this to their pricing model (RH WS costs at least $179, SuSE Professional costs $79), and it seems like a much more reasonable product when compared to the likes of RH and MS.
For North America and Europe, SuSE and RedHat are virtually the only 'professional' Linux platform solutions. Others have some fantastic technical merits, but are not real professional-grade businesses for the enterprise to deal with. I love Gentoo, I like Debian, and on technical merit alone I would place both above RedHat and SuSE (as long as the user is a highly competent linux enthusiast), but the support infrastructures are simply not there in a meaningful way as far as businesses are concerned.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've been thinking about the daemon lately. He's calling me.
This Redhat thing may have just pushed me over the edge. My thinking is that this is a good opportunity to make a clean break.
Maybe it's time for me to finally give BSD a spin on one of my test boxes instead of switching LINUX distros. I have to learn a whole new setup procedure and distribution ens and outs, I may as well leanr a whle new OS while I'm at it.
Now would that be Free BSD, Open BSD or Net BSD? Hmmmmm..
Huh?
Sad to see Red Hat changing their support policy. It is also sad that one can now honestly say that in at least one area Microsoft is doing a better job of responding to customer needs. It's ironic that M$ has yielded to customer demand and changed their support policy for 98/SE/ME at the same time that Red Hat is changing their policy for the worse...
-1 Interesting? Heh, more like -1 Clueless Dumbass.
But I really really though that there was this groundswell of big hearted volunteers willing to unendlingly support open source software.
Can it be that the big, mean spirited, greed capitalistic company like Red Hat is just like Microsoft and forces its customers at gunpoint to upgrade or die?
on a related note check out this internetnews.com story - http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 300161
Legacy Red Hat users seek alternatives - they quote a couple of people off of the Fedora Legacy project who say it's not ready
SuSe, Mandrake, and Redhat (well anything UnitedLinux too) use the sysvinit scripts.
/etc/init.d, /etc/rc#.d, chkconfig. Some differ in easy access to subsystem start/restart. I'm fine with calling the scripts directly, so I never differentiate.
That is
Also note these are all RPM-based.
Debian and Slack use rc-subsys BSD-style scripts.
Also, everyone is using xinetd these days.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The question is, why haven't you downloaded an ISO?
You can subscribe to RedHat's errata list and know when to look for new WB RPMs (or just rpm -bb the SRPMS from RHES, same difference)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Look, if problems crop up with Red Hat 7.x or 8.0, the community is going to notice and post it somewhere. Then the community will fix it. And post the fixes somewhere.
So you have to be a little more alert, and not just depend on up2date to solve all problems.
Doesn't mean you have to throw away your distro and switch and spend another six months re-ironing the kinks between the way you had your system before and the way you have to do it with another distro.
Let's stop the panic before it starts, alright?
If you're a naive user who only uses the GUI, maybe you should switch. But if you have any knowledge of the innards of Linux (i.e., config files, the overall structure, etc.) and can handle the command line, I don't see why end-of-life is a nightmare.
Linux is meant to be continuously upgraded forever. This is not Windows where you have to throw everything out every two (or ten, depending on how delayed the next release is) years.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Back when the choices were "Mac Classic" and Win95, had we heard that one of these was getting EOL'd, there would have been real pain. After just a few years, the debate isn't about how you're going to have to start using a typewriter or something, but how you're possibly going to make a good decision given the actual hundred or so choices available.
Would you have thought this possible in 1995? Your choice for the most part then was staying with WFWG or making the leap to Win95, although the choices we have now were beginning to come on-line then.
So RH ends, Fedora moves forward, and there are more reasonable choices available than most of us would have time to evaluate well. It's like the end of Tandy CP/M, only a hundred times better!
Qwitcher Bitchin.
I'm not at the point where I can give a thumbs up to any of these projects yet, but that's only because they are so new. I predict one of these is going to become a very popular. The great thing RHEL has going for it besides its stabilty is how long it will be supported. There is something to be said for not having to worry about doing major updates on your server for five years. If a OS "works" and there are no security problems why update to new versions?
Like I said right now there is no clear winner because literally not enough time has passed to see what project is going to stick around long term. The one that does is going to find a lot of users like myself who find the moron proof Installation, stability and long term viability a real plus.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
...there is still some PC out there running Yggdrasil Linux.
And it wouldn't surprise me in the least, if that person was reading Slashdot and replied to this post.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We are migrating to Debian from RH 7.3
no, you're just stupid.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Here's hope that this is yet another step towards the death of RPMs.
They were cool in 1998; time for something a little bit more modern (Debian or Gentoo's approaches would be fine.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Comment removed based on user account deletion
but has anyone mentioned that Microsoft is STILL supporting Win 98? Way to set the example, Red Hat.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
We are to pump up your, brain?
I got the E-Mail. EOL in April(?)
I am looking for a new DISTRO... I am ashamed to admit it but I am an XP guy - Suggestions?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Is the term source based distribution really accurate anyway? I rebuild source packages for my Red Hat system all the time.
'Source based distro' seems to mean 'distro that forces you to install from source and had a nifty system to fetch dependent packages from source rather than binary and build them with particular options'.
Maybe 'pure source distro' or 'compile packaging distro'
I love how people freak out when MS says it will stop supporting products, but when Redhat says it will not support any of it's products anymore, except the ones you buy in the future, that's OK. This is GREED. These are MS tactics that you all claim to hate so much but it seems that everyone only hates things when MS does them. Redhat is looking to take Linux and make a big profit from it. All the free work that everyone else does is supposed to make Redhat rich and that's OK. The sooner you see the truth the better off you will be.
"We are developing a Custom Debian GNU/Linux distribution for schools. It will be simple to install and maintain, and will be based on local languages. In Norway's case, this means that all bundled applications will be available in Bokmal and Nynorsk."
skolelinux-i386-pr44.iso. Test version 44.
Two clues, little man:
Aspell
Will to power
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Too many alternatives? FreeBSD is a great option (singular).
It's a true UNIX. All rights not reserved.
www.n0dez.com/unix/.
FreeBSD makes sense to me.
I have found to be annoyed by RH versions +6.0. They are overbloated. Maybe this is the time for all you RH users to move to Gentoo.
Granted it is not the easiest to install but maintaining it is a breeze. And unlike RH 9.0, I'm not frustrated with stupid little pop-ups that they removed 'mp3' support. WTF!?!
Anyways if you want a distro like RH, I'd also recommend Mandrake. Mandrake is a refined RH -- minus the imperfections especially if you're allergic to them like I am.
The Fedora Legacy Project is a volunteer effort to support RedHat products that have reached End of Life.
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/
Debian sucks and is dead. SuSe is the only real alternative (MDK might work too)
Thank you. This objective look at things is a breath of fresh air compared to the RedHat haters and Gentoo zealots in this thread. If anything ever deserved +5 informative, this did.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
as network services. The idea being you have the network listener already written, and you can add functionality by hooking it up to easy-to-write stdin/stdout unix utilities on any port via the configuration file.
*inetd does all the hard stuff (connection throttling, creating/maintaining sockets, etc.) and you just write a simple implementation of the protocol you want to implement in a perl script or C or something.
hosts.allow and hosts.deny are a configuration files that were historically used by inetd, but xinetd and tcp_wrappers also honor them, in addition to their own configuration files.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There's an ancient how-to floating around about how you can switch to Debian from Red Hat without a complete re-install. It seems like there are a lot of us who will be doing this soon -- having another Linux-install-weekend is not my idea of a good time. Any help?
Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
1- Apt-get - The best packaing system.
2- Social contract - no hidden down the road costs.
3- Is the heart of OSS and Linux
4- Not bean-counter centric
5- 12,000 packages ready to install
6 - Fastest at security updates.
7 - Well I could go on, but after testing Debian, Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat it was clear that Debian is "THE" deal.
I'm looking into moving to FreeBSD myself, serves my needs.