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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!
/me puts on flame suit covered in asbestos...
Paul Thurrott called it "The Alpha, the Omega, the XP to your Fedora!"
ease of installation? The strain must really be getting to you.
Am I the last remaining Slackware user?
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.
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!
[Cough...]
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!
Awww c'mon! Gentoo is for sissies. Manly men use Linux from Scratch
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman