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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.
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...
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.
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.
Speaking of other options, Lets not forget that Progeny will be offering Redhat support for those distributions as per this slashdot story.
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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).
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...
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. ;)
> 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
P.S. If you need a support contract, there are many besides redhat who offer them. Most of them write code and are just as qualified as redhat to handle you (it's not like windows, and even with windows the "most" qualified give the worst support ;) ).
Security updates are also still available, in fact they are more timely than redhats ever were.
http://apt.freshrpms.net
They are still updating 6.2. I wouldn't worry much about 7.3 or 8.0 for awhile.
You can upgrade to a newer version when you do become scared with an apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade.
Yes Yes, there are many distros; everybody who reads /. knows that. But in the long run, distros boil down to rpm-based (named for Red Hat which designed it), deb-based (debian and all derivitives), and source-based (slackware, gentoo; neither of which are in competition for the mass market though they do have a loyal following). So really, if you don't want to wait hours for things to compile, you have two major option to choose from; debian based or red-hat based package management. Thus, the assertion that debian is the "other-option" is still mostly true even in the presence of so many choices.
Windows 98 = 8 years of support. I'd rather have 8 years of support for a buggy product than this.
In my experience, Windows 98, even with support from Microsoft, will consume a fair bit of effort just to keep functioning.
My unsupported RedHat 7.2 machines, on the other hand, are pretty much rock solid. The only thing that they really need now is the occasional security update, which you can get from Progency, or from Fedora Legacy, or you can roll your own. Rolling your own RPM isn't too hard, and in a lot of cases you can simply take the SRPM from Red Hat or Fedora and rebuild it for your system. Rolling your own updates for Windows isn't really an option, and Windows 98 would be such an unstable basis that I'd consider it a waste of effort.
Heh, for ease of installation on a Debian based distro, get Libranet
Ease of installation? Debian? At least it can be said that it's a one-time ordeal, after which things get much better.
Fedora Core has apt-get as well, and, when enhanced by adding livna.org to your /etc/apt/sources.list, gives you all the programs Red Hat feels that they can't touch, like ogle and mplayer, some of which have still not been packaged even for Debian unstable.
Fedora's preferred apt-equivalent is yum, but I like apt better; apt is certainly more bandwidth-efficient.
Debian's stability is great for older servers, but you are likely to find that it won't install on many machines you can buy in a store today, as it lacks support in the kernel and X for current hardware. That said, hardware running Red Hat 7.3 will probably work fine with woody.
Now, when sarge comes out Debian will again be competitive, but woody is too old.
Please Gentoo: lose the hubris, sort our the installation!
I'm no Linux newbie, but I'm not an expert either. I recently tried gentoo, and I love the manual install approach that Gentoo offers. I suspect that I have learned more about Linux during the past few months of installing and using Gentoo, than I have from using Redhat since version 5.2 was released. For people keen to learn more such as myself, I would highly recommend Gentoo.
It's not as easy to install as redhat/fedora/mandrake etc. etc. etc. but it's hardly difficult for anyone with nothing more than basic understanding. The documentation is excellent, and the community forums on the gentoo site seem to have some of the most helpful people.
Gentoo isn't meant to be a 'user' orientated distribution, and I think to make the installation procedure similar to other distributions would take more away from the distro than it added.
>With the Evil RedHat people Dropping support in only 2 years
Redhat 9 was released in April 2003. Dropped in April 2004.
Thats 1 year of support.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Go to Amazon, spend $13.99 + shipping and get Offical Fedora Companion. No ISO, not downloading and you can look at the pretty picture in the book while you install the OS.
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
Red Hat will release security and bugfix updates for RHEL3 for the next five years, while Fedora will have new releases every six months and won't go much longer than that. RHEL3 has official support and Service Level Agreements. Fedora doesn't.
Technically, one main difference is the kernel, which is patched in a way to increase the amount of continguous memory an application can get from around 1.3G to, IIRC, 3 GB. This makes RHEL kernels good for databases which need large amounts of contiguous RAM. You could rebuild a RHEL3 kernel on Fedora if you wanted to run Oracle on your big desktop box, but you wouldn't get support (besides, check out the EL3 Professional Workstation pricing).
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:
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.
I don't know if they always had this, but Gentoo currently has step-by-step instructions on their site. The instructions are long and involved, but there's nothing to hard in there. I'm a recent Windows refugee, and it didn't give me too much trouble. Gentoo has many serious usability issues however, like the whole "etc-update" thing is kinda weird at times. Matt
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
And the cool thing about the "long and involved" instructions is that they do the best job of any documentation I've read so far of explaining WHY you're taking the steps you're told to.
/etc/fstab and /etc/modules.autoload on seperate occasions due to my own inattention and someone thinking that an update to a freaking COMMENT warrented re-zeroing those files to defaults. Not fun.
I learned more about Linux when I first installed Gentoo (pre 1.2) than I did in the previous years of working with the OS.
For the first time I understood specifically why things were the way they were, rather than just following the "install wizard".
I agree that etc-update can be troubling. I've learned never to let it update conf files that I have important settings in "wholesale". Instead, I copy the "new" config file and manually determine if any important changes are included.
I managed to hose my
That's pretty much the only thing I dislike about the distro though, and on the whole, etc-update is useful more than not.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
There are Installers out there for gGntoo also.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
from the respective websites:
slackware: "first release in April of 1993"
"Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock"