Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
.
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 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.
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.
fedora has serious problems in it's installer. specifically in regards to laptops.
if you can get it installed, it's nice.. but trying to walk a newbie through an install asking him to type obscure commands or if he has a newer compaq laptop ask him to repeatedly hit the caps-lock key on every boot during installation is not acceptable.
Fedora is still beta-ware.. I'm hoping that they fix everything in core 2 but from the responses I am seeing on the bugzilla for it, I'm not expecting it to be fixed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.