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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
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
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.