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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.
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
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.
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
Ok, it may bave been intended as a troll, but he has a point. I got XP free with my dell. I felt no great need to reformat it, and I have a linux partition for when I want to tinker with linux in a power enviroment, not to mention the 3 or 4 scrap boxes... But as a desktop enviroment, that just works, it has no rival (Except possibly OSX.) Everything just... works. Ok, if you want to fanny around customising it, it's shit, but if you just want to write some emails, watch some movies, play some games, linux is no match (at least not without several weeks of tinkering.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
I guess the Linux community can stfu about the great support.
No the Red Hat community can stfu about the great support...
Debian and many other distros still offer this "great support" you speak of.
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"
People use distributions so that they don't have to do stuff like this.
It may not have been a line item on the invoice, but don't kid yourself - you certainly paid for it.
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 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.
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?
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'm sure they didn't mention those repositories for legal reasons (ie. We don't mention it, we're not responsible for anything that happens if you use them). In any event, the word should get out a little better about those repositories. Myself, I've got clients on everything that has been dumped (7.3-8.0) and what will soon be dumped (9.0) and am getting even more clients wanting to make the switch. None of them are duanted by the decision of one distributor of one distribution. It's about the level support they get directly from their supplier (me) as opposed to the company putting it out.This can't be said for large installations, that I know, but a school of all places (primary, secondary, high schools, etc) shouldn't have a problem with it. Hell, that gives and computer studies courses a serious project throughout the year as far as I can see it. Let me throw a little situation at you:
1) Walla Walla High School decides to convert all internal student systems to Linux (including student servers, library systems, etc)
2) Once the framework is in place, students are picked out of each computer class whom have a level of skill and competency (and trustworthiness) to let administer the student network.
3) Students suggest upgrades or changes that the school admin never thought of or didn't have the time to implement
4) Students implement changes. Some work, some don't
5) Everyone learns
6) School offers "innovative learning environment using the latest software to enrich your childs knowledge of computing in the digital age" (why couldn't I come up with lines of BS like this when I had to)
In any event, now that I'm thoroughly off topic, I'll end with this. RedHat doesn't mention the repositories because, if they did, they can be held liable for anyting that happens to systems using said repositories. A recommendation can and would be construed as an endorsement.
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
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.
Perhaps I'm also off topic. Right now the only Distribution that I am considering using for my servers is Debian, and here's why. What I need more than anything is to manage a few mega-servers. My parents, and some friends all asked me to set up routers for them so that they can have e-mail (IMAP, POP, SMTP), web space, a firewall, SQL, and of course I need to shell in to upgrade things occasionally. That's a ton of open services. They need security patches on average of once every few months. I want to log in every week or so and run a script to patch each of the 5-10 machines I am in charge of and not waste time looking for the patches to the packages I need to update. Red Hat did that for me through YUM, synaptic/apt-rpm, up2date, or red-carpet. Debian does this through apt/synaptic out of the box.
Is there a single command I can type as root that will grab all of the security patches, regardless of how often I read up on necessary patches in slack? How about under free/open BSD or gentoo? I believe that portage and ports can do some of it, but can they auto-update? I don't trust fedora yet - bad taste from Red Hat and no real track record of timely updates, so that's out.
To me, this is far more important than a 2.6 kernel, or a good desktop (I use Mandrake for the Desktop, and it even has urpmi to update). Having an easy way to brainlessly update my servers for security is the most important feature. What other distributions of Linux OR BSD do that for me? Which ones do it best?
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...
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.