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.

Comments

Other options?

[sp00]

Why is debian always the "other option" when there are lots of alternatives?

Re:Other options?

[TwistedSquare]

Clearly there is only one other option ;-)

Re:Other options?

[MoThugz]

Slight misconception in your post.

Slackware is _not_ a souce based distro. It uses it's own packages (commonly referred to as slackpacks) which are actually plain tarballs (.tgz). It even pre-dates RPMs (possibly even debs, but don't take my word on that... I'm no Linux historian).

Re:Other options?

[mark_lybarger]

i don't see why can't a distro please those hard core users as well as function extremely easy for the "newbies"?

i/2 the install document for gentoo is going over tedious things, and finally getting to the actual tedious commands that the user has to enter. a basic installer just needs to let me select a few things like:

• which stage am i going to use and where is that stage
• bring up a decent gui fdisk application and let me partition away the hdd. and allow a simple "you figure out the partitions gentoo and let me see how it looks" type thing
• which kernel would you like to use, and here, i'll preconfigure it for what i think it should look like, but take a check and see if you need anything changed if you want
• if using a graphical display, set it up.

etc, etc, etc. there's tons of graphical install applications floating around these days. and it's finally good to hear drobbins mention that a graphical install application needs requirements, design and implemention and support. basicly by saying that, he's saying that gentoo will have an installer application. there's been some before that i've heard of (never used), but the community seems to have been so "elite" that they wouldn't accept such a beast in the past.

it's possible to learn how to customize, optimize and tweak a system w/o having to endure a weekend of hard core headaches. perhaps the mailing lists, forums and irc channels are afraid their signal to noise ratio will be altered by such an install program?

Inevitable?

[x0n]

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.

Re:Inevitable?

[x0n]

Am I missing something here? People paid for Windows 98. People are still paying for Win98. Every time a machine is shipped with 98 on it, the boys in Redmond have another beer. And in "stark contrast", Red Hat aren't making any (comparable) money off of RH6/7/8. Noone pays for it. Every time someone downloads Redhat 7/8 off from a RH server, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Never mind the time/money spent on maintaining it, for _free_.

Re:Microsoft supports customers

[gr0ngb0t]

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

[prockcore]

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"

Re:what the hell

[lobotomy]

You obviously have never had to support any production servers or you would never make such a stupid statement. Let me guess: you are a 13-year-old with a computer in you bedroom. Yep, in your case, upgrade to Fedora. No problem. I have updated my home system and my laptop to Fedora -- works great, I like it.

There is no way in hell I am going to update my servers at work to Fedora. Production systems cannot be updated lightly. It was only 7 or 8 months ago that I updated our mail server from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. Updating servers that people rely on 24/7 can be a traumatic experience (especially when you don't have the money to be able to have redundant servers).

Why do you assume that people are looking for a "free" solution? A lot of people pay for Red Hat Linux, then they pay for Red Hat Network. This is not a case of people looking for something for nothing. People are willing to pay but Red Hat is not interested. What really hurts is that Red Hat has stated that they were not losing money on Red Hat Linux, they just did not have enough "growth". *Gag* Business school crap!

So now we have to make a tough choice. What do we go for next?

• Fedora Core is not for the enterprise.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux costs real money. This is not a problem for some businesses but is quite a burden for Education (where I am). We are in talks with Red Hat about pricing. But I feel like I would be buying a pig in a poke (a product sight-unseen). Why? Because I haven't ever seen it. I can't just download it and install it at home to evaluate it. The vast mass of developers out there have never touched it and can't tell you if there are any issues concerning their software or not.
• SuSE Professional 9. I purchased a copy so that I could evaluate it. Well, let's just say that I hope Novell can put some money into it and maybe I will try it again in a year or two.

So where does that leave me? Between a rock and a hard place. To anyone that paid attention, Red Hat's EOLing was not a surprise -- but that doesn't make it any less painful.

Re:what the hell

[irix]

Funny, I have been updating a Fedora laptop using up2date and a server using yum and I have not had any problems. Mind you, I don't live in fscked up networks that need an HTTP proxy.

Or, you could continue to get updates from both free and paid sources for older RedHat versions if Fedora isn't quite mature enough for you yet.

Or you could sit there and bitch. But I guess that is what these RedHat stories are for - so people can piss and moan about a company that has done more for Linux than pretty much everyone who posted here combined.

Why is Fedora not the other option?

[JMax]

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?

Re:Why not use Fedora Legacy's yum repositories?

[CliffH]

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

Problem? No Problem!

[$ASANY]

A few here complain that their support is being "dropped", and the /. crowd comes up with alternatives ranging from progeny support, to switching to any of eight or ten other distros, to looking at three or four BSD distros, to keeping RH9 and doing manual updates. I don't like to see pain, but if this is what pain is these days then life has gotten ENORMOUSLY better.

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.