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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
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...
How long will Fedora be providing RPMs for RedHat 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0?
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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.
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Windows!
/me puts on flame suit covered in asbestos...
Paul Thurrott called it "The Alpha, the Omega, the XP to your Fedora!"
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.
It'll be interesting to see what the future holds for Red Hat, though, as well as a few other things. With Win98SE losing its support come June and RH9 come April, I wonder how many will migrate to something different and how many will stick it out, hoping nothing catastrophic happens to their legacy platform of choice.
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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.
The new pricing policy really hurt RedHat and Linux at our school. What folks had been promoting as a cheap alternative to MS software has now closed ranks on price. It took a pile of work to get admins to understand that "RedHat = good", and the fact that "RedHat" as they know it now costs money has been enough to push a variety of departments off the Linux path.
I know they have to make money, I just wish it wasn't at the cost of marketshare. It would really make my life easier if I could port more people to Linux or OSX.
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...
Has anybody found that running up2date on Fedora core 1 has been a trying experience lately? I realise that this is the lazy way of keeping a machine patched, but up2date has been a great facility since redhat 8.0 (I had a bad experience with 7.3). I think their (fedora) site is having trouble coping with the load.
I really hope that Fedora core can fill the shoes of Redhat 9! Time will tell.
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. ;)
Am I the last remaining Slackware user?
> 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
And this same week Microsoft just added two years to the WIn98 EOL. I have a RH9 server that gets no support after April this year. That doesn't make me happy. I have a backup with Trustix standing by, but they haven't been real stable either. I'm looking at possibly picking Win2k3 as I know it will have support for 5 more years guaranteed. Redhat needs to step up and offer something to paying customers that want to stay with RH9.
I guess the Linux community can stfu about the great support.
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
Two of my servers are still 7.2, while both are updated up to today and both secured as possible.
Up to recently I still had one 6.x but machine died and that was the end of it
latest kernel
proftpd instead of vsftpd
samba 3.0
apache 2.0
opengroupware (in testing mostly)
mysql 4
qmail instead of postfix (or it was sendmail)
latest cups
openldap
squid
etc, etc
No one stopped support, just up2date from redhat doesn't work anymore (I have 5 enterprise server licenses but not even once I used up2date), all apps and services are still compatible, and all of them are still patched and updated, which is far more than someone could say about NT
Sorry, but as such I don't see difference
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From a redhat customers perspective this is bad. To many this is the exact reason they moved away from microsoft.
......
Redhat hasnt been my distro of choice for quite some time, but for many people it is the "only" linux they know of or use.
Personally i hope novell/suse take advantage of this and prevent people from moving back to the evil empire.
And although I personally use gentoo on my systems and I know people who use debian, I wouldnt recomend a non-experienced admin use either, and most linux admins are really windows admins which is why you see so many linux boxes that get broken into
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
guess it was too much money being spent without any inflow, so it had to stop.But didnt expect it to stop so soon. Always thought that RH was someone who would provide support as long as possible.
Lord of the Binges.
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.
Hey Microsoft will now support it til 06 right ?! Thats 8 years of support. With the Evil RedHat people Dropping support in only 2 years Does that mean Microsoft good, RedHat Evil ? (Oh the Humanity !)
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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"
I'll throw a plug in for whitebox linux.
It's RHE3 isos without the support (and with different brand graphics).
Not sure what the differences between Fedora (RH9) and whitebox (RHE3) are. Sure would appreciate enlightenment though.
Okay guys, when it was announced that Microsoft was pulling the plug on a much older and obsolete product, we all aimed our pitchforks at them. Are we going to do the same for Redhat?
"Derp de derp."
A good friend of mine just got started in Linux and chose SuSE Linux. I've been using Redhat 9 since last year, and had never seen SuSE, so it was a lot of fun to set it up together. Once we got past the FTP install (I'd never done that before), it was a dream. I mean it really blew me away. It found his TV tuner card (Winfast 2000 XP Deluxe, I think) automatically and put a link to a tuner application on his desktop. He literally logged in for the first time, double-clicked and was watching TV, color, sound, everything. This was amazing to me, as I spent two weeks trying to get my Audigy 2 and winmodem to work with RH9 way back when, before finally giving up and deciding You Can't Get There From Here.[1]
It's really slick, polished, and the installer (YAST) is the first thing I've ever seen in a Linux distribution that would make me willing to spend money.[2] This weekend I'm going to wipe RH9 and give it a try. They even have a live-eval CD image if you want to try it out first, before giving up HD space.
[1] Eventually fixed, but if I hear "emu10k.o" one more time I'm going into orbit.
[2] Plus the lizard thing is cute.
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 have to ask the same question. Why are people so freaked about Fedora? I downloaded it, installed in in place of my trusty RH8, and it's great. Looks like RedHat 10 to me. Up2date's caused zero problems for me, and everything else is slick as a whistle, too. The only difference is that I no longer worry about whether my RHN account is still active. This is a great distro. Why are we all having fits about having to find another one?
I'm sure I'm not the only person that loses goodwill when I have to explain to my boss why he has to write another check for something he thinks he already bought. I suspect that this move will lead to a hell of a lot of unpatched Red Hat 9 boxes sitting around after April 1st. Red Hat has made it difficult to keep boxes secure by charging for updates. Savvy sysadmins have already installed apt-for-rpm, or something similar, but Windows shops that tried out Linux for fun are going to feel burned.
Anyway, I lobbied for Mandrake at the beginning, but the PHB wanted something he had heard about. But I think I can use the specture of us needing to pay for the top corporate up2date subscription as a way to argue for Mandrake. 9.2, here I come.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
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?
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.
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.
Many posts are drawing a parallel between this action by RedHat and Microsoft's eol'ing (or not eol'ing) Win98.
1) Yes, they are both doing this for the same reason: MONEY
2) No, it's not the same because THIRD PARTIES CAN SUPPORT REDHAT. If you want to start your own DEAD RH support company, go ahead. You have the full source.
3) No, it's not the same because YOU CAN UPGRADE FOR FREE. Go download it. No one is left behind here.
4) No, it's not the same because NO ONE IS LOCKED IN. If you want to jump off of the RedHat ship, nothing is stopping you - you're not stranded. Copy and run those same binaries on debian, gentoo or roll-your own, anytime you want to.
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
Bob (resembles Pyro but with Luke Skywalker's whiney voice): "Waaah! They're dropping Redhat!"
Tom (resembles Emperor Palpatine but with Magneto's charm): "Come to the dark side, Bob!"
Bob: "The dark side? What's that?"
Tom: "BSD."
Bob: "But that's evil! All my penguin friends tell me so!"
Tom: "You're friends are flightless waterfowl that smell of herring. You are better than that. You have the potential."
Bob: "But it's not under the GPL!"
Tom: "Just pretend it is. There's nothing in the BSD license preventing you from fully and completely treating it as GPL."
Bob: "But it wouldn't really be the GPL. I would know and wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Tom: "We have gcc..."
Bob: "You do?"
Tom: "...and all the other GNU software in ports. Even glibc."
Bob: "Wow, I never knew. No wait! You're trying to trick me! I happen to know that BSD is development in a 'cathedral' like environment, instead of the politically correct chaos of the 'bazaar'."
Tom: "Words, words, just words. Yes, we have some procedures we adhere to, to prevent random code from entering the system, but is that any different from Linus holding the keys to the Linux kernel repository?"
Bob: "But BSD users are elitist!"
Tom: "Yes, we are. But you are worthy to join us. Look in your heart. You know you are better than flightless antarctic waterfowl."
Bob: "Hmmm, I guess you're right. But what about the software? What about my GNOME and MPlayer?"
Tom: "We have them too."
Bob: "But what about my NVidia card?"
Tom: "We have NVidia drivers."
Bob: "Opera? Java? Oracle?"
Tom: "Yes."
Bob: "Well okay then. I guess I'll switch."
Tom: "Fine. First I need you to sign this contract in your own blood. Then you need to renounce all that is good. Finally, you have to wear these horns..."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Most people associate EOL with the complete disappearance of support for the product, as the true power of open source has not fully caught on yet. Why don't we beat people over the head with this?
I feel that because we don't make a big deal about 3rd party support for open source linux distros, people form an unfounded negative perception of the community. Come on guys!
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.
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 $79), and it seems like a much more reasonable product when compared to the likes of RH and MS.
For North America and Europe, SuSE and RedHat are virtually the only 'professional' Linux platform solutions. Others have some fantastic technical merits, but are not real professional-grade businesses for the enterprise to deal with. I love Gentoo, I like Debian, and on technical merit alone I would place both above RedHat and SuSE (as long as the user is a highly competent linux enthusiast), but the support infrastructures are simply not there in a meaningful way as far as businesses are concerned.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've been thinking about the daemon lately. He's calling me.
This Redhat thing may have just pushed me over the edge. My thinking is that this is a good opportunity to make a clean break.
Maybe it's time for me to finally give BSD a spin on one of my test boxes instead of switching LINUX distros. I have to learn a whole new setup procedure and distribution ens and outs, I may as well leanr a whle new OS while I'm at it.
Now would that be Free BSD, Open BSD or Net BSD? Hmmmmm..
Huh?
Sad to see Red Hat changing their support policy. It is also sad that one can now honestly say that in at least one area Microsoft is doing a better job of responding to customer needs. It's ironic that M$ 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...
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
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.