Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life

egburr writes "Well, today is the last day for Red Hat Linux 9. The Fedora Legacy Project is supposed to start legacy support. I am still planning to stick with RHL9, for a while at least. How many others are planning to do the same? How many are switching to Fedora? How many are switching to some other distribution altogether? How many have already switched? For people still using earlier levels of Red Hat Linux (6.x,7.x,8), how well has the Fedora Legacy Project worked for you?"

Comments

no update for us

[grafikhugh]

We use 9 as a file server and don't plan on updating. It does everything we need it to do already.

Re:no update for us

[danidude]

> We use 9 as a file server and don't plan on updating. It does everything we need it to do already.

How about the security updates?

Re:no update for us

[cloudmaster]

Oh, so this is an "internet" file server, serving to non-trusted machines? :)

WSAD

[jobsagoodun]

WSAD (WebSphere App Dev) doesn't run under Fedora, so I'm with RH9 until it does. Something to do with libc. Heigh ho.

Re:WSAD

[Mr. Sketch]

Third party support for their applications on linux is what's keeping us on RedHat 8. It's the only version of linux that both ClearCase and Mainsoft support, so RH8 it is if we want to port our applications to linux. I actually wanted to run RH9 or FC1, but those aren't supported by Mainsoft.

Re:WSAD

[Dr. Evil]

Redhat's screwing themselves with this artificial version numbering and BS support tactics. They're going to lose all the developer mindshare they've fought the past 8 years for.

Redhat's going to get bought out or Novell will rise to take their place.

Re:WSAD

[Wesley Felter]

On the contrary. The whole point of the 18-month development cycle for RHEL is that the ISVs can keep up with it.

Re:WSAD

[naztafari]

Sorry this is OT, but was I the only one thinking FPS controls that particular selection of characters?

Re:WSAD

[naztafari]

Bah, typo! "thinking FPS controls WITH that particular selection of characters..."

Re:WSAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running it as we speak on FC1. The only issue I've had was when launching sub-VMs, you can solve that by running WSAD with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 (other "milestone" values like 2.4.1 and 2.4.19 might work too). This is a known issue with older JVMs and NPTL.

That said, I work for IBM, and I'm using an internal version probably newer than what's available externally. If the above trick doesn't work for you, post your exact problem or an email address and I'll try provide some more assistance.

Re:WSAD

[r_cerq]

The difference between RH8 and RH9 isn't artificial. Most threaded apps break in RH9 due to the NPTL (there are workarounds, but ISVs don't support them)

Re:WSAD

[fireteller2]

They're going to lose all the developer mindshare they've fought the past 8 years for.

This is the point of view I most agree with. This is a startlingly bad move by RedHat, and I too have already moved to Suse. I am going through the pains of learning the quirks of a new system, and once I'm comfortable there will be nothing RedHad can do to win me back.

P.S. I own a small company and guess what Enterprise OS flavor is at the bottom of my list for evaluation.

Re:WSAD

[This is outrageous!]

P.S. I own a small company and guess what Enterprise OS flavor is at the bottom of my list for evaluation.

Windows?

Re:WSAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I too have moved to Suse and I am not looking back. Sad, I have actually purchased the box set for every release since 4.2 as my "contribution" even though I could have downloaded it. To make matters worse, I live in Raleigh.. HQ of RedHat.

Re:WSAD

[PygmySurfer]

P.S. I own a small company and guess what Enterprise OS flavor is at the bottom of my list for evaluation.

Windows?

Hopefully Windows isn't even on his list. He did say "enterprise" after all.

Re:WSAD

[robhancock]

I think "most" is hardly accurate - the only ones that break are buggy ones that were previously abusing the threads API..

Re:WSAD

[steve_l]

yes, but its pricing model also puts the OSS community off it. $300/year? that is more than Solaris, or WinXP.

I do need ISV support for one thing (VMware), but I am planning on making SuSE9.1 my reference platform for ISV supported software.

Re:WSAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's taking "Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition"'s name seriously.

Re:WSAD

[ewilts]

Red Hat Professional Workstation. This is technically equivalent to RHEL WS and costs about $85 including a full year of RHN updates. That's actually *CHEAPER* than buying a boxed set of RHL 9 and buying a $60/yr RHN subscription.

Re:WSAD

[macdaddy]

Do you actually need support? We're dumping RH because we don't need support, never have in all the years we've been running RH. Hell I even got the marketing guy to understand this after explaining it a few times. He couldn't understand why we needed support. Eventually we made sense of it for him when we showed him how much it would have cost us to buy support for all the various RH releases we were running on all our different servers over all the years we've ran RH and not once use it. That finally made sense to him. Then he had to ask why we never needed it. The response was pretty simple too. We are incompotent. :-) Not saying you are either. Read my other rants on the notion of support. We're switching our entire production line to Gentoo within the year.

Re:WSAD

[Mysticalfruit]

We have the same problem. Stuck on one of worst releases of RH ever...I like 7.3 and I like 9, but 8 was always a big screwup. Mainsoft needs to get off their asses and start upporting their stuff to newer releases, or patching their existing release so it'll run on new kernels.

Stupid mvfs!

I'm already using fedora legacy

[sw155kn1f3]

I'm already using fedora legacy to update rh8.0 and 7.2 boxes (only four fortunately).

No complains.
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade from fedora legacy work flawlessly.

Re:I'm already using fedora legacy

[luwain]

I've put Fedora Core on my newest machine (replaced Windows XP Home). I'm running Debian, RH7.2 and Windows 2000 on my older machines. I have to say that the Fedora machine has become my favorite. The install was easy (detected all my hardware -- more than Knoppix! which is quite a feat), and It's been very stable. Now that apt-get works, I don't see Debian holding any advantage. I use the Fedora box as both my development machine and my main browse and e-mail box -- I've downloaded and installed the latest versions of EClipse and FireFox. Netscape 7.1 sometimes gives a segmentation fault when trying to start under Fedora, but I don't think that that's Fedora's fault.
Fedora is very, very good. I tried Mandrake 9.2, Knoppix 3.2 (hard disk install -- quick Debian System), ArkLinux, and Sun's Java Desktop before trying Fedora, and none was good enough to keep on the box, except Fedora. I was surprised that I got more software with Fedora than with Sun's Java Desktop (which I paid for) -- What market are they going for?? ( SJD is somewhat SCO-like -- ugh!). ArkLinux kept crashing (they do say that it's alpha software). I had a hard time getting Knoppix to work with my Gigabit Ethernet, my wireless card and didn't have my usual "Debian patience". Mandrake 9.2 kept freezing during the install and when I finally did get it installed, it too had trouble with the Gigabit Ethernet and wireless. Fedora handled my hardware with ease, was child's play to configure the way I wanted it, and hasn't crashed once.

Re:I'm already using fedora legacy

[sw155kn1f3]

:) You're actually confusing Fedora Legacy & Fedora Core. They had to choose the better name to distingush them easier!

Fedora Core is community-supported distribution, much like RHx.x was.

Fedora Legacy is a community-supported bugfixes/updates effort for old redhat systems currently not supported by redhat itself (for RedHat distributions from 7.2 to 9.0).

They usually take old packages, native to these old systems and apply back-ported security patches to them.
That's for people that cannot/don't want to upgrade their main distribution, while being able to maintain "old" distribution to be secure.
apt-get can be used on these "old" distributions as well too.

Hope this shed a light a little.

Re:I'm already using fedora legacy

[remmy1978]

You might be interested in a new linux distribution which I am starting which will hopefully combine some of the features people are looking for.

It is going to be based on the .deb package format but unlike Debian will have regulary scheduled releases. We intend to support older releases as we make them for up to 5 years to provide them with security updates and provide seemless upgrades between releases without requiring or recommending fresh installs. People interested can sign up for the mailinglist on http://www.serene-linux.org/

Re:I'm already using fedora legacy

[christophersaul]

Java Desktop System is aimed at businesses, not the average Linux fan's desktop. I work at promoting Java Desktop to various companies, but wouldn't recommend it if you're the kind of person who's heavily into Linux, updating, fiddling, installing, etc. It's a great business package though.

Re:I'm already using fedora legacy

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be interested in a new linux distribution which I am starting

Mistake #1 -- the world doesn't need another Linux distro.

It is going to be based on the .deb package format

Mistake #2 -- .debs have long been rendered obsolete by .rpm. All the important commercial distros are .rpm based and so most users are rpm users.

We intend to support older releases as we make them for up to 5 years to provide them with security updates and provide seemless upgrades between releases without requiring or recommending fresh installs. People interested can sign up for the mailinglist on http://www.serene-linux.org/

Laudable goals... but helping other projects who nearly meet the requirements would do far more good than starting Yet Another Linux Distro. Unless you plan something extremely radical, or are too egotistical to fit in with others... there is simply no reason or justification for starting a new distro these days.

The hat

[RotJ]

So did Marc Ewing ever get his hat back, or was the whole enterprise a failure?

changing

[Soothh]

moving our desktops to fedora,
but my box will always be debian :)
fedora is good for set it and forget it,
but i like debian for myself

Re:changing

[cscx]

fedora is good for set it and forget it,

Coincidentally, so is the Ronco Shotime indoor rotisserie and BBQ.

Re:changing

[Anonymous Coward]

My roommate thinks pots, pans, and ovens work the same way. I hate it when it's my turn to do the dishes.

Who's responsible?

[xpl_the_myst]

Technically, who's responsible for the Fedora Legacy Support? If it is just the community, it doesn't sound like much.

Re:Who's responsible?

[GigsVT]

The community wrote it.

If you don't trust them, then why the hell are you running the software they wrote?

Re:Who's responsible?

[wookyhoo]

Ah, the kind of comment that I can't help but respond to.

Why would you automatically think that if the project is supported by the 'community' it must lack something, or not be as good?

Does having support from someone looking to make money (for all the good they do, that is all IBM and RedHat basically are) necessarily make things better?

Personally I would put more faith and trust in the community that needs and wants the support than anything else.

Re:Who's responsible?

[Anonymous Coward]

His concern is rational -- we're talking about backported security fixes. You want some small assurance that the people who are doing it know what they're doing.

With RedHat, it's an employee. With Fedora Legacy, who? Is there anyway to find out?

And the "community" is large and diverse enough to contain poor and malicious coders.

Re:Who's responsible?

[Jezza]

Err... Isn't "the community" that which created all this stuff? I've been kicking the tires of FC1, and actually I really like it (YMMV).

I think if I was deploying it "somewhere that mattered" I'd use the Enterprise WS edition - and honestly what's so evil about that?

RH9 was a strange half way house - fast moving (like FC1) and supported (a bit) like Enterprise. I don't quite understand why we all miss it so much? For Enterprise work then WS looks like a good option, for home FC1 is really very nice.

So what's the problem again?

Re:Who's responsible?

[ZiggyPiggy]

Move a couple of words around and you get questions that are just as insightful:

You want some small assurance that the people who are doing it know what they're doing (assumes that the employee at RedHat knows what he is doing)

With Fedora, it is a member of a community that polices itself. With RedHat, who? Is anyway to find out?

RedHat is large and diverse enough to contain poor and malicious coders.

Re:Who's responsible?

[DA-MAN]

With RedHat, it's an employee. With Fedora Legacy, who? Is there anyway to find out?

With Fedora it is still a Red Hat employee. Fedora and Red Hat are still very much the same group of developers. Remember, a lot of the work done backporting for RHEL 2.1 is still going to apply to RedHat 7.3 and RHEL 3 to RH9.

Remember everything that Red Hat ships was developed by the community for the community. If you're running unsupported (IE not RHEL), you're not getting anything from Red Hat that you won't get from Fedora-Legacy. If Red Hat had screwed up a fix, they'd just release another fix later.

If you don't trust Fedora, write your own fixes and maintain it yourself. If you wish to pay someone to do it, Progeny will gladly take your money. You are free to do so, which is the true power of the GPL. A lot of NT4 users are hurting right now with migration costs and upgrades because they have no such option. Yet Sun was able to maintain their RH6 derivative for the Cobalts for quite a while longer than NT4 by using a lot of debian's GPL'd backports and a little creative repackaging. Gotta love the community.....

Re:Who's responsible?

[sniggly]

Thats a fairly clueless statement. Peer code review for all updates of all important software (kernel, apache, samba) is extremely competent, there wont be any backdoors in those! Also you can meet all of the maintainers openly on many different lists and websites.

With a fedora rpm the actual code will most likely have been either written or reviewed by one of the thousands of professional linux coders be they paid by redhat, ibm or otherwise. Fedora just does the packaging.

Live & learn....

Re:Who's responsible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is you people's problem: You think the word "community" is a fuzzywuzzy magic answer to every question.

To everyone else you sound like cult members.

Re:Who's responsible?

[node 3]

Technically, who's responsible for the Fedora Legacy Support? If it is just the community, it doesn't sound like much.

The answer to your question: The Fedora Legacy Project volunteers are responsible for the project. These are, essentially, SysAdmins who've volunteered to package the bug fixes and security patches that they already need to apply to their own legacy systems so that others won't have to.

You may not have personally meant it this way, but your words echo a common sentiment that people often voice where they want to know that if the product they are using fails that someone else's head is going to roll. For those who need that, buy commercial support.

Why have we created a culture of people afraid of personal responsibility (not you necessarily, just in general)?

Re:Who's responsible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. While the main projects are peer-reviewed, that's not really true for distro-specific security fixes. I'm was just curious who signs and uploads these things (apparenlty still RH employees).

Re:Who's responsible?

[mrscorpio]

The problem was, for the first few months, Fedora Core 1 was a piece of crap. Now that it's matured a bit...it's still not as good as SuSE or Mandrake, but I don't feel Red Hat ever was once those two distros got off the ground, at least on the desktop. The up2date utility STILL takes a dump if you try to install more than one update at a time, so you have to use another app to stay up to date; most use yum from the command line, and it's not too bad, though I prefer URPMI or portage.

Hearing rumors of developer strife Re: FC2, I'm not confident for the future of that distro...I think Mandrake's similar yet different release scheme is a lot better (mostly because they've always been community-oriented, not changing horses midstream like RH), and SuSE is an all commercial outfit. I don't see a place for Fedora Core as a free distro either, with Gentoo, Debian (and derivatives), Slackware, and Mandrake all being much more established (and better in their niches).

Fedora just seems like the bastard child of Red Hat, only kept around so that they can say "hey, we like free software too!" But I think the quality, at least thusfar, diminishes my confidence toward their commercial offering, especially considering that I've only really liked one RH version ever (8).

Chris

Re:Who's responsible?

[JW Troll]

technically, the biggest problem with FC is that it's behind. Hundreds of numbers behind, in fact. If you look at Windows, you'll notice that Windows 2000 was out years ago. XP is because they've run out of numbers and have to do letters now.
Redhat is going back to tiny numbers, which guarantees they won't be competitive in the linux market.

And of course, linux is also dying. Please notify the trolls.

Re:Who's responsible?

[melonman]

Absolutely. RH9 was not a great release - a sort of bug fix for RH8, and the only distro I have ever had which regularly kernel panics when mounting floppy discs.

I spent a week trying to install Gentoo - very clever I'm sure, but when gcc said it was not configured to compile c I decided enough was enough. Fedora looked like RH9 in mourning, but up2date was so slow that going flat out it would never have kept up with the security patches.

Forked out my $419 for Enterprise ES, installed it, patched it, found rpms for all the non-standard stuff I wanted, and everything worked. It's the most I've ever paid for a software product, but if I count my time at anything like a commercial rate it looks like a bargain to me, especially if I can avoid having to do a fresh install until 2009.

SuSE

[nlinecomputers]

I switched the few units I had on RH to SuSE about 6 months ago. Sure you don't have ISOs to download but you can WGET the FTP site and do your own private, in house FTP install just as easily. SuSE stable and has good documentation.

Re:SuSE

[hawkbug]

Yeah, me too. I actually have the pro version of 9, and will purchase 9.1 when it comes out. I moved like 5 boxes to it. I'm just so disappointed by Red Hat - I know they say FC is the same thing, but with more open source support.... but I tried FC1, and the installer locked up on me 3x in the same place on a machine that has Suse 9 running on it flawlessly. I used to have Red Hat 6.2, 7.1, 7.3, and 9 all running on this machine before, so I know it's not bad hardware. When the installer crashes, they can't convince me that FC is as stable as RH releases.

Re:SuSE

[ip_fired]

Switched both of our RH boxes (7.1 and 9) to Suse 9.0. There were a few hiccups, especially having to do with some custom made pam authentication modules that I wrote, but otherwise, it all went very smooth. I love YaST, which sold me on Suse over some of the other distros.

Re:SuSE

[kevinank]

I also settled on SuSE 9.0, after first having tried Debian, then Lindows, both of which were painfully bad (although in completely different ways.) SuSE is sweet; I still encounter a few annoying bits where SuSE doesn't install the same set of default applications, but it is by far the easiest OS to administrate of any I've used. (Actually Lindows is also simple to admin, but so limiting that it ends up being impossible to configure to do what you want.)

Re:SuSE

[bcs_metacon.ca]

What kind of a comparison is that? You've compared YaST to Anaconda, and nothing else. You never even USED Fedora Core. The installer is just one package in a multitude. Your problem could probably have been fixed with a quick visit to fedora-list@redhat.com or http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ . Linux helps those who help themselves.

Re:SuSE

[BrianMarshall]

The SUSE website says that the difference between SUSE you pay for and SUSE you download for free is only a few apps that are not included in the free one. But I could never find a list of the apps that were not included.

Does anyone know what the difference between free SUSE and paid-for SUSE is?

Re:SuSE

[grepistan]

Well, I've never had a problem installing any version of RH from 6 onwards, currently at fedora core 1, which is excellent by the way. As a home user I'm not overly concerned about security patches and the like either, so I will be sticking with Fedora for the moment.

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever apps are missing you can still find and download off of SuSE's ftp server and use YAST to install (YAST will take care of the dependencies...) Also I just Installed Ximinian Desktop 2 free of charge and used Red Carpet to update SuSE (Found a lot more updated packages for SuSE 9.0 under Red Carpet after I just used SuSE Online Update)and upgrade kde...not too shabby

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

"As a home user I'm not overly concerned about security patches and the like either, so I will be sticking with Fedora for the moment"

Are you the asshole that keeps scanning my net from your r00ted box?

Re:SuSE

[Donny Smith]

Me too switched all RH to SuSE Pro... "It just works!"

Never tried to download Fedora (I haven't even been to their Web site) and have no interest whatsoever. SuSE has good quality distribution and I no, thank you, I'm not into fscking with my distribution, making custom kernels. Not any more. Now I just use applications, for which SuSE is perfect.

My 2nd choice was Debian but I never got to try it after I got my hands on SuSE.

On the server, though, I'm still runing RH (3 servers); true, security could be more up-to-date, but I'm thinking buying update service from Progeny.
Ultimately these boxes will become SuSE or Debian servers one day...

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

> What kind of a comparison is that? You've compared YaST to Anaconda, and nothing else. You never even USED Fedora Core. The installer is just one package in a multitude.

Yes, and you haven't used SuSE. YaST is *a lot* more than an installer - have a look. It's really worth it.

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

And Novell is releasing it under the GPL, so all of the best parts of YAST (or perhaps the whole thing) can be reused by other distributions.

Mmmm......

Re:SuSE

[grepistan]

What halfwit mod decided that the parent was a troll? Jesus, do we give mod points to just anyone around here? Read the fucking post before you mod it, morons!

the cs department...

[Anonymous Coward]

at my university just finished moving over to fedora, which i discovered in lab just today.. im at colorado state u. as for me personally i havent descided which distro to use on the dual boot system i have yet.

Fedora Core 2

[xconsulting]

Might as well wait until Fedora Core 2 is released.

Re:Fedora Core 2

[Scyber]

I have found FC1 to be pretty good. I have it running at home and at work with no complaints.

I am looking forward to FC2 though. I just wonder if power management will ever work correctly with my laptop though.

Re:Fedora Core 2

[Jezza]

Well FC1 is pretty good on my "system" (a rather motley machine actually). I did have trouble with the network card (an EtherLink XL - hardly exotic) but it works fine with adaptor from a Mac server. It seems okay to me (YMMV).

Re:Fedora Core 2

[dresgarcia]

Fedora core installation was a snap on my box. My wireless card worked right out of the install, yum updated everything flawlessly, and its been up for 3 weeks now serving as my mediacenter in my home with a radeon 9600se and a bttv878 tv/fm card. Why not wait on getting fedora core 2, a lot work has been done to bring core 1 to where it is

Re:Fedora Core 2

[ErikZ]

Did you use something like MythTV? I didn't like how Myth took over my system. I wanted to be able to VNC into a normal desktop also.

Debian

[DaLiNKz]

When RedHat decided to throw in the towel for any real distro (well, as real as it got), I decided it was time to find something that was a bit more.. small. I tried Gentoo but as fun as it was it didn't do what I wanted on my servers.. Debian I can do exactly what I want.

Re:Debian

[justsomebody]

When RedHat decided to throw in the towel for any real distro

When did this happen'?

Redhat just moved people distro where it belongs. Between people.

Redhat still supports development in Fedora, and even funds it. Funny I've been noticing only improvements (since the change) and no stepbacks. Fedora is just as supported as RH ever was, no better, no worse (except there's much more choices now, yum instead up2date, and more public repositories). You'd notice if you try to search package for RH9 and same package for Fedora.

I really don't know what is people problem with Fedora and neither does anyone that didn't jump to conclusion before even trying.

Re:Debian

[DaLiNKz]

I just don't like the fact that either I pay them loads to run their server version on my server or run a version that I feel is more a desktop version of linux.

Re:Debian

[justsomebody]

Let me comment you back. (Not to bash Debian but I'm really interested)

I run Fedora on my server and I can tell you that it lacks nothing, for your info, it's only gains against RH9.

Few questions:)

Why do you think that you need server version. I have two of them but can't realize why small enterprise would need RHES. Yes, there are gains for enterprise (I mean ENTERPRISE) but (for SME) other than paid RH support there's nothing, and even that is needed only in case that in-house lacks administration or administration is not good enough.

Does Debian do server version, you said you changed to debian and now you cry about server?

What does RH9 and Debian offer (on server part) that FC1 doesn't (I already told you that support lacks nothing, it has only gotten better)?

Re:Debian

[JPDeckers]

We had our servers running redhat too (due to being Dell servers, support, yadayada), and also had to choose a new distro.

We tested slackware, gentoo, fedora, suse and debian, and to my own suprise, our sysadmin (who is running Gentoo on both our fileservers as his personal box) went for debian.

Guess running production servers has other requirements than 'internal' servers. Now I only wonder why we still have Gentoo on our fileservers.

Re:Debian

[firebeaker]

Some applications (IBM Rational ClearCase for one) don't support Fedora, but do support RHEL 2.1 & 3.0. I'm sure there's more than just ClearCase that are in this scenerio.

Re:Debian

[ArsonSmith]

Debian offers enterprise class hardware support out of the box.

Re:Debian

[james_in_denver]

I REALLY don't get the "MY LINUX IS BETTER THAN YOURS!" debate. 99% of the kernel, tools and utilities are the same.

I was talking to a few guys from RedHat about this last week. They said it was more of a marketing/pricing thing than any grand plan to abandon home users. It just helps their image in the "Suits" world to say they are focusing on "Corporate" clients. And guess what, you can still buy RedHat workstation, and still pay about the same amount of $, and still get support for your system.

I really don't see any big change here.

Do I need a new pair of contacts?

Hey Dubbya, wanna serve your country, get a gun and join those boys in Iraq to see what "service" is really about.

Re:Debian

[DaLiNKz]

Maybe its just the excuse I was looking for to leave RedHat? :)

Re:Debian

[Dunkirk]

Redhat still supports development in Fedora, and even funds it. Funny I've been noticing only improvements (since the change) and no stepbacks. Fedora is just as supported as RH ever was, no better, no worse (except there's much more choices now, yum instead up2date, and more public repositories).

Well, "stepbacks" is sort of relative, isn't it? I mean, I left Red Hat after being a die hard user since the 6.2 days when 8.0 came out. My decision was confirmed with 9. Given the quality of those releases, it was obvious long before the official announcement that what they were peddling as a "consumer" distro was becoming a rolling beta. I've been deliriously happy with SuSE, and, frankly, I'm glad that Red Hat gave me the excuse to switch. It's been everything Red Hat should have been post-7.3.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem, ass munch, is that a lot of people have a lot of servers that have RedHat installed that they now can't do anything with. So there fuckface.

Re:Debian

[stfubye]

I've been using Fedora Core 1 for a while now, seems like a "real distro" to me.

Re:Debian

[justsomebody]

I'm going to bite that one:)

I Still have one 7.2 server box (and one at home). Kernel and all services are still compatible. Off course I always build from source and deploy rpm-s over yum from secure link (I always disable default ones, so I can test updates first before applying them, I simply can't afford stoppers).

Few 8 and 9 RH servers of mine are updated on daily basis, same principle and all my last servers are FC1.

Re:Debian

[rawg]

I switched to FreeBSD and it's even better. Smaller, faster, and easier than Debian. For a web server it can't be beat.

Re:Debian

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Given the quality of those releases, it was obvious long before the official announcement that what they were peddling as a "consumer" distro was becoming a rolling beta. I've been deliriously happy with SuSE

You're unhappy with the unstable nature of redhat, and you find SuSE to be better in that respect? I don't follow you there.

I was a long time redhat user like yourself and switched to SuSE 9 a few months ago. But I'm not horribly impressed with it, especially from a stability standpoint. Right after I first installed it, my system would lock up solid every time the screen saver or screen powerdown would kick in (probably something to do with the pre-release Xfree86 they decided to ship). A later update fixed that.

But now I decided to copy all the RPMs to my hard drive so I wouldn't have to juggle the 5 CDs every time I wanted to install something. So I pointed Yast at the location where I'm storing the RPMs... and now YaST segfaults every time I pull up the package management portion of it... haven't seen any updates for this one yet.

I also tried installing the NVidia's nvidia X driver, which is available as an update on YOU. Yast would report success when installing it, but it never actually got installed. I finnally found a log file from the nvidia installer about what was wrong. But YaST just acted like it all worked fine.

And that's just some of the problems I've had. And I'm not running this on funky hardware either. I had RedHat 7.2 on year for over a year and never had a problem. Now I'm thinking of switching back to Fedora. RedHat wasn't exactly Debian stable, but it was never this bad (ok, except for maybe 8).

Re:Debian

[nutznboltz]

Who cares? Today I have witnessed Debian-like support on a Redhat 7.2 box. Whoda thunk it?

Nobody could make money on a system which keeps customers from upgrading. Redhat's done the right thing by moving on.

I'm stuck with admining boxes I'd like to drop off the edge of the earth due to people in charge who don't have a clue what goes on at my level. When companies grow to a certain size no one can see from one end to the other.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

No step backs.. lets see.. expert mode gone in the installer.. they've gotten more Micro$oft like.. we know what you what.. and a little pet peeve of mine.. no more add a user.. lets everyone install and run as root... the list goes on..

Re:Debian

[M1FCJ]

Are you talking about "support" in the sense of somewhere to call/write when you get stuck or support in the sense of "it doesn't work on that version actually"?

Take Oracle: They only support some distros, all commercial, enterprise level stuff. On the other hand you can get it working on almost anything, Slackware to Mandrake, some with minor problems, some with more tinkering.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched from RH to SuSE and then Debian. On the way, I gave Gentoo and a couple of smaller dists a try. All of my customers machines (100+ computers) are now on Debian, and the customers seem to love it.

The tri-release model turns out to be ideal for a commercial operation. Stable is perfect for customers who need a stable environment that doesn't keep changing. Testing is popular with the developers who like to use more current software, and unstable is great for the adventurous.

The current release of Debian (Woody) is outstanding but once Sarge has been released with its new installer, Debian will be very difficult to beat.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it offer RAID/LVM options during install yet? If not, I'd say RH is more suited to "server class" situations.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

What does RH9 and Debian offer (on server part) that FC1 doesn't (I already told you that support lacks nothing, it has only gotten better)?

Well Debian has longer release cycle. With Fedora you should upgrade (to next version) every 9 months or so. But since upgrade is free and it goes quite smooth (my box is still running upgraded once a while, first there was RHL 7.3 and now it is FC1) it's a minor problem.

Re:Debian

[justsomebody]

You are stupid... You don't know what you talk... List goes on.

Expert is still as it was in text mode.
M$ like??? No more than other Linux distros.
Add user is in now firstboot service.
So,... no root, by default you can't go on and not making nonprivileged user. That was still posible in RH9.

Re:Debian

[firebeaker]

Both actually, in the case of Fedora. ClearCase support won't help you, and key features fail on Fedora (it does Kernel Module voodoo, and the modules aren't supported with the Fedora kernels due to changes in them. )

Re:Debian

[ArsonSmith]

yes it does, the new installer will install on lvm or raid. Will Redhat install on Sparc? HPPA? Allpha? Mips? PPC? or any of the other Enterprise class hardware available. I think it does PPC but only supported by IBM and not redhat. Maybe Sparc but I don't think it is supported by Redhat either.

Already made the change...

[Anonymous Coward]

I started on Red Hat. I switched as soon as I heard that they were ending support--and focusing more on enterprise solutions. I ended up with Gentoo and haven't looked back since.

Moved on.

[RaymondR]

Red Hat did a great job introducing many of us to linux, but since my last experience with it I have moved on to SuSE, Debian, and Gentoo. RIP RH.

Re:Moved on.

[SDLightman]

Ditto. All my servers were migrated to Debian and my GUI boxes are SuSE and Gentoo.

Serious question

[eille-la]

End-of-Life, oh my god.
Will my box still boot?

Re:Serious question

[nlinecomputers]

Yes but only when the sun isn't up. RH9 server of the undead.

Re:Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to NT4.0, still patched and supported, from 1996.

So much for who actually tries to force upgrades on you.

Re:Serious question

[dresgarcia]

We're still using redhat 7.2 on over 400 servers and couldn't be happier, sure we discuss migrating to newer red hat version, enterprise versions, and other distros, but it doesn't need to be done. None is forcing you to do anything. You can't support older software forever, granted 9 did had a seemingly short run.

switched to Debian

[gevmage]

Once the announcement came out that the only free version would roll over every 6 months, I switched to Debian on all my work systems (I already run Debian exclusively at home).

Re:switched to Debian

[itsdave]

redhats release schedule for the "free version" has always been about 6 months.

July 1997
Redhat 4.2

December 1997
Redhat 5.0

May 1998
Redhat 5.1

November 1998
Redhat 5.2

April 1999
Redhat 6.0

October 1999
Redhat6.1

September 2000
Redhat 7.0

April 2001
Redhat 7.1

October 2001
Redhat 7.2

May 2002
Redhat 7.3

September 2002
Redhat 8.0

March 2003
Redhat 9.0

Re:switched to Debian

[gevmage]

True indeed. However, versions of RedHat Classic don't go end-of-life when the next version comes out; they're supported for a year or so.

My understanding was that Fedora would roll over every 6 months, and that one and only one version would be supported at a time.

Re:switched to Debian

[batkiwi]

Are you running stable?

Because if not, and I know almost no one who does except on super-crit servers, debian CONSTANTLY rolls over.

Fedora rolls over the same as debian, it's just that they hard-version it every ~6 months. They are versioning it time based rather than goal based so that if you install the "newest" fedora core, you will be at most 5.999 months behind.

Also, since they've moved to yum and apt-get, a new "version" simply means that you change the "1" in release-ver t "2," then run "yum upgrade" or "apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade". If you've been keeping up on updates, there likely won't be a TON to get up you (maybe a new kernel, which you can ignore if there's no security fixes, and some other stuff).

Really, fedora is just like debian without the stable branch. They have no "security fix only" branch (that's what RHEL is for). Just think of fedora stable like debian unstable. It's good enough for 97% of us, and I've never had a problem with either of them stability wise or breakage wise.

Re:switched to Debian

[tacocat]

There exists a big difference between Debian and all the rest in how they have tiered their packages into:

1. stable
2. testing
3. unstable

This allows you to choose your own comfort level of new software versus surprises. Eventually, the merits of this software distribution approach will win over the rest of the distros and we'll be able to support both stable servers and well supported workstations in any distribution.

Re:switched to Debian

[robhancock]

Except that Fedora's update packages are basically arranged the same way..

Re:switched to Debian

[SaDan]

Debian's more established than Fedora right now. I don't like Debian, but I'd use Debian over Fedora any day of the week.

Yes, I've had to support a couple boxes running Fedora at work. No, it wasn't fun. It felt like I was administering a couple of Windows machines (no, that's not a compliment on the GUI).

Re:switched to Debian

[itsdave]

fedora is not "supported" at all even when it is first released, i believe this simply means if you have a problem with something, you can not call them on the phone or email them and expect any tech support. this doesnt mean they won't release any errata etc. so far as im concerned if you never called redhat or emailed them for support then you never needed that support in the first place.

anyways, as far as the EOL you speak of, I guess we will find out for sure in a few short months when FC2 is released. but im willing to bet they still release errata for 18 months or so at which point im sure fedora legacy will carry the torch.

just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[rokzy]

oh happy day (oh happy day)
when suse was born (when suse was born) ...

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[tftp]

The 9.1 is released already, see www.suse.de

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[iggymanz]

Switched from RedHat 8.0 to SuSE 9.0 for my main home server & also my laptop. Great stuff, all my devices work (DVD, burner, wireless, USB for camera & keychain disk) and it's fine for doing my Ruby, Perl & C/C++ development.

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[rokzy]

it was paper launched a while ago but still a few days from being able to buy (not pre-order) - May 5th for UK.

I've just been reading some detals and found this nice jab at Intel:

"For example, a computer with an AMD Athlon 64 processor with 1.8 GHz is faster than a 32-bit computer with a Pentium(tm) 4 processor with 3.2 GHz."

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[molarmass192]

Yeah, but they're not shipping the DVDs in the US until May 8th according to their store.

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[Mateito]

If you knew Suse,
Like I know Suse...

Wake up, little Suse, wake up!

It looks like Suse
It must be Suse
I'm sure it's Suse
But I don't know.

I remember when rock was young
Me and Suse had so much fun.

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Suse-suse-sudio?

Switched to XP

[drgonzo59]

I was using Redhat since I have a RAID adapter (MegaRAID, now LSI Logic) and they only had drivers for Redhat and some older verions of Suse (all binary), so in order to use my RAID array I am forced to use MS Windows. But if it weren't for that I would use Gentoo probably, until they decide to do what Redhat did then I'll use FreeBSD.

Re:Switched to XP

[griffeymac]

Score 1? I was expecting this post to be moderated as "5: Funny".... At least I thought it was funny. No offense. :) G.--

Re:Switched to XP

[amblin]

Do the drivers that ship with stock 2.4/2.6 kernels not work with your MegaRAID? Seem to work OK for us on several models of the MegaRAID we run in our servers.

Re:Switched to XP

[Zizkus]

Switched to Debian, also running MegaRaid on Penguin servers, found this for debian install supporting megaraid, www.beekum.nl/pe26xx.iso (minimal/network install), it was made for Dell servers but worked fine on the penquins, only had to run first installing base from CD to get kernel with megaraid support, them switch to new console (alt-f2) and modprobe 'my-nic' to load support for the nic, ifup, restart networking and complete stable install from the net. Also of interest, the 2. drivers on LSI include the source code for the driver. This only took a couple of day's trying to use alternate methods to load debian to figure out! so enjoy, also if you want to run testing, the testing install CD's support megaraid.

Re:Switched to XP

[slickwillie]

I've never tried it, but can't you use FreeBSD 'vinum' to implement RAID? Or maybe it does RAID on PODs (Plain Old Disks).

went with ES

[Vanayr]

Ended up going with ES 3.0. I just can't afford to go with an unsupported product and take the chance.

Java Desktop System

[AKAImBatman]

I am still planning to stick with RHL9, for a while at least. How many others are planning to do the same?

Looking at JDS myself.

Re:Java Desktop System

[Anonymous Coward]

am still planning to stick with RHL9, for a while at least. How many others are planning to do the same?

Looking at JDS myself.

Why was this comment modded as funny? What is so funny about this? So what? He's wants to use JDS. Give the guy a break.

Re:Java Desktop System

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it: wtf is this funny?

Re:Java Desktop System

[AKAImBatman]

+1 Funny? How strange. Never thought of myself as much of a comedian. *shrug*

Re:Java Desktop System

[dresgarcia]

I find that amusing, I read about it and was like. . . "hrmm why bother?" Sounded like a waste of time to me.

Re:Java Desktop System

[mrscorpio]

I think it comes from the fact that your post seems to be jokingly equating JDS with RH9, a common misconception - JDS is based off of SuSE.

Otherwise, the post was pretty pointless ;)

Chris

Re:Java Desktop System

[AKAImBatman]

I think it comes from the fact that your post seems to be jokingly equating JDS with RH9, a common misconception

Interestingly enough, JDS was originally going to be based on RedHat. Apparently they made a (very wise, IMHO) decision to switch to SuSE half-way through development.

Stuck with what works

[va3atc]

Frankly on my system (p2 266, 32MB TNT2 M64) I find the only distro that
seems to run GNOME with any decent speed is Red Hat 8.0. Whenever I try more recent distros like Gentoo/Knoppix the GUI is extremely slow in comparison.

Knoppix would be totally awesome if they had a lean version or an easy way
to uninstall some of the software that comes with a full system
installation.

Re:Stuck with what works

[SoTuA]

Knoppix would be totally awesome if they had a lean version or an easy way to uninstall some of the software that comes with a full system installation.

Huh? How about dpkg -l to get the full list of installed packages and apt-get remove <unwanted packages>?

Re:Stuck with what works

[Homology]

Frankly on my system (p2 266, 32MB TNT2 M64) I find the only distro that seems to run GNOME with any decent speed is Red Hat 8.0. Whenever I try more recent distros like Gentoo/Knoppix the GUI is extremely slow in comparison.

With 32MB RAM you might consider using something less hungry for memory than a recent GNOME. I use XFCE4 on an older P2 laptop, but fluxbox is even leaner.

Re:Stuck with what works

[va3atc]

With 32MB RAM you might consider using something less hungry

I should have been more specific, the 32MB was the Video Memory on the graphics card.

Its 128MB RAM in here, never actually gets totally filled even when playing Descent 3, though does start to page to disk when running Unreal Tournament.

Re:Stuck with what works

[tomstdenis]

icewm would also fly on such a box [and take no time to install]. If all you need is a wm and not a desktop suite [which is what GNOME is btw] then you're good.

Tom

Re:Stuck with what works

[tmillard]

I've got Red Hat 5.0 on a P1 that I'm planing on making into an X 11 Window System termainal.
Upgrading my software would not really work very well.

Short life span ?

[billcopc]

Isn't it a bit early to kill off RHL9 ? I haven't really been paying attention since I'm a Debian whore (and Debian releases are few, far-between and far-too-few-things-changed), but it seems it's a rather fresh release.

Or is this being done to give their commercial offerings a little more real estate ? Fedora may be the "new" Redhat Linux, but some of the more idiotic corporate users they won't have the synaptic ability to Google that correlation, and will be led to believe that RHL is no longer a "Free" "Hacker" "Distribution" but rather a "mature" "enterprise" "solution".

Aww heck it's a theory.

Re:Short life span ?

[_Sprocket_]

Fedora may be the "new" Redhat Linux, but some of the more idiotic corporate users they won't have the synaptic ability to Google that correlation, and will be led to believe that RHL is no longer a "Free" "Hacker" "Distribution" but rather a "mature" "enterprise" "solution".

RedHat came out to our center last year to do a presentation. One of their claims is that Linux moves too fast for some Enterprise developer's tastes.

An enterprise application developer will get done certifying that a specific build of RedHat will work with their application to their satisfaction when they realize that the official, stable build of several libraries have already jumped a few increments. Which, of course, invalidates their entire QA process.

RedHat decided to handle this issue by developing a slower-moving "Enterprise" target. This offers a more stable and predictable platform for enterprise application developers to develop for, QA, and then provide support for their products on that certified platform.

This was before the Fedora project had been announced. However, even at that point, they were saying that the RedHat Linux we all knew would be the faster-paced, more bleeding-edge version.

Re:Short life span ?

[billcopc]

So really RH Enterprise Linux is just a guaranteed "stable" branch, kind of like Debian Woody, as compared to the less-stable near-bleeding-edge stuff one would typically use on a home desktop PC, which would be Fedora (in my case, Deb Sarge/Sid). They just know how to turn an uninteresting word like "branch" into a crackload of money.

Just switched...

[alta]

I just switched for security reasons. I pointed nessus at an install of RH 9 and it came back with 6 or so remote exploits (Apache/SSL, PHP sendmail, named, mysql and openssh)

I installed Fedora 1 with the same services and only got back the openssh bug, and that was easy to update from source. Yeah, I know I can patch 9 from source myself but it's too much of a pain in the ass to do regularly. I'd rather have something newer just because there's less to patch. It's like racing against the hackers. I'd rather start at the pole than at the back of the pack where they are.

Re:Just switched...

[GigsVT]

If you'd done any research, you'd have found that those nessus hits were false positives, because Red Hat backports security fixes. The products will report a vulerable version, but they are not vulnerable because RH fixed them.

Nessus just looks at the version, because trying the actual expoit is too risky on running systems, many exploits crash the system (or at least the daemon) in the process of exploiting them.

Re:Just switched...

[ePhil_One]

I'd rather have something newer just because there's less to patch.

You might want to look at maintaining your own copy of the distribution and doing NFS installs. Its pretty easy to patch in updates, just replace the old package with the new and run mkgenhd. Next Installs start with all the latest packages that way.

Re:Just switched...

[alta]

You have made the assumption that I have not done any research. Yes, some of the older versions have been fixed, but I've run the script kiddies toys against my own boxes (test boxes) before and was able to get in. Yes, I'm taking the cheap and easy way out, but the simple fact is, to me, the distro is just the successor to RH9 and there's simply LESS to patch to make it safe. And I know you're not trying to tell me that the RH9 CD i burned last year has already had patched some of the bugs that were just discovered this year. Fedora is by no means secure enough for me as-is, but it's a closer fit for me needs than RH9 is.

I'm glad...

[ScottGant]

I can't recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I'm naked in the dark. There's nothing - no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.

I'm glad to be with you, Redhat 9... here, at the end of all things.

You cannot always be torn in two, RH. You must be one and a whole for many years. You have so much to enjoy, and to be, and to do...

Re:I'm glad...

[Uber Banker]

There was a time. A long time. A long time ago. The boosom of life and the blossom of existance existed. In that time. Time. And again?

That time wore a red hat.

That time was nine.

Re:I'm glad...

[happyfrogcow]

for those who don't know, that's from Return of the King. s/(Redhat 9)|(RH)/Samwise/

wait, what am i thinking. of course you know, this is /.

I went to SUSE

[digicide]

I decided to switch to SUSE not long after I heard they were going to kill support. I like it a lot better.

Re:I went to SUSE

[Spellbinder]

it will only take a longer time until you got to update it
but the problem stays the same at least in a few years it will take you at least a day of work to get the system running on a newer version of SUSE
i think debian or gentoo is the way to go
debian with a clear update path which will let you update from stable to stable without much hassle
gentoo with continuous updates which you have to do anyway
i don't say it has to be debian or gentoo but i think their methodology of updating is right

one thing i wonder is how well is apt-get working on redhat/fedora/SuSE/whatever if you have to upgrade from say SuSE 8.xx to 9.xx

I Already Use Fedora Because ...

[osewa77]

By the time I was about to choose a web host for my site, the RedHat 9 end-of-life issue was already known and they offered Fedora (not RedHat 9.0) as the main OS. I strive to configure my systems in such a way that I can freely upgrade to the latest packages without worrying that anything would break.
___________
naija geek

Yay...

[NeoGeo64]

Does this mean I don't have to pay my $650 fee now?

With RH 7.3...

[SoTuA]

...it works perfect. Set them up as apt sources and works wonders. Although we are phasing out the RH7 servers, and putting our apps in a chroot environment with the precise apache/perl/mod_perl/whatever versions we need for our apps to work.

Slackware or nothin

[ph1nn]

Nuff said... I used Redhat once... a while ago, that was an unpleasent experiance.

I have Slackware or Debian on all of my boxes, and i prefer Slack

Re:Slackware or nothin

[happyfrogcow]

yep. over the course of 5 or 6 years, its been Slackware->Redhat->Debian->Redhat->Slackware . The redhats were version 5.1(i think) the first time, then 6.0 the second time and upgraded that installation throughout the 7.x something versions. Used that until this past winter when I decided I'd rather be slacking it. Nice full circle...

Re:Slackware or nothin

[Kazymyr]

Amen. I've tried many distros, but somehow I always come back to Slack. Somehow all of the other distros feel awkward. Things aren't where they're supposed to be. Installing and/or getting rid of packages is weird.

Gimme Slack or gimme death.

Re:Slackware or nothin

[Anonymous Coward]

When redhat sent out their end-of-life email for releases 8 and 9 last year, I was furious to say it mildly. I consulted a bunch of linux lists about which distro to switch to and the best answers I got were recommending Slackware. (Actually the response that got my attention was 'If you can't figure something linux-ish out yourself, ask a Slack Guy') So I got my copy of 9.1 and I've never been happier! Stable, fast, lean and to-the-point. Screw redhat... they can go ms-linux if they want to, and IMHO andybody who chooses to use and develop Fedora is wasting their time. And if you want the added bloat of a bunch of flashy/goofy crap packed in your system you can certainly add it later. Get Slackware and learn how linux really works.

Re:Slackware or nothin

[SaDan]

I agree 100%.

Nothing runs like a Slackware box. I've tried the BSDs, most major Linux distros, some of the smaller ones, Solaris x86, Windows, Plan 9 (that's some cool stuff right there, just can't dedicate a machine to it all the time), and still go back to Slack.

People, Slackware is good stuff. If you haven't tried it, go get a set of 9.1 ISOs (ftp://ftp.slackware.no/linux/slackware is a good place to start, fast downloads), hit some of the Slackware forums (http://www.userlocal.com http://www.linuxpackages.net), and have fun.

Darn, my RH9 box has reached EOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll convert my system to FreeBSD. It should then have a long and healthy happy life with no end-of-life problems.

I switched to...

[Bug-Y2K]

FreeBSD or OS X.

A long time ago... never looked back.

--Bug

Raw Fedora

[javcrapa]

Fedora is still way too raw for cutting RH9, the change had to be slower, taking small steps, I believe people will stick to their RH9 for some time...

mmm, tasty

[Triumph The Insult C]

yum is a very tasty treat for keeping rh9 boxes up to-date. using it to keep some SAP workstations (for the rovers) running

white box linux

[ehackathorn]

It didn't take long for someone to take redhat's enterprise linux source rpms and repackage them as a "free" distrubution...

Check it out at: White Box Linux

Re:white box linux

[Chester K]

It didn't take long for someone to take redhat's enterprise linux source rpms and repackage them as a "free" distrubution...

I have no idea why someone would want to run it though, except as a secondary platform to test software that you're going to be rolling out to real RHEL boxes. RHEL is a pretty limited distribution; it doesn't even self-host. The only reason I can see that you'd want to run it is for the support contract behind it -- which you don't get with White Box.

Re:white box linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Humm.... RHCE RHCT Exam prep... If you can't afford RH AS?!?!

Re:white box linux

[Chester K]

Humm.... RHCE RHCT Exam prep... If you can't afford RH AS?!?!

Well, like I said... testing in preparation for doing something on a real RHEL system. :p The point being that I can't see someone running WBEL on a production server or desktop for any reason.

Re:white box linux

[ThrobbingGristle]

Why not? We are... it's been WBEL for those projects which have no budget and RHEL for those that do...

Re:white box linux

[PeTeLish]

: The purpose of the cAos project is to provide a stable Linux solution for organizations and individuals that do not need or want to purchase their Linux solution. --- Enter cAos' CentOS 3.1 - with enterprise kernel Its industrial strength, built from solid code base, and I have absolutely no need for RedHats subscription based updates. That's why I use it! Also for those interested, I believe CentOs to be better polished rebuild than WhiteBox, with more frequent updates from the RH Eratta.

Re:white box linux

[opkool]

Actualy, White Box Linux is a mixed bag: on one hand, it is a free recompile of RHEL. On the other hand, this is a one-man-show, who refuses to ackowledge help offers and who is not ontop of security fixes.

If you are interested in "Whitebox Linux", most probably you would like to try out CentOS.

CentOS is the same idea that whiteBoxLinux, with a few differences:

- CentOS is a community driven project, instead of a one-man-show.
- CentOS cares about security updates.
- CentOS has several "flavours" to suit your needs.

See CentOS here.

Peace!

Mandrake... for now

[vDiver]

Having to bring along (kicking and screaming) several other folks in the office that need a bit of a crutch, I'm working the Mandrake way now.

Will it stay that way? Probably, at least until I see a reason not to.

work servers

[quelrods]

Some systems have already been migrated to debian, some aren't publically facing and the time/money isn't there yet. Overall our plan is to migrate everything to debian. Using stable and a quick apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade makes patching quite easy.

Progeny, then SUSE

[bearl]

We'll be using the Progeny Transition Service for a while, on RH9.

But we've already started moving to SUSE Linux, and we'll accelerate that when SUSE 9.1 is released.

Re:Progeny, then SUSE

[laing]

I'm not yet convinced that Progeny is a real company. I sent them cash over a week ago but haven't heard anything from them yet.

Re:Progeny, then SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Progeny most certainly is a real company; check their whois record, call them, and ask for their Sales Department to find out what happened to your order. We're very happen with them.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Homology]

Hi their, just in case things go sidewise as it were I have put up a mirror. The mirror of http://www.redhat.com/security/ is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_109/www.redhat.com/ security/ The mirror of http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_109/www.fedoralegac y.org/

Not to be rude, but why should I download and install security patches from a site that is not an official mirror site?

Fedora Legacy appears to work well

[vrTeach]

I've only pointed my apt sources to it for a couple of months, but I'm happy that there have been some important updates. I have a couple of machines that are stuck at RH7.3 because of high-priced commercial software running on them for which there have not been updates. Likewise, I have another machine that is stuck at RH8 for some hardware support.
Where I can, I have moved to fedora, and am trying out Fedora Core 2 test3 on my everyday work machine (I break it alot).
I wonder, however, how long the legacy project can continue to cover a wide variety of RedHat releases? It seems as though it would make sense to focus on a few very good (stable) releases, such as 6.2 (maybe), 7.3, 9 (maybe).

Re:Fedora Legacy appears to work well

[HTH NE1]

I'm still running 6.2, and from what I hear from IT, I will never get upgraded because the company needs someone running the old OS to do testing for bugs for customers who won't be upgrading either.

Can't even install any Mozilla newer than 1.3.

Re:Fedora Legacy appears to work well

[vrTeach]

Well you know, 6.2 was/is a great and stable distribution. Too bad about the mozilla, but 1.3 is better than netscape 4.X, I think.

But, why doesn't your company take your computer for testing, and give you a new one? (bet I know)

Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[OblongPlatypus]

I'm managing a remotely hosted Redhat 9 server. Does anyone know how risky (or even possible) it would be for me to upgrade to Fedora Cora 1 by simply pointing my sources.list at an FC1 repository and doing an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade?

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded two machines from RH9 to FC1 by switching the sources in yum.conf - no problem at all!

I also upgraded an RH7 machine. It was a bit more work - a few rpms had to be manually installed - but it worked in the end.

Fedora Core 1 has been very nice, very stable, and very free! Just switch the yum or apt sources to one of the mirrors, though, or you'll die while waiting for updates.

- Mike

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[Moth7]

Not a good idea (at least not in my experience and that was on a non-production box). I had countless conflicts, unresolved dependancies and general mess. And that was just installing the Fedora artwork :-\

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[Etcetera]

Haven't used apt-get myself, but I did an upgrade via yum a few weeks ago and things went pretty well. Of course, I'd been installing things via RPM so I didn't have to deal with sources colliding, so YMMV.

Overall, I was worried going into it, but everything Just Worked.

More info here and here.

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[GigsVT]

As the other poster said, it's too risky.

If you can tolerate very obselete packages, Debian is best for something you don't have physical access to, since they test their dist-upgrade path well (as opposed to Fedora, where it might work, but no one is really making it a priority).

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[_Sprocket_]

I'm managing a remotely hosted Redhat 9 server. Does anyone know how risky (or even possible) it would be for me to upgrade to Fedora Cora 1 by simply pointing my sources.list at an FC1 repository and doing an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade?

I did this with a laptop at work. I installed apt-get for RPM. Modified my sources. Did an "apt-get update" followed by an "apt-get dist-upgrade" followed by an "apt-get upgrade" to finalize a few trailing edge packages. It all went fairly smoothly.

There was one odd bug having to do with some library for GNOME that, once I had it figured out, required removal and re-installation of the appropriate package. Sorry - I forget the details. None-the-less... I was half expecting to have to reload the thing. Went fairly well.

Of course - this is a laptop sitting in front of me. Keep in mind that my very tired and currently fuzzy memory may not be recalling anything that would have caused massive heartache if I had been doing this process remotely.

YMMV. ;)

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[billatq]

I've done it, but there are a couple of caveats:

1) If any kde stuff is installed, remove it before upgrading. If you don't do this, you'll run into problems.
2) sendmail will be installed twice. Remove the older one with rpm -q.
3) You'll have to update a couple of things such as fedora-version manually.

Other than that, all of our servers were updated like that and work fine.

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[mauryisland]

Likewise. A yum upgrade went very well. I upgraded to the appropriate "redhat-release" rpm, then did a yum upgrade overnight. I had to install the 'prelink' rpm afterwards, but there was virtually no complaining from anything in the system that I recall. I was impressed!

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[r_cerq]

I did that in a few machines (with yum instead of apt), with varied results.
Some machines booted perfectly, others had problems. The most successful case I had was a RH 7.2 to FC1 upgrade where the only thing failing was a threaded app that didn't like NPTL (LD_ASSUME_KERNEL solved that one in an instant)

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[ThrobbingGristle]

I did it remotely with apt-get dist-upgrade. I recall that it wanted to remove evolution and some other must-have apps, and that I ended up with two versions of sendmail and one other package. (this was a server/workstation) After the main upgrade was done, I just added back evolution and removed the duplicate packages.

Actually it was pretty easy. However, don't put your job on the line for this. I would make sure you have remote console access or a competent site tech on hand if this is job related.

Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1?

[Alan Cox]

Its easy if you do it carefully and you know the couple of gotchas - in fact I did one of the ftp.linux.org.uk boxes a couple of days ago *while* it was serving fedora isos at high load

Grab the yum package and fedora-release
Install these two

Now (works around a missing dependancy that might otherwise bite people)

yum upgrade e2fstools krb5-libs
yum upgrade rpm
# You want the newer rpm early
yum upgrade

and it should just work.

No guarantees but its working fine for me. Getting to FC2test3 is best done by CD. I'm going to play with yum updates once FC2 is out but things like the Xorg config file changeover make it hairier

Red Had is dead...

[msoftsucks]

I've switched all existing RH servers and desktops to SUSE. Any new systems deployed at this point, will also have SUSE. Currently evaluating Debian to see whether or not its better than SUSE for my purposes.

Debian Rules

[omar_armas]

Red Hat died for me since RH 7.3, when I discovered Debian. Omar

Fedora Legacy != Fedora Core

[jbellis]

the former provides updated packages for EOL'd RH versions; the latter is the basis for new RH versions.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I started compiling last week

Mostly ok

[shurdeek]

Fedora legacy is only for 7.2+ (i.e. not for 6.x). It is IMHO somewhat slow with the releases, and it could use more volunteers. Other than that it's ok.

mdk and RH

[minus_273]

when mandake died i considered moving to RH then RH died so i tried gentoo and debain only to end up on OS X (though my server runs debian now)

Going slow.

[OgGreeb]

I have a half-dozen production servers using RedHat 9, and I've been wrestling with this problem as well. The first thing we've done is make sure all the machines are up-to-date as of today (4/30). We will likely subscribe to Prodigy's support service, since replacing the OS or going without security patches will be impossible for us, and we like the convenience of the up2date mechanism. We will defintely wait to subscribe, both because there are no announced patches post-today yet, and because we want to hear of potential problems encountered by others.

It would help a lot if RedHat would provide an ability to upgrade a RH9 installation to RHEL3. I know we would subscribe immediately if that were possible. We originally chose RH9 last year for these machines, over RH Enterprise 2, because the RH9 was more up-to-date with the features we needed at that time. It wasn't a question of hobbyist vs. production then and still isn't.

Re:Going slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can upgrade RHL9 boxes to RHEL3, though it's not a supported upgrade path. Run the installer using

"linux updateany"

Off RedHat

[Moth7]

I started on RedHat and it was a very nice distro for a beginner - I still recommend Fedora to those just setting out with GNU/Linux and have a couple of friends who recently switched. I myself however am burning a Gentoo CD as I post (still on Fedora), since usability is no longer a major issue and the customization of Gentoo just has too strong a draw. One thing that put me off staying with Fedora is the lack of upgrade compatibility between the Core releases - that and the huge CDs for install. The "upgrade" from shrike to yarrow (yah,yah, not both Cores, but still) broke my Gnome 2.6 install - I'll be sticking with portage from now on :-)

Nonsensical

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no sense. If there are drivers for your RAID adapter for Redhat and SuSE, why do you have to use MS Windows??

Re:Nonsensical

[drgonzo59]

Sorry for confusion, they are for older much older versions. And now that Redhat is cutting support and the lsi logic won't issue fedora drivers, I am using xp.

Progeny Transition Service

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the commercial progeny transition service
that also does security updates for Red Hat Linux:

transition.progeny.com

Who still uses an old version of Red Hat Linux?

[antdude]

I am still running 7.1 and 7.2 at home. I will switch to Debian, Gentoo, or something when my OS or HDD dies. :)

Re:Who still uses an old version of Red Hat Linux?

[Codifex Maximus]

Heh... RedHat 7.1 on my old box... heavily modified. Gentoo Linux on the new box... very easy to update.

Re:Who still uses an old version of Red Hat Linux?

[r_cerq]

I upgraded my home desktop straight from 7.2 to FC1. Worked like a charm, and was very much worth it. The GNOME upgrade alone justifies the minimal hassle.

After all the blood and tears... switch?

[presarioD]

I managed to install RH9 on my presario 2500 and after all this blood gushing, tear drenched experience, now that my baby is stable and I completely isolated winXP into a 3Gb corrner and am able to work fully on RH9 I HAVE TO SWITCH???? Nahhhh...

I dumped Red Hat completely.

[Theovon]

I liked the convenience of Red Hat. But I figured if I was going to have to deal with something else, I might as well learn something. Plus, others, like SuSE, wouldn'd recognize my 3ware RAID controller.

So I switched to Gentoo. It was a pain to set up, but I'm very happy with it now.

Re:I dumped Red Hat completely.

[Om242]

So I switched to Gentoo. It was a pain to set up, but I'm very happy with it now.

Agree. Gentoo is definitely a badass, balls-to-the-wall, Linux Distro. When you want to learn it all yourself, install all your programs from source, stability be damned, then go Gentoo.

However, there are those of us that use Linux at work, and in that realm, Gentoo is absolutely not even an option. Now before anyone thinks that I'm just a troll trying to incide a Disto War Thread, I'm not. Let me explain.

YOU know that a properly configured Gentoo box is just as stable in the hands of a very clued admin. You also know that if something breaks in Gentoo, a clued admin can fix it, most times without restarting.

But guess what? Your boss doesnt. Most bosses (at least mine) want to know only 2 things:

1. Is there someone I can call if shit hits the fan?
2. If you quit, or I fire you, can the rest of us figure out what to do with all your servers you've left behind? (ie. see #1).

Not only that, it was the fact that Red Hat *does* have support that allowed me to slowly phase out the old Solaris machines. I would go in my bosses office, say that I wanted to move to Linux for mail/web/etc... and he would say, "Does it have support?" (see reasons above why he asked this)

Why yes... it does, in fact. Five years of it if we go RHEL.

That being said, we moved onto RHEL3 at my company for that very reason after RH9 was starting to go bye-bye.

++Om

Re:I dumped Red Hat completely.

[Chuck Bucket]

• YOU know that a properly configured Gentoo box is just as stable in the hands of a very clued admin. You also know that if something breaks in Gentoo, a clued admin can fix it, most times without restarting.

• But guess what? Your boss doesnt. Most bosses (at least mine) want to know only 2 things:

  1. Is there someone I can call if shit hits the fan?
  2. If you quit, or I fire you, can the rest of us figure out what to do with all your servers you've left behind? (ie. see #1).

I hear ya, though after a year and a half I feel very competent in Gentoo. I do config-management and unix sysadmin. I've built a new build machine and now a cvs box on Gentoo. It's the easiest (for me) to admin, it's a snap to keep up to date, GLSAs tell me what to worry about security wise. Funny, I phased out some old Solaris boxen in moving to the new system. Anyway, in regards to your #2, yep, I don't think they'd be able to keep things running w/o me! ;)

CVb

Re:I dumped Red Hat completely.

[tweek]

Funny you should mention that. As I've said before, the majority of slashdotters have probably never heard the words "supported configuration".

We actually have several gentoo boxes in production and our new enterprise production application will be running partly on Gentoo (CUPS for check printing - business rules you know) and one box running Firebird for data warehousing. The rest are a mix of RHAS3/2.1 depending on the program product installed (WAS/DB2/Tivoli)

I'm having to bring my admin team up to speed on Gentoo so I can actually take a vacation but considering we keep our own rsync server with buildpackages and use bindist, it aint no biggie ;)

Having said that, our stores are being migrated to Fedora Core 1 with our own yum server and a few build hosts in the office for testing the RPMS. The end user doesn't see it unless it passes our build hosts and causes ZERO downtime. The only exception of course is kernel security fixes. Gotta reboot for those ;)

Tried to change, but Red Hat is the only way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using some old machines 1) 486dx2 66Mhz with 16 Mb RAM; 2) P200MMX, with 156 Mb RAM; 3) DEC Alphastation 233MHz with 32Mb RAM. Other distros hae been too flaky for me . SUSE's KDE environment (anything over 3) keeps crashing. Its like walking on thin ice with these machines. I really should upgrade to something faster....

Still using 7.3

[Anonymous Coward]

I just put fresh installs of 7.3 on two new servers. I update openssl and build a fresh kernel from source before deploying them, of course, but I build most of my key apps from source anyway, and with the most recent 2.4.x kernel, I haven't found a need yet to use 8, 9, or Whatever Comes Next.

Posting anonymously so I won't invite hackers to come test my security, but everything's been swimmingly fine with the hardening procedures that I use (OpenNA Linux's books are outstanding). Fedora? What's that?

I'll probably be moving to a Linux From Scratch system for my next round of servers anyway, so I can avoid getting locked into distros.

Nope

[ceswiedler]

I went to Debian, and I'm happy. I figure if anyone's going to support their (free) product for a long time, it's the Debian Project.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to tell you this, but I've read all these comments on here that claim that someone named "Netcraft" is claiming that Debian is dying, too.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

>>I went to Debian, and I'm happy. I figure if anyone's going to support their (free) product for a long time, it's the Debian Project.

Yeah, and since Debian never gets updated, you will always be running the latest version, too!

Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[seifried]

I've written an article on this topic covering about a dozen alternatives, it's available at:
http://www.seifried.org/security/redhat/20031230-r edhat-support.html.

Your basic options are:

Continue using Red Hat Linux 7.x and 8.0
Continue using Red Hat Linux 9
Red Hat Advanced Workstation
Red Hat Advanced Server and Enterprise Server
Red Hat Fedora Linux
WhiteBox Linux
SuSE Linux
SuSE Linux Enterprise
Mandrake Linux
Mandrake Linux Enterprise
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
Solaris for Intel and Sparc
Windows 2003
Mac OS X Server

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[freaksta]

"Slackware".. you forgot the most important one of all.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

er... debian?

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Go figure, and he's a bsd zealot too...

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[afabbro]

Damn, I guess I'm going to have to stop using Gentoo...and Debian...and NetBSD...

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's OpenVMS? MOd DOWN@!!!

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[the eric conspiracy]

You can add Fermi LTS to that list.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I would go for anything not Redhat related, might as well not even allow them the mindshare of using Fedora. I think it is unacceptable for them to pull the support rug out of any software version before it is three years old.

So far, none of the apologists have convinced me why the EOL should be this way, especially when even the hated Microsoft supports their Windows software out to five years after initial release. Even the annual licence fee is higher than the one-time licence fee for Windows Server.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Great article.... Must have taken you years
to complete the research... When does the book coming out?

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[noselasd]

Not all of these are real options for everyone. Many will have very
good reasons to need to stick with a Red Hat.
Whitebox Linux is a nice option. While not a Red Hat product, it's
a recompilation of the source RPMS for RHAS so technically it's the same.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[shawnce]

You left off SCO UnixWare!

Didn't you know...

"SCO UnixWare® is the solution for companies who place a high value on the scalability, reliability and security inherent in the UNIX® technology, but don't want the vendor lock-in or high server costs associated with proprietary platforms." ...at least that is what this lawyer is trying to tell me.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[RazorX90]

I was going to set up a Red Hat server (because when ever I thought of Linux, RH9 seemed the obvious choice), but when I heard RH9 support was coming to an end I had to figure out something else. I'm actually glad I was forced to look into the massive amounts of new options I now had to choose from--I'm very happy with my FreeBSD 4.9 setup and I think I really would have missed out if I was never forced to research and make a preference-based choice.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Brandybuck]

Many will have very good reasons to need to stick with a Red Hat.

And the reason at the top of the list is "Our $75,000 per year administrators are too stupid to learn something else, even when that something else is 99.97% identical."

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

agree with the choice for freeBSD. it rocks! but my RH 9 box. 20:45:03 up 65 days, 19:25,

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Bronster]

And the reason at the top of the list is "Our $75,000 per year administrators are too stupid to learn something else, even when that something else is 99.97% identical."

I'm sure I misheard you saying:

And the reason at the top the list is "Out $75,000 per year administrators don't want to waste their time f*(^ing around making products only packaged for R'hat work on some other system rather than following processes we've already spent a lot of time validating and testing".

In a large enterprise setting, it makes a lot of sense to concentrate on one system - and that 0.03% difference is actually a lot more in some cases - in computer software it's more than enough for things to break in funny ways. To expose strange bugs in unexpected places.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[ignavus]

Debian isn't an option? Geez, what have I been doing since late last year then (work and home)?

Dropped RH7.1. Installed Debian unstable. Been doing regular dist-upgrades via synaptic since then.

Worked great for me.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[evildead]

There is a lot of QA work involved in moving a large enterprise to a new linux distribution.

In such a large instance, there is probably a change control group that approves or denies such things for going into devel, testing, and then production. They're supposed to look at the benefits of change versus cost.

I've seen places where the systems people want to leave RH completely over their new policies, change control is fighting it, and it goes up to management -- which does what it does best, playing ostrich.

So do you blame the $75,000/yr (ha!) systems admins who are trying to protect and maintain their environment?

Or do you blame the $95,000/yr chimpanzees who call themselves developers who squat over the change management system like their own personal toilet, because they're too stupid and/or lazy to switch?

Or do you blame the $200,000/yr managers who look at the problem, and decide not to make a decision in the hopes that the problem magically goes away? (and when things go horribly wrong, shoot the systems administrators ...)

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[mgbastard]

You left off Darwin & Mac OS X itself. Since you included non-enterprise versions of other distributions, these should be in the list too.

If you don't need apple's windowserver, Darwin is a free option. Depending on your definition of Free, it's BSD free, but not GPL free.

If you don't need any of Apple's server additions to OS X, then OS X itself is decent - although it does tend to give higher priority to windowserver than does os x server (one of the tweaks, but you can tell it always boot into console if you want!)

If you bought Apple G5 xserve hardware, then you'll want all the monitoring tweaks they include for free with the 10-client edition of osxs. The client limiter only applies to AFP connections, so if its not a mac file server, you don't need unlimited edition. (read the license!) I find it a weak argument for anybody to claim your getting charged extra for the 10-client os above the bare metal, due to the low price.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[buchanmilne]

Except, your artical has some inconsistencies.

For example, you quote the Mandrake support lifetime as 18 months (which applies to the download/free software version), but then you only quote the Mandrake Enterprise version in the price matrix.

I only endure the pain of a RedHat system when I absolutely have to, and that's only when you need enterprise support (ie someone to sue). In all other cases, I prefer a distro that is easier to administer, like Mandrake.

Support lifetime isn't as important for non-enterprise deployments, where you most likely would gain some benefits by upgrading your server every 18 months or so.

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[MikeCapone]

Slackware is indeed a great distro and my personal favourite.

I'll probably recommend Fedora Core 2 (when it's out) to my father since he wants to try Linux.

But Slackware makes for a great server AND desktop (if you put a little work into it).

Re:Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux

[Brandybuck]

Enterprises change their systems all the time. Usually they change them to totally different architectures. For examply, my company dumped Windows on us after a fifteen year successful run of SunOS/Solaris. We survived.

Do you really think your enterprise is going to stick with Redhat X.Y for the rest of eternity? Of course it won't! If your admins cannot handle change, then find some that can.

I've already moved to Gentoo

[sunscream]

...and I will never look back.

Re:I've already moved to Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad we really don't fucking care.

Re:I've already moved to Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. But only too bad for you. For him it doesn't make a rat's ass worth of difference whether or not you care

The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Trolling4Dollars]

I haven't used support from any company for my own systems at home in close to ten years. Suport is pointless if I know how to fix everything myelf. Linux has made that a reality for most users. The only place I find myself having to dal with support (and piss poor support in some cases) is at work where we have Sun, HP-UX and Windows. But let's get real here. How many of us need support? I mean REALLY NEED it? Most of us keep very nicely run networks of 10-20 machines at home (thanks to the fact that we DON'T have to pay huge prices for sotware). A lot of what we learn at home translates to things we can use at work. So in many cases we are our own support at work, especially where Linux is concerned. The distro doesn't matter much if you know what you are doing, so support is largely irrelevant to a majority of us. I'm sure there are other here who will echo this sentiment.

Re:The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though this is a troll, it's getting modded up so I might as well reply.

I haven't used support from any company for my own systems at home in close to ten years.

Sure, most home users can either happily stick with RHL 9 or upgrade to Fedora.

Suport is pointless if I know how to fix everything myelf. Linux has made that a reality for most users.

You're forgetting that 99% of Linux users are total newbies (this is not a judgement; it's just a fact) and so might actually need support.

The people who are sweating the end-of-life issue are businesses without lots of Linux experience.

Re:The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Trolling4Dollars]

I'm not a troll. I'm pointing out that most of us who use Linux, use it at home primarily and at work second. 99% of Linux users are NOT newbies. How mny of us on Slashdot woul you say are "newbies"? Not me. Sure, there are things I don't know, and I'm not a coder, but really... how hard is it (once you have the experience) to grab source code, configure and compile it? It just isn't that big of a deal and it doesn't require any programming skill. Even editing C source files or Makefiles is NOT that big of a deal. What it takes is exposure and experience to a different approach. I would put compiling and installing libraries and software on Linux on the same level as editing the Windows Registry. We've all done that, and again it's no big deal.

Re:The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Anonymous Coward]

I would put compiling and installing libraries and software on Linux on the same level as editing the Windows Registry. We've all done that, and again it's no big deal.

The problem is that in an enterprise environment, I don't have time to go f***ing around compiling packages by hand with 50-60 different servers doing different functions. Oh.. new OpenSSL vulnerability.. do I take 8 hours out of my day today to go recompile everything that uses OpenSSL on all those systems (do I even remember everything that uses OpenSSL?) or do I run up2date and let the package manager take care of that for me?

Now, I'm sure you're saying "but a good system admin can handle that" and I would tend to agree, but frankly I don't WANT to waste my time doing tedious boring compiles when the packages are already available with a support contract. Now, in a perfect world I'd just use Debian, but my company demands we use Red Hat because Debian isn't a "commercial" distribution and ISV's don't officially recognize it as a supported platform.

When it comes down to it, it makes more sense for companies to go with the commercial packaged solution rather than the compile-from-source option because you want your sysadmins working on something other than tinkering around with the underpinnings of the operating system like adding users, etc.

Re:The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still not getting it. You're so leet you can't see it.

When Linux's user base is growing at 300% per year, it's a mathematical fact that most of the users are newbies. You don't see it because these people don't post on Slashdot; they're newly-minted RHCEs sweating away in the server rooms of corporate America. They don't have the experience or the patience to grab source code, configure and compile it. They want support, and the PHBs breathing down their necks definitely want support.

Re:The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Trolling4Dollars]

Yes. But for how long will they be "newbies"? my point is that to use a machines as complex as a computer, you'd better damn well know the machine inside an out. A lot of people make the car comparison with computers saying that the only thing a user needs to know to use a car is how to steer it. But... we are not users. We are more like mechanics. And if all your mechanic knew how to do was steer a car, you'd be sunk. Now think about how many auto mechanics there are out there... Someday there could be as many people who know Linux inside and out. Or, at least, that should be the goal.

I am moving ...

[foobsr]

... and the RH9-box here has turned its desktop background black (after restarting X ) - is it empathy?

I would like to change to gentoo, but after my experiences on an AMD64 (X blocking KDE) I switch to Suse there (9.0 works fine installed over the net) and went for Debian on another (production) machine (box).

I also might add that I do not like the policy of RH which I rate exploitation in disguise (Attention moderators: Pick this as flamebait while missing the big picture).

CC.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

I don't care how good they think they are. We used Red Hat because it was *RED HAT*. We were glad there was an accountable group responsible for testing updates and getting security patches into the system. Someone to do our work for us, so that we didn't have to spend all day auditing code ourselves.

Now, with fedora.us, they've tossed control back to the skript kiddiez. "Here, trojan our old RH systems, we don't care anymore".

SuSE, a couple years ago

[haute_sauce]

I was running RH on my servers for some time, but it was almost an act-of-god (and not covered under my insurance policies) to get the correct XF86 settings on my laptop. On a whim went out and purchased SUSE 7.x (I am now on 9.0) and not only did it detect the correct config for the graphics, I also got Yast in the deal ! I have been running SuSE on my laptop(s) and my servers, with no regrets.

Support == Security Patches

[Anonymous Coward]

n/m

Re:Support == Security Patches

[Trolling4Dollars]

Learning How To Update Your Own System == True Self Sufficiency

Re:Support == Security Patches

[Anonymous Coward]

and how would you automate those updates you do by hand?

I migrated a long time ago

[nocomment]

After an ISP I worked at got bitten real hard by the remote root vuln in (i think it was ws_ftp) in 6.0 we migrated then. I have been running Mandrake since, but recently tried debian, and I'm not sure if it would be possible to migrate to anything else.

Re:I migrated a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it was caching-named. I had an RH 6.0 box with only caching-named (and iptables+masq) running rooted a few years ago. Although there may ALSO have been a remote root in ws_ftpd.

Re:I migrated a long time ago

[nocomment]

There was a remote root in ws_ftpd, that _ONLY_ affected RH 6.0. I guess _that's_ where the "don't run Red Hat DOT-OH releases" came from eh? :-)

Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[zerofoo]

I BOUGHT a copy of RH 9 so I could run my filtering proxy server on it Dan's Guardian.

Since RH is EOLing RH9, (and their enterprise stuff is EXPENSIVE), I decided to go with Fedora Linux. Dan's Guardian installs and runs great with minimal fuss.

Good job redhat! I was a paying customer...I guess i'm not any longer. I wonder how many others they lost?

-ted

Re:Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[Wesley Felter]

Red Hat lost the customers who were paying $100/computer and gained the $1000/computer customers. So far it's a pretty profitable strategy.

Re:Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[avdp]

Two completely different markets, not a whole lot of overlap. The $1000/computer market would have never bought the "regular" RedHat distro, and vice-versa.

They are seeing the retail business as not worth the effort. It's a shame. I've bought right about every release in the store (about $60 each time) AND I had a couple of subscription to RHN. I suspect I was not the only one doing that. They don't feel they need my money? good for them. Suse is getting it now, I don't think they're spitting on it.

Re:Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[Wesley Felter]

Two completely different markets, not a whole lot of overlap. The $1000/computer market would have never bought the "regular" RedHat distro, and vice-versa.

I agree, and I guess they couldn't afford to pursue both strategies so they chose the most profitable one.

Re:Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[avdp]

Their retail business was profitable (one of the execs said that in an interview a while ago) but you're right, not as profitable. Of course, this strategy may have an unfortunate side effect for them. As illustrated by this story, many programmers are switching away from RedHat - many of those programmers are decision makers (or at least have influence) at their place of work. I do.

Re:Bad strategy for Red Hat...

[ewilts]

Red Hat Professional Workstation is *CHEAPER* than buying a boxed set of RHL9 and a year of RHN updates.

Enterprise Linux at consumer pricing. It's what I'm running on my production server at home.

I'm switching tomorrow

[dzeanah]

I've been running a forum that sees something like a million hits per day on Redhat. I've scheduled a half-day tomorrow to migrate.

Now, I just need to decide between Debian and FreeBSD (yeah, I know it's "dead," but it sure is a nice OS).

Debian

[Rev Saxon]

A long time ago. Red hat 7.2 I think. Sure, it was hard at first, but I was just preparing for the futrue when this happened.

And they said BSD was dead!!

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!

I got fed up with Red Hat 9 and Fedora

[Orion Blastar]

I went with Lindows, which is now Linspire. The CNR (Click N Run) software makes Up2Date look weak. Well Up2Date was buggy anyway it never updated itself properly and had an expired certificate and other crud. Plus I got tired of RPM-Hell and Lib-Hell on Red Hat and Fedora that was as bad as DLL-Hell on Windows.

Oh BTW I do not need to use the commercial software with Lindows/Linspire, apt-get works well, and OSS downloads work great too.

Lindows/Linspire is not 100% GPL, but worth it to get an easier to install and configure Linux than what the distro of the month offered. An added bonus is Non-GPL software in Lindows/Linspire that can work with data files that Windows apps also use.

So who needs Windows?

Re:I got fed up with Red Hat 9 and Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice! Looking forward to try it, I got a free eval. offer from Netraverse

Giving Gentoo a Try

[RonBurk]

I've used nothing but RedHat in the past, but it's just become too much of a feeling that my business (yeah, I buy the CD's right from them) isn't terribly appreciated. So, yesterday I ordered the new release from Gentoo and will try it out on one machine. At least I can tell that Gentoo is in no position to sneer at my measly $20 :-).

Other motivations include a growing desire for a slightly more cutting edge distro. I wanted the 2.6 kernel some weeks ago, and have an interest in playing with the new security models as well. Fingers crossed that I'll be a happy Gentoo camper from now on.

Fedora is awsome

[Yiliar]

The only real change is that more people are working on the project, and telephone support is not really an option. So did you ever call before? I thought not.

I have been using Fedora Core 1 at home and Fedora Core 2 beta on my work laptop since it became available. No complaints here!

Re:Fedora is awsome

[RobTheJedi]

As a new fairly new linux user (baring an experiment with a dual boot madrake box 4 years ago) I have to say that I have found Fedora Core fairly quick to pick up, easier for me to get going on than when I was trying on RH 9.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[ComputerSlicer23]

Have you lost the ability to use md5sum -v? Can't use rpm --checksig?

You might have to track down a FedoraLegacy key. That shouldn't be too difficult.

FedoraLegacy packages should be signed by a key (presumably you trust the people running FedoraLegacy, otherwise you'd question why you should install updates from some random OSS project). If they have the signature, either the source is the original, or the keys have escaped FedoraLegacy's control. If the second one has happened, you're screwed. There isn't much you can do to show that the packages are correct at that point.

Unless you feel it's a major loss of time download the security updates, there's virtually nothing else for you to lose by downloading them from a mirror, if it's fast, and you have a fast connection.

Kirby

Switched to Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

We looked at Fedora briefly but how can one know that RH will not EOL Fedora just like it did with RH9? RH fully controls Fedora and if it starts cutting into the sales of RH's "enterprise" linux Fedora will be EOLed quicker than you can say "Debian!".

We switched to Debian and are very pleased so far.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[molo]

Never heard of pgp signatures? Why should I care where my packages came from as long as they have a trusted signature?

-molo

FreeBSD... seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're somebody who isn't afraid of something a little different, I would wholeheartedly recommend switching from RedHat Linux to FreeBSD.

FreeBSD runs anything that Linux does - including running KDE 3 & Gnome 2 beautifully, has 3D accelerated OpenGL on some hardware (NVIDIA in particular has official drivers). FreeBSD even has a Linux translation (not emulation) layer, where it can run Linux executables (including commercial games like Unreal Tournament) - sometimes faster than Linux itself.

That would be all well and good, nothing special compared to a Linux system. But I see there as being two benefits over and above Linux:

(1) A very coherent, organized mindset. Everything is where it should be - from the volume of comprehensive, easy to follow documentation - to the location of system files. One of the main weaknesses of Linux is the fragmented distribution base - something that's not present on FreeBSD. FreeBSD favors logical common sense over the "me too" insanity that Linux distros are sometimes affected with.

(2) The ports system. As useful software is released, it's integrated into the ports tree. The ports tree are a series of directories containing information about where to find - and how to compile sets of software. To install a port, use the installation program "/stand/sysinstall" to install from a pre-built binary, or move into the appropriate directory and type "make install" - and it does everything else for you.

Ports can be upgraded by running cvsup on the ports tree - then typing "portupgrade -ra" - and when you come back in the morning, you'll have all the latest versions of your software installed.

Anyway - my point is that FreeBSD is the best "Linux distribution" - except it isn't Linux. if you were to believe the trolls: "Netcraft reports that *BSD is dying". Except that Netcraft runs FreeBSD - as do Yahoo and a bunch of other companies. Hey, if it was good enough for Apple to take and make OSX on top of...

I've been running at least one machine on FreeBSD since the 3.x series, I'm now on FreeBSD 5.2 for all my Unix needs and think it's an absolutely awesome operating system. Some things I've run on FreeBSD:

* KDE 3 & Gnome 2.
* KDevelop, G++, Python, Scons, Subversion.
* Unreal Tournament 2003 (with full OpenGL acceleration).
* thttpd (Turbo Httpd) & the PostgreSQL database.
* OpenOffice & Mozilla.
* ssh & screen.

Re:FreeBSD... seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

what about documentation... i had a hell of a time figuring out software raid on freebsd. yes i know, the handbook is well written, whatever. i'm not a freakin' sysadmin, i just want some simple howto instructions to mirror my whole drive to another. took ages, and after something went wrong it took even longer to find out how to recover. i'm sure you could do the same thing in 5 minutes, but not me or many users. freebsd is just too damned *manual* sometimes. debian is a better compromise for me.

Started Using Slackware

[snowboardguy711]

Red Hat discontinuing support was great for me. I started using slackware. I learned so much more about LINUX then I ever would have using Red Hat. I stopped using Fedora as well.

Re:Started Using Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! I switched to Slack 9.1 when redhat send out their end-of-life emails last year. I thought I knew linux...turns out I only knew redhat.

Slackware desktop

[nnet]

Always used slackware for servers, probably go to slackware for desktops if the testing period warrants it.

Re:rhel

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean RHEOL? ;)

My Complete and Utter Dissapointment

[l0ungeb0y]

Just over a year ago I paid my CoLo provider $200.00 to do an install of RH9 on my Server and installed RH9 on my LAN server... if I'd only known then that RH would be end of lifing everything but it's enterprise products, I'd probably have opted for something else.

After this experience, I'm feeling very underwhelmed by Fedora, not that I'm worried about it being end of lifed, but feeling ditched by an OS, does not make one want to sign up for something related to that OS. Plus, reviewing Fedora's website, I found it very hard to find any actual documentation, the RH support site was very helpful, easy to use and made my life less stressfull when it came to dependancy issues with RPM packages or problems with source compiles.

Right now I don't have time to research alternative OS's to determine if I should go with SuSe, Debian or BSD.
I am tempted to buy a shiny xserver from Apple, since all my desktops/laptops are OS X, and it offers a GUI remote admin tool, which *should* be rather slick. But, it also occured to me that upgrading full releases of the OS could require a CD, and that would be a pain in the ass in a CoLo situation. Then again, having everything run OS X would make life much simpler. And typically, any decent CoLo would be more than happy to perform a simple OS install for a bit of cash.

However, I must admit that I have grown rather accustomed to RPM and up2date and with OS X most everything GNU needs to be compiled from source, as I for one refuse to use FINK if only because I despise it and found it more a pain in the ass than just compiling sources. Since I can afford the 500$ for an RH ES license, I might just opt for that route to save myself the hassle of a major server migration.

On the otherhand, I've heard great things about Debians apt-get...

Ahhhh crap... Guess I'll just have to throw together a rig for Linux Release comparisons, give me an excuse to check out Gentoo as well.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I think it describes the problems that RH has saddled me with in their move to enterprise only.

Fedora core 1

[LinuxBretz]

I have switched to Fedora Core1. I am still a Mandrake Club (basic) member but since the first try of Fedora, I definitely abandoned Mandrake.
Fedora is more stable and reliable ( RPMS, development libs ) than Mandrake... Even though my birth language is french ( Quebec ), I just cant use an always-broken(unstable, no RPMS consistency ) distribution.

as everybody say- Just my 2 cents...

Re:Fedora core 1

[Lord Kano]

Oddly enough, I am a faithful Mandrake user because of how stable it is. There have been a few changes that I don't like, for example some options have been taken out of MandrakeUpdate, but all in all it's the best distro overall that I have tried.

But it's cool that Fedora is working for you, that's what's so great about F/OSS. No vendor lock in.

LK

Re:Fedora core 1

[LinuxBretz]

( again sorry if my english is funny :-)

Indeed Fedora works for me. I used Mandrake since its 7.0 version ( at work :-) and at the same time, tried other distros ( such as Slack: my first Linux distro; SuSE, RH 6.x+ etc... ) and I always returned/prefered Mandrake over all others because of its easy userfriendly setup tools. Because especialy, devel tools/pkg seemed always half broken, I was used to manage to setup (missing lib here, orphan link there etc ..) right and code confortably. And then came Fedora Core1 wich have everythings(i know/or need) working %100. I just can't return to Mandrake's inconsitencies.

Thanks,
Bretzel

I dumped Red Hat....

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched to emacs.

Switch to Debian via Knoppix

[vlauria]

I decided to make a switch to Debian after a friend kept talking about apt-get. After trying for hours to get Debian to work with all my hardware, my friend recommended the CD bootable OS, Knoppix. Knoppix is KDE on top of Debian and is easy to install. APT-GET makes my life a breeze when installing new packages. Everyonce should be running Debian. You don't get much more authentic then a real GNU/Linux distro.

Here is an AMAZING guide to a Knoppix HD install:
http://www.asiaosc.org/article_82.html

RH9 EOL

[sloanster]

I moved all my own desktops and servers to fedora core 1, which is essentially Red Hat 9.1, and the fedora project does look to be supporting it for a couple of years at any rate. Plenty of time to decide on which distro to go with long term.

I find that FC1 does everything that RH 9 does, runs all the same apps, games etc, as well or better than RH9. I like FC1, but I will be buying SuSE 9.1 and giving it a hard look as a primary distro -

Some of my clients have begun moving all their linux servers to SuSE BTW

Beyone Redhat 9.0

[deanj]

Ok,so the up2date program on RedHat has been a nice feature.

Does any other distro do that? I'd like to know, so I can make the switch.

switched to gentoo and debian

[bolind]

Up until six months ago, I was running Red Hat on my personal machine, and we are stille running Red Hat on our servers.

Now I run Gentoo on my workstation. I like the nerdiness factor, and package upgrading is super easy. Also, no full reinstalls every year, just emerge world and I'm happy.

On the server side we also got a little tired of the constant upgrade hell, and when Red Hat chose to EOL the standard 8/9 line, we decided to switch to Debian. In is in progress now, and I've been running it on my personal server for about three months, and I am very happy with it.

For me and my friends, easy, available upgrades that we can count on keep coming for years is really what is important.

Re:switched to gentoo and debian

[waylander]

Funny.

I switched to Fedora Core because I got tired of the extremely long release cycles in the debian world. Also the whole .deb-instead-of-rpm thing.

FC: installation a snap, no worry about which bootdisk to use... firewalling set up out-of-box...

We'll see how long it takes for FC2 to hit release and if they can keep up the pace.

Debian is a very good distro, though. And some very talented coders there. Hats off to them. Especially if you have some oddball/non-intel architecture.

Debian has also been very good about getting security updates out in a timely fashion.

Re:switched to gentoo and debian

[g0at]

Any reason not to use Gentoo on the server?

(This is a serious un-biased question -- I have a couple of RH 7.2 boxes which I want to switch over, have played with Gentoo a little bit and have been impressed so thinking of it, though I have no experience at all with Debian.)

-ben

Re:switched to gentoo and debian

[Anonymous Coward]

the long release cycles are good they provide a known and virtually unchangeing system to work on while still provideing timely security updates

if i need the latest version fo something i can get it stright from backports.org with no trouble

Redhat ES 3.0 and SuSe Enterprise

[FatherOfONe]

Well on our Opteron servers I went with SuSe, because RedHat is way too expensive for 64bit Opteron.

On our Athlons (32bit) we went to Redhat ES 3.0

Here is my limited take on SuSe 64bit and RH 3.0 ES.

SuSe installs easily, their support is great, but you have to submit an email and they usually get back to you within a day. Yast compares well to RedHats up2date. It was a little weird to use ncXXX start instead of service xxx start. What sucks about SuSe 64bit is that a lot of stuff doesn't run well, and for us Oracle 9i is not supported, although I have been told by Oracle that a version of 9i for SuSe 64 bit will be available next month. Now I will add that I rsync between this a SuSe box and an old Redhat 7.1 box, for some reason rsync will eventually hard lock the the SuSe box. This kinda goes with my overall opinion of the stability of SuSe 64bit, things some times lock up.

Now RedHat ES 3.0. Ok this appears to be a lot like Redhat 8.0 and 9.0. If you have worked with those and like them, then you should be happy with ES. Except for the price. On our case it will cost us more to use RedHat than Microsoft Windows 2003 server, and if we were not a Linux shop then we would probably be using Windows. I hope you are hearing that Redhat!!!! You need to offer support contracts and sell ES for around $150. I would have little trouble paying $500 a call for support.

Your post said you are on Redhat 9.0 now. Most major software vendors will NEVER support Redhat 8,9, or Fedora. Given that you were on 9, I will assume that you don't run stuff like Oracle,DB2 or PeopleSoft; so I would evaluate Fedora. I would also take a long look at SuSe 9.0(9.1) non enterprise also. That version will run you under $100 and you could still get support. My only concern is what Novell is going to do to them. Having delt with Novell for over 10 years now, this is something to be very worried about!

Gentoo/Slackware

[smkndrkn]

I use gentoo almost exclusively and I have slack 9.1 on a laptop. I can't bring myself to stop using slack since I used it since my first dealings with Linux many years ago but gentoo is just too sexy to deny. I'm installing stage 1 right now on an old PIII 500Mhz with 512M of RAM using 12 servers to do the work with distcc. mmmm emerge + distcc

Re:Gentoo/Slackware

[FunkyMonkey]

Word. Gentoo is damn cool!

Netcraft confirms

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat9 is dead

Why OSS is destined to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates from its very movement.

Re:Why OSS is destined to fail

[Lord Kano]

The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates from its very movement.

There is no such thing as a legal pirate. If what they're doing is legal (and it is BTW), it can't be called piracy.

LK

Don't laugh... Linspire

[christian simpleman]

Short story: HP ze5385 notebook took much time/sweat to get RH9 tweaked for onboard wireless, firewire, video, Ethernet, sound, etc. Have run it for 8 months co-partitioned with WinXP. The Win partition melted, I was going to devote the whole drive to RH9 when someone brought a Lindows Desktop Edition CD to our LUG meeting, almost as a joke. For laughs I popped it in the laptop. Twenty minutes later we were not laughing, I was surfing the net on the auto-detected onboard wireless, listening to streaming audio through the auto-detected sound card, etc. you get the picture. It is Debian under the hood, with serious attention focused on installation, a large database of supported hardware, and many concessions (?) to the MS-entranced user base.

My FC1 experiences

[XryanX]

I've been running FC1 on one of my boxes since I couldn't get RH9 to load from the disks I had. It's been working fine, but up2date freezes on me. It's a pretty easy problem to fix- just run yum update through the shell.

Re:My FC1 experiences

[sloanster]

It's been working fine, but up2date freezes on me.

Bah, I ditched up2date and went with apt - keep all the FC1 boxes up to date with a nightly apt-get cron job.

switched to Mandrake

[jeremyol]

While it was nice to be able run Oracle on my home machine, the desktop for RH9 was just too clunky. I decided to switch to Mandrake after mucking around with a friend newly setup box. MP3s just worked, video clips just worked, the only package that I had to do rootish things for was MultiSync so I could sync between Evolution and my Zaurus.

Progeny support?

[trickybit]

Has anybody got thoughts on Progeny transition support?

I think that it may be the easiest way to avoid (or postpone) an upgrade/reinstallation/distro-switch.

All I want is backported security patches.

Re:Progeny support?

[mwillems]

Yes. We use Progeny support and have found it to be fair, simple and reliable - and very affordable. Hats off to Progeny for jumping in here.

We support many 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 servers and this is the way to keep them simply up to date. No need to switch. We've been using this since 7.x went out of support some months ago. Experience all good (and no we are not in any way related with them!)

Michael

MOD PARENT UP!

[shakamojo]

Slackware is an excellent distro, and for a server OS it's one of the best I've tried. I'd highly recommend making the switch from Red Hat to Slack, I did myself it years ago and haven't looked back!

RedHat Enterprise 3.0

[shane2uunet]

I spent $25 and got the RHEL 3.0. It is the best distro I have tried yet. Yes I have tried Mandrake, Gentoo, and a few other ones. The RHEL is solid, I download the srpms from their site that don't some with the WS edition and compile them. Simple. I'm completely sold on the RHEL. I think the job that the guys at RH are doing is worth $25 of my hard earned money.

Re:RedHat Enterprise 3.0

[sagi]

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/index .html

$25 ?

Re:RedHat Enterprise 3.0

[shane2uunet]

Yeah, student edition of the WS. Get the updates just no support (who needs that).
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries /educati on/indiv/

The RHEL is awesome. I use a customized Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, and Openldap rpms. They all compile great.

Main problem I had with Gentoo was with OpenLDAP. T1he version that gentoo was labeling as stable was 2.0 when version 2.1 had been out for over a year. No problem running Openldap 2.1 on RHEL.

I hear everyone complaining about RH moving to a more community based model and actually trying to make some money on the enterprise side. Redhat has done a lot for linux. It would be nice if some of these blind nerds could see that.

FreeBSD!

[kugeln]

I was loyal to Redhat for almost 5 years (of buying CD's, retail boxes, etc) but I jumped ship back when the announcement first came out about RHL "going away".

I replaced RHL on all but one of my servers with FreeBSD and never looked back. The other one is the firewall, which runs OpenBSD.

-k-

Re:FreeBSD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too, and have started using freebsd (5.2.1) on some workstations too. Just getting used to the portupgrade idea of updating now, and it works very well compared to some of the src.rpm issues I used to get myself into. It may be too late for apt-get for me...

Suse 9.1 Pro ISOs

[Saeger]

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Suse 9.1 Pro, which is due to ship on May 8th, but I'm guessing the 'unethical'-but-still-legal ISOs will be leaked to the net a little sooner than that, and definitely way before the FTP-only version is made available.

I've got a gut feeling that Novell's SuSE is going to eventually unseat RedHat as the #1 solution for server AND desktop, so I'd might as well dump my RH9 desktop for it now.

--

Re:Suse 9.1 Pro ISOs

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing worse then a closed source pirate is a open source pirate.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Homology]

Have you lost the ability to use md5sum -v? Can't use rpm --checksig?

It's not just a question about verifying rmp when downloading security patches from an unofficial mirror. With an official mirror it's likely that the mirror is complete and updated. You got it now?

Haiku

[rock_climbing_guy]

Red Hat end-of-life
I installed SUSE at home
I never looked back.

7.3 and going strong

[KidSock]

I'm the kind of user who just want's to get s**t done (programming) so I use Red Hat 7.3 and WindowMaker. It ain't fancy but it's solid as a rock. So far I haven't had too much trouble keeping 7.3 current. I just get the latest .src.rpm and rpm -bb SPECS/foo.spec && rpm -ivh RPMS/... The other day was the first time I really had a problem trying to install a new proggie (kst). It wanted the latest qt libs. Presumably I could have installed those as I have with the latest glib and gtk but it wasn't all that important at the time. I suspect I can keep going until the .src.rpm's are no longer compatible. And by then "sarge" will be "stable".

Morphix

[poppageek]

While I have used RedHat from 4.2 and ran Fedora Core 1 and liked it I ended up with a Debian install. After playing with a Morphix Live CD and really liking it I decided to double click on the "Install to Hard Drive" icon on the desktop.

No looking back. I love it. Easiest Debian install I've ever done. I really like the Synaptic package manager too. I've used Slackware and various releases of Mandrake but from now on it's Debian and FreeBSD for me. FreeBSD for servers and Debian/Morphix on my Thinkpad.

Getting old, like things that are easier now.

Switching slowly with a bit of pain.

[mchallis]

I admin six servers plus three workstations. All the servers were RedHat 7.3 and the workstations were RedHat 9. I am switching the mail/web servers to FreeBSD 4.9. I am switching the workstations to Debian and FreeBSD. The Samba servers are staying on Redhat 7.3 for now. They are inside firewalls and so are relatively safe. I will probably move them to Debian later. Like many folks here, I "grew up" on Redhat starting with 5.2. I paid for a half a dozen up2date subscriptions for the last couple of years, and bought most releases. I'll be darned if I am going to use a version of Linux with a license that says they can come and audit my sites. That seems totally counter to Free software. Nor do I feel any need to be their beta testers with Fedora. I really don't want to deal with any more "commercial" distros after RedHat and Caldera! Sorry Suse and Mandrake, but I've been burned twice. I am debating whether or really when to sell my RedHat stock.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

RPMS suck. Redhat sucks. I switched to gentoo a few months ago and have never been happier with a Linux distro. I like it better than Debian as well...

Redhat Professional Workstation successor to RH9?

[BeforeCoffee]

Hi, not sure how many people heard about this:

http://www.redhat.com/software/workstation/

But, isn't this essentially RH9? Looks like I have the upgrade I've been looking for for my RH8 server! Wheee!

Not really so bleak...

[virid]

I started using Linux with Red Hat 4.2, and I've been a loyal Red Hat customer for years. Lately, I have begun to dalliance with other Linux distros. Personally I now use Slackware 9.1 and am very satisfied with it (The installation is absurdly easy and the system runs solidly). Nevertheless, I understand Red Hat's decision and even respect it from a business standpoint. Red Hat's backporting 2.6 features into thier Enterprise product will really strengthen Linux in the business market. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies need strong, fast, stable kernels with support for more memory and processors. Red Hat has decided to fill a niche of the market in a way that other companies haven't. I think this is an interesting move and I wish them lots of success. While it is unfortunate that they cannot continue to reach out to both users, I think Fedora will turn out to be great distro in the future.

Switched way back....

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the writing on the wall back when they announced end of life to their products. Don't get me wrong, I understand the need to kill off old products. But when you get down to it, did it need to be 6-12 months? By the time you get all the kinks worked out of one install, you have to do it all over again with the next version. I had always been skittish of RH anyway coming from slackware. I only got 8 months of RH usage before they pulled this so I hadn't gotten committed and it wasn't a big loss for me. Except for when up2date totally trashed a custom mail server setup forcing me to almost start from scratch just because I upgraded for a security patch.

I've switched to Gentoo and I haven't looked back. The simple fact that I keep the system perpetually up to date is a god sent. No more reinstalling until I put it in new equipment. And even then, I can just swap the drives(or move it to new ones), rebuild a kernel and call it good.

I loved a few things RH did, like lokkit, but over all, I think I'm better off with a different distro all together.

Just upgraded last night

[pyrrhonist]

I just did a clean install over RH9 with Fedora last night.

I was not amused to find that the graphical install does not work on my less than cutting edge system.

I was not amused further when I found out during the text install that selecting the option in Disk Druid to extend a partition to fill up the rest of the available space causes the install to crash.

After rebooting and entering in all the options again, I was able to install Fedora with no further issues.

After installation, I ran up2date which downloaded and installed the 120 some odd patches seemingly without a hitch, and was only somewhat hindered by the fact that the cron.daily and cron.weekly scripts decided near the end of the upgrade that it was suddenly time to execute, thus bringing the system to a screaching halt.

Finally, after the crons finished and up2date finally allowed me to click on the "Forward" button, I was able to log out and click "shutdown". It was at this point that the shutdown sequence promptly failed, and I was left staring at the blue Fedora background unable to log in and unable to switch to a virtual console. The three finger salute also failed to do anything productive, and I was forced to use the power button to make guacamole out of my filesystems.

All in all, I am quite a bit less than entirely thrilled with Fedora. YMMV.

Re:Just upgraded last night

[lobotomy]

I was able to install Fedora on an old laptop w/ a 266 MHz Cyrix MediaGX and 64 MB of RAM without a problem. It runs fine (albeit a tad slugish). SuSE 9 Pro doesn't even support anything less than i686 CPUs. I also put Fedora on an old Dell laptop w/ a 233 MHz PII and 128 MB of RAM. No problem. SuSE, on the other hand, would crash during the install and then reboot over and over.

I tried SuSE on a 500 MHz PIII. It installed but crashes when attempting to set up hardware. Guess what? Fedora works. The first machine I actually got a full SuSE install on was a 1.1 GHz IBM ThinkPad. It seemed nice, but I found the a lot of their setup GUIs to be unintiutive and frustrating. The final straw was when their DHCP client only set the IP addr, but not the domain nor the name servers. Kind of defeats the purpose of using DHCP. I installed Fedora and that is what I am using at this moment.

Overall, I found SuSE 9 Pro to be a steaming pile. A cow-orker who likes to install just about every operating system he can get his hands on installed and ran SuSE for about a week before coming to the same conslusion. He is now also using Fedora (actually Fedora Core 2 Test 3).

All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[Anonymous Coward]

For one hardware problem or another, all of my RedHat boxen have died (Thats what I get for extending old hardware beyond it's "usual" lifespan).

Now that I cannot even update them once resurrected, RedHat can eat my shorts.

I was a diehard RedHat fan.

'nuff said

Re:All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[sw155kn1f3]

What are you talking about ?

You can install apt-rpm or yum and update every version of RH starting from 7.2
It's just a matter of typing apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade with repositiories pointing at download.fedoralegacy.org. I use this for about a year already and didn't get a single problem.

They have ALL security patches backported by redhat itself or comunity.

I don't beg you to stay on redhat, use everything you want. I myself have to support a dozen of 7.2, 8.0, 9.0 boxes. Fedora legacy is well suited for it. Period.
Standard redhat's up2date & bare rpm doesn't even go close to what apt-rpm can do on these systems.

Re:All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, OK then. Thanks. Myopia has its problems.

Re:All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[Brymaster]

"I was a diehard RedHat fan." And a total faggot? God I hate this stupid Slashdot reply timer. I go to submit this comment and it says it has been "19 seconds" since I hit reply. That thing is incredibly stupid and annoying.

Re:All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[pyrotic]

I've been very impressed with yum. We used it to upgrade a 7.1 box to 7.3 + Fedora Legacy. You instatall a new redhat-release package for your target version, install yum, check your kernel is recent enough, type yum upgrade, and all the rpms are installed over the network. Reboot, and Bob's your uncle. No messing about with install CDs, and minimal downtime. You can't do that with RHEL yet.

That said, Fedora Legacy is behind on rpm updates. The last one is March 2004. We run pretty locked down systems, so many of the errata aren't critical for us, because we don't have X or any of that stuff. But it is worrying. We'll probably go to Fedora Core sometime next year, or when one of our boxes is cracked, whichever is sooner.

Re:All my RH Boxen belong to god.

[sw155kn1f3]

Very interesting about version upgrades.

Wondering if it's possible to do the same with apt.
If not, I'll be installing yum in no time :). Obviosly it will give many advantages.

We run our internal proxy on...

[ProudClod]

RH 7.2.

We've been using Fedora Legacy for ages now with yum, absolutely flawless. Patchwise it's pretty bulletproof.

6 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I started with redhat 6 years ago. It didn't support all my hardware, like my pci ide controller card so I switched to mandrake 4 years ago. Switched to gentoo 8 months ago.

If I had to pick one reason I stick with gentoo its this. When I browse the net, or freshmeat or whatever and find a tar.gz. I can do ./configure make make install, and it actually works. Somehow it seems like its real linux whereas the rpm distros are somehow customized and modified linuxes. The ability to easily use absolutely any software there is, and having stuff like mplayer actually work, is why I'm done with all that.

I am not a "pirate"

[jmorris42]

> The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates
> from its very movement.

As the alleged "pirate" in question, allow me to disagree. Those who need the SUPPORT offered by RH should purchase RHEL3. Those of us who DON'T need the support shouldn't since RHEL3 is 100% Free Software. Red Hat does not sell software since that would be kinda daft, it being Free Software and all that. What they sell is support and if you are the sort of site deploying an Oracle box you will be writing them a check just like you wrote one to Sun when Oracle was sitting on an UltraSparc.

Basically, WhiteBox should be thought of a product between Fedora and RHEL, offering the longer deployment window and most of the stability of RHEL but with the community support more like that of Fedora.

And I have heard my little project from the swamps of Louisiana mantioned by several RH people, but never disparagingly. So if they don't have a problem with what I (and the cAos, tao, etc. rebuild efforts) am doing why don't you hold off on condemming me for another couple of years, until you learn a little more about how the Open Source/Free Software ecology actually works.

Re:I am not a "pirate"

[hattmoward]

It's great to see you personally responding to this, Jim. I love the way that the installer displays banners giving credit for so many of the projects packaged in WBL. I don't see any pirating going on here -- everyone's abiding by the rules provided by the original author in their distribution license. There's a term used around slashdot, "Don't feed the trolls", but I understand your desire to make a personal comment here. :)

Re:I am not a "pirate"

[Kafka_Canada]

I've never used WBL, but it looks quite interesting (this thread is the first mention of it I've seen) and I'm going to explore it, possibly switch over to it permanently. So I, too, would like to thank you for posting personally here, and as you and the parent to my post state, it looks like the person criticizing this as piracy has quite a few lacunae in his understanding of the open source world.

-

site in sig is temporarily at geek.is-a-geek.org

Re:I am not a "pirate"

[Alan Cox]

I'll second that here too. Red Hat Enteprise Linux is a package not just a pile of bits. Its a support and service arrangement, qualification, support and all the stuff that goes with it.

I don't think anyone has any problems with white box. If you want conservative and you don't want any support or guarantees then it may well fit better than Fedora.

I think for the average hacker however RHEL3 and White Box are not going to appeal that much, because they are older software - that people are sure works or know the limits of - and not the latest and greatest. No SVG themed gnome 2.6, no current KDE, no 2.6 kernel ...

Re:I am not a "pirate"

[Lord Kano]

I'm glad you took the time to respond to this. I was not aware of your project until today. I may give it a shot. I had moved away from Red Hat in favor of Mandrake, but I'll look into your project.

LK

Re:I am not a "pirate"

[Anonymous Coward]

Definately this is NOT a example of piracy.

When you liscence a RHES version from Redhat you are liscencing a 1 year support contract and some of the closed source software.

For example a server edition costs 799 dollars, with that you get official online help, and support phone calls during business hours. With garrenteed turn around times.

Compare that to Windows, their server edition costs around 700 dollars and the first real support call is free, however after that the costs of support go dramaticly up.

Windows is only cheaper if you don't use the support, and Fedora is free if you don't want support in the first place. Redhat's sceme is a win-win situation for clients and themselves.

So then if you use whitebox, you loose out on the rapid developement and community supported Fedora, and you lose the ability to use Redhat support. Either way you lose something, but Whitebox is nice for people who what to use RHES but are not sure about it and can't or don't want to pay for it beforehand.

So why would Redhat be upset? I am sure that it doesn't give them warm fuzzies, but then again it works out in their favor in the long run, anyways.

Stuff like this is what free software is all about.

So this is not piracy to take GPL'd code from Redhat's server, strip the trademarks away, and make your own distro, because you are not trying to trick Redhat into providing free support for you.

I am running into this problem myself.

[johnnnyboy]

I stuck with Redhat 9 for all my servers for now.

At home I use Gentoo and E-smith SME server .

I tried FC1 for a while and I find it very buggy. For the very first time, I didn't trust it enough to put it in production! It is basically the old redhat but they don't test it as much.

I prefer to have a distro that works instead of always trying to find runarounds due to bugs.

I nolonger need tools to edit config files. I just need stable packages, updates and security patches that works.

Before I give up, I'm going to give Fedora Core 2 another look. Debian is looking might good to me right now.

FreeBSD is one giant leap for mankind.

[erik_norgaard]

I switched everything to FreeBSD one year ago when they made the first anouncements about facing out support for the RedHat Linux series.

It was the best thing I have ever done! It was the most painless migration I have ever done, and things just work! No more searching around trying to get all the dependencies to meet.

There is nothing that can get me back on linux again.

PS: Yes, I have tried Debian, everything is obsolete, and gentoo just hasn't matured. Further gentoo tries to do too much in one swift move failing to recognize how brilliant ports really is...

Re:FreeBSD is one giant leap for mankind.

[cpghost]

Same here. I've migrated over 700 machines for one of my clients from RHL9 to FreeBSD. It was dead easy, because they used standard apps that had nothing Linux/RH specific.

Actually, using FreeBSD was the best IT decision they've ever made. Thanks CVSUP, maintenance is now a dream, and the community support in mailing lists is outstanding!

Fedora from the beginning

[X-Nc]

I upgraded from RH 9 to RH 10... Uh, I mean Fedora, when FC1 was released (can't wait for FC2). For all my desktop/workstation needs it fits the bill quite nicely. For my server(s) I have gone to White Box Linux but I could have just as well used Tao Linux or CentOS-3. Moving to SUSE would have been a viable option as well but I didn't need to go that far.

I had a lot RedHat in my Office

[gullevek]

But when RedHat decided to switch to Entprise only I searched for alternatives, not only to get away from this policy but finally to get out of the RPM dependency hell.
So I tried again Slackware, and Debian (Although I always disliked it) and I stick now with Debian. The better I know it the more I like it And there are only 2 RedHat Boxes left, one that will be replaced in 2 months and the other is so not important I really don't care :)

Moving away from RedHat

[Anonymous Coward]

My company is moving away from redhat and its extortion style licensing scheme. We were happy with redhat 7.2 but are not going to pay redhat a licensing fee for each of our 60+ linux servers for no real benefit. If I wanted to pay for support it would be cheaper to go the Microsoft!

Instead of moving to fedora with is more or less unmanaged release system we are going to one of the RHEL clones, Trustix.

There's also CentOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I've upgraded most of my public facing 7.3 and 8.0 boxes to Centos 3.1 (which is effectively RHEL 3). It works great!!

Check it out at: CentOS

You have no clue

[Anonymous Coward]

This just shows you have no clue what you're talking about.

Software companies have faced the problem of rampent copyright violations from the very beginning. Microsoft figured it out though. You make money 1) from bundling software with hardware, and 2) providing support.

IBM and RedHat know this too. Red Hat knows that it makes money from their good reputation in providing The Linux distribution. Knockoffs are a dime a dozen.

This fork of RedHat Enterprise shows why Linux will succeed. Even when a company's business interests leave you out to dry, you can still get support for your existing, legacy systems. WhiteBox is helping RedHat out of a support cost and ensuring that RH9 customers aren't hurt by their business move.

Re:You have no clue

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft makes almost no money on support and customization.

Of course there's always the IBM model:
1) Give them Linux for free
2) Charge for support
3) Charge for maintenance
4) Charge for customization
5) Charge for CPU Time ("On Demand!!!")

FYI: CentOS is better

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used both WhiteBox Linux and CentOs, and I've gota a say CentOs did a much better jobs of repackaging the RH 3AS rpms.

CentOs is also suggested to those taking the RHCE as the best alternative to buying the "real deal" from redhat. (RHCE Study guide 4th Ed)

Check it out http://www.centos.org/

Also note that ones you have CentoOS you can even straight build RH's Cluster Server SRPMS with no hassle at all.

Life goes on!

[Robotron2084]

This is one of those times where I really love linux's libre. I wasn't really taken with Redhat on the desktop, but it works great on the server. Upgrading using a different distro is very straight-forward, and I'm much happier now with Mandrake.

I've been using RH 7.3 and 8 forever, and just last week upgraded to Mandrake 10 for my desktops, and RHEL2.1 for my server. I was using 7.3 for a long time, was very happy with it, and I would've just gone ahead and kept using it if my hard drive didn't start giving errors a couple days ago.

Redhat's server line is really solid, well supported, and migration from 7.3 took about an hour tops(with cp-ing everything!). I've never used Fedora, because I'm really happy, ecstatic really, with Mandrake on the desktop. All the weird hardware that I had to compile and figure out how it works, and write wiki entries about just worked flawlessly in Mandrake 10.

The only thing I miss from my RH8 with KDE3.2 is the keyboard shortcuts. Why was that removed from the Mandrake KDE build?

Yummy

[james_in_denver]

Installed yum did a "yum upgrade", and voila Fedora. I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel a while back and xosview was broken for a few months. Everything else works just fine.

BTW I really don't feel like anybody is tied into any particular "flavour" of linux. If you need to keep an older LIBC around, just install it somewhere else, and set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to it. Pretty much the only differences I see are in the config tools, but Vim and a command prompt look pretty much the same to me regardless of distro.

PS:and if I'm wrong, I am sure someone will let me know! ;)

Only dead fish go with the flow....

CentOS = RHEL 3

[Anonymous Coward]

I've upgraded most of my public facing 7.3 and 8.0 boxes to Centos 3.1 (which is effectively RHEL 3). It works great!!

Check it out at: CentOS

Bye bye, RedHat

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a sad day for RedHat at the company I work for. We have around 20 RedHat boxes that support critical operations, but a relatively small budget. Due to RedHat's out-of-sight pricing and strange licensing, we cannot afford to migrate to the enterprise offerings (hundreds of dollars PER YEAR, PER BOX? Damn!) Fedora could be appealing, but seems to move too fast for our situation.

So what's a midsize company with a limited IT budget to do? Drop RedHat. I hate to do it, as we've had a great run with their products, but they apparently aren't interested in our type of business anymore. We will now have to find someone else that we can pay a reasonable amount of money for limited support (i.e. security patches).

Re:Mirror , just in case

[ComputerSlicer23]

You had me right up until that word "likely"... I got confused somewhere around there.

If your serious about security, you'll end up hand checking the RPMS that are on the list of the errata anyways. I've seen high quality mirrors out of date for days. I know kernel.org was out of date for at least a week from the RedHat security updates. I've seen several whitebox-linux mirrors out of sync for a couple of days. I've seen the redhat.com FTP site have the errata packages out at least a day before the errata messages. I actually confirmed it was an errata package with the maintainer before the errata message was posted to redhat.com's site (it was OpenSSH, and I hadn't heard publicly about the exploit).

If it really bothers you, rsync from any unofficial mirror, followed by an official mirror, and/or the primary site. I've done that on more then one occasion to take load off the primary site. I'd get the bulk of the updates/changes from the mirror site. If the mirror site is broken (which I've seen happen on several occasions) you get working packages via the primary site. Other then that, you never use the primary site. Generally, I've found that people who say they have working mirrors, in fact, have good working mirrors that are well maintained. People who post that they have mirrors, generally are pretty serious about mirroring for themselves.

Kirby

Mad about Oracle

[BrianMarshall]

I have been using Redhat 9 and I liked it. Oracle supported it and I can install Oracle 9i (without the i parts) just fine.

Now, near as I can tell, Oracle is not supported on any home or workstation version of Linux; it is only supported on server editions. Supposedly, you can get Oracle to run on FC and a variety of other distros, but it requires files that are only available if you already get support from Oracle. Probably there are ways around this, but... I would rather a setup that is supposed to work rather than a long, involved procedure to get it to work.

As a developer that wants to use Oracle from time to time on my personal machine, this is not good.

So... Red Hat 9 for now, probably home-SUSE plus a server version of SUSE on a separate box if I want to get into Oracle in a serious way.

Get Slack

[sybarite]

I switched from Red hat to Slackware 9.1. I've been very pleased with the performance, stability and elegance of this distribution.

switch what

[billco]

I run linix for years going back to slackware in 94. I've RedHat back to 4 to 9, (5.2 was the best). Since RedHat now only seems to see $$$ and dropped RH-9, and see's us to beta-pigs for Fedora 1, and 2 (which s#cks), I've feel like I've gone back to the roots of linux in I currently run debian on me servers, and GenToo for the Eye-Candy Box. Both remain me of the way linux was COMPILE it all for this box, and keep it up to date. But I'm old and still miss my 8080 based H8 with its PAM & offset-octal led's

Fedora Core Review

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using FC 1 since it came out. I've followed Red Hat since pre 6.0. Anyways FC1 had some bugs, but by the final release it was a decent distro. The problem lies in FC2TR3. It doesn't work on my PIII box. I can install it on my PIV box, but I use that box for winBlows gaming. I've tried to get help from fedora.org as well as other forums and no one seems to have any idea what the problem is.

In short use FC1 and only use FC2 if you are dying to see gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6.

SuSE - why I chose it and still use it

[Tandoori Haggis]

I'm sorry to see what has been happening with RH and the experiences of some of its users. I've not tried a "proper" RH distro, however its a pity to see folk dropping Linux and going to XP on account of their experience with RH.

Perhaps I can ask them to consider SuSE Linux?

I tried Installing Linux in the late 90's and encountered problems from the beginning.

Freebie CD's based on an old "RH compatible" kernel failed - no suprise there. "Definite Linux" based on a later "RH compatable" kernel didn't wan't to compile on my machines. (Definite vanished some time back).

These were in no way valid tests of the official RH release. However, being European I decided to go for a European distro, which I figured was in the business for the long term. SuSE seemed keen to support the individual home user as well as the corporate users.

It was the purchase of SuSE 7.3 Pro that got me up and running on Linux at home. By the time 8.2 Pro arrived, YAST was making software installation much easier, especially from downloaded rpm's.

I am very happy with SuSE Linux which has after all helped to distill my interest in Linux. I have to use XP at work and always look forward to booting up my Linux box at home.

There will always be detractors of various Linux distro's. I think SuSE have been underated in the past. They continue to support the individual and the corporate user, providing a pretty good experience out of the box, while also giving the newbie Linux user confidence to take small steps towards learning by doing.

While there is plenty of scope for learning with SuSE Linux, I'm still planning to learn by trying other distro's when I can make the time.

Three cheers for SuSE!

so did they

[Crayon Kid]

My brother's company did pretty much the same thing. Actually, I'd like to elaborate, since the person who asked (and others) may want some reasons to go with the move, and I got all the details.

So first here's the WHO: they are a small web development company. They have several development servers and a couple of deployment servers. They were running Red Hat, all the same version (the kernel configuration and the actual packages installed differred from the production to the work machines). They were using pretty much everything from RPM's, except for some central webdev things (Apache, PHP, Postgres) which they compiled from source because they needed special settings for them. They host they own servers and bandwidth is not a problem.

Now the HOW: They started with one of the development machines, by making a new root partition in the unused space. They chrooted in it and unpacked the base stable Debian tarball, then set up the apt sources to some nearby mirrors and fired up an upgrade to testing (it was a chroot, so networking was already up) as well as apt-get'ting whatever packages were needed to replicate the original environment.

Next they recompiled the kernel and those special apps I mentioned before, and copied over the work resources (projects and stuff). After a Grub setup and a reboot, it worked fine (just a few details to iron out). The whole thing took about an hour and a half (skilled guy doing it, I guess).

Next came about a week of testing. When everything turned out fine, they made a backup of the entire testing machine and then moved the Debian partition to the start of the disk and reorganized it with whatever other partitions were needed (/var, /tmp, swap).

Made an image of the disk, ghosted it to the other machines, restored work environments from backup, and they were done. Actually, the production machines were a bit tricky, but only because they had to make each of them serve everything while the other one was being changed. Plus they had to cross-compile the kernel and the webdev packages for them on the work machines, but they did that all the time already.

And now here's the WHY: why Debian? Because they were looking for: the lowest cost (cheap bastards); no support needed (they relied on their own syadmin -- yeah, one guy); painless package updates, from a variety of nearby mirrors; a distro similar enough to Red Hat so as not to need too much adjusting for the people; another end of life as far away into the future as possible (didn't fancy doing this again in 12 months). They felt that Debian and Slackware would fit the bill, because they were the oldest and most reliable Linux distro's around. (Eventually Slack got booted--you can guess why.)

Finally, a brief overview of why they rejected other choices: Red Hat = too pricey, life-time too short, plus it would imply a reinstall anyway; Gentoo = they felt that compilation and servers don't go very well together, plus Gentoo is too young; SuSE = it came very close, but the beancounters pushed for as little spending as possible; Mandrake = they felt none too sure that it won't dissapear suddenly someday, given it's history of financial problems; any BSD = too much a step from Red Hat. (Fedora wasn't yet a serious option at the time.)

Some of you are probably gonna say they're cheap bastards who wouldn't give back to open-source by at least investing in some support. What can I say, except "small company, gotta cut the expenses to stay ahead these days". The whole switch took a little over one week and cost them just a bonus for the sysadmin.

Good news! You're wrong!

[wandazulu]

You are in luck...I was able to get 10g running on a stock Suse 9 installation...all I downloaded was the boot.iso and did the installation via ftp from a mirror.

The instructions on getting Oracle running on Linux are on the OTN site (something along the lines of "Installing on Linux"...sorry, don't have the time right now to find the exact URL). Just follow the instructions and you're set, presuming that the box has at least 512meg of ram (it affects kernel parameters which Oracle wants set).

The only real trick is when you actually get to the Java part of the setup...there is a flag you have to pass to the installer to ignore the supported version check. If you pass -? to the installer program it'll be there...just pass that and it will install.

I've had 10g up and running for a few weeks now and have had no problems...it's not a rocket (my machine only has 512meg of ram), but certainly usable for development and has even had a couple of other users testing it.

Good luck...it works. I'm looking forward to getting my copy of 9.1 so I can see if the speed increases they report in the kernel will have any effect on Oracle.

Wanda

Re:Good news! You're wrong!

[Undertaker43017]

Another way to install 10G on a version of RH or FC, other than server, simply change the /etc/redhat-release to read:

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 1)"

The Oracle installer won't know the difference.

10G does run very nicely, I have had it installed for about three weeks and haven't seen one problem.

Re:Raw Fedora = switching to RH9

[mce]

Indeed. Whereas at home I run full-custom stuff, at work we're still at RH 7.2 and 7.3 because RH7 is what most commercial Linux software was tested/certified on back in its day. But RH7 does suffer from some bad choices as well (g++ 2.96 comes to mind), so we're about to ditch it for something new. After looking around at what is available and supported by commercial Linux softare, looking at what the various distributions cost (sorry RedHat, but AS & Co are too expensive for us, especially considering that we don't need most of your support), and thinking long and hard about the impact of switching to a non-RH based distribution, we ended up choosing RH9, knowing full well that support would end at about the time we'd be ready for roll-out. The advantage? We get to soldier on one or two more years with a stable-as-rock basis at a minimal switching effort and no extra cost whatsoever. And we get to observe the market impact of RH's new strategy for some time before comitting resources to switching to an alternative distribution that might well be dead one or two years from now.

Still going to use it

[Seven001]

I run RH9 on a box I mostly use for local services (web server,seti, ect.) and I have no intentions of moving to Fedora. If at some time I decide to move away from RH9, I will probably go to another distro altogether. Debian or Slackware I suppose.

Fedora Core and legacy

[danny]

Most of my machines (and all my desktops) are running Fedora Core. It's actually more stable and reliable than any Redhat distribution I've used.

One of my servers is still running RH 7.3, using the Fedora Legacy support. And the main faculty servers here are moving to RH Enterprise Linux.

The arguments that RH has shafted people are way off target. There are lots of options for people running RH 9, including keeping on doing so.

Danny.

Fedora and RH9

[snookerdoodle]

Since ya axed:

Currently Fedora Core2 Test2 on my laptop, but may switch to turbolinux since I actually use it. ;-)

Currently RH9 on desktop and no plans to switch. If I REALLY like turbolinux, well...

Mark

My experience

[(H)elix1]

Most things did not matter... but...

I've got a zSeries emulator which runs on a t30 thinkpad and RH8. This way I can develop for the 31 or 64-bit Linux distributions in zOS - think VMWare. I could 'upgrade' a couple months back to a t40 thinkpad and RH9 - or run it on SCO (I kid you not) Unix on a xSeries workstation. Yup, thanks for the options.

I tried updating with Fedora, and it broke things hard. I would do any of the 'enterprise' Linux distros in a heartbeat... but no... Their dongle and 'special sauce' prevent me from trying any of the other distros on my own - they have to do it at the factory and don't support anything else yet. The RH 8 support contract expiring like it did was special too.

What did I do? I patched by hand for a while. Today, I pulled the thing off the network and treat it like NT 4. I'm hoping these ding-dongs figure out the support structure without me buying a third party support contract for someone who will do the patch management (that is safe for the emulator). I'm not happy (or referencable) right now...

On a professional level work now done on SuSE, then tested with RH somewhere later down the line by someone else... On a personal level, it made me hunker down and learn Gentoo. No more rpm's for a specific distribution on the boxes I keep out at my ISP, and I'm pretty close to the cutting edge with latest-greatest hardware support. Beta distro's like Fedora are not needed anymore. While the SuSE kit is nice (crossover plugin rocks), I'll be damned if I get lulled into sticking with a distro because of updates. Don't know about the new RH, have not looked back. Subscription security patches are not worth hundreds of dollars per year, per machine.

Re:My experience

[alecto]

Dongle?! Who would copy a mainframe emulator?

Server's staying on 9

[kulpinator]

I have a 4-way running RHL9 at work and since I pretty much totally de-personalize the thing after a month (install apt-rpm, custom kernel, remove redhat config tools, write own init.d scripts), it really doesn't make a difference what "version" of a distro I use. After all, I'm constantly updating it (this is obviously a totally alpha-level server), and the "version 9" really meant nothing to me to begin with. Except for the requirement of slight tinkering with Oracle 10g to install on it (only supports RHEL and UnitedLinux).

Incidentally, Oracle 10g's jvm does not play well with 2.6.0 and a preemptive kernel (on a server? what was I thinking?). There went my 103 days of uptime...

So I'm sticking to what I've got. Because it's Linux, it just works!

Don't look only for Fedora support

[r_cerq]

From a binary/package-version perspective, FC1 is fully compatible with RHEL3 (including in the NPTL issues), so for most major apps you should actually look for RHEL support instead of Fedora.
I did this with a few apps (most notably Oracle 9i) with good results (packages and instructions for RHEL3, in my experience, always work for FC1)

Re:Don't look only for Fedora support

[goonerw]

I tried that but I kept getting errors with Oracle 9i's JVM trying to run and failing with libc errors when loading the Universal Installer.

Re:Don't look only for Fedora support

[guru zim]

I was going through this trying to get 10g installed on FC1, but I'm stuck with a JRE error, even though I'm pretty sure that it's installed.

http://staff.in2.hr/denis/oracle/10g1install_fed ora1_en.html
Anyway, it looks like it was working, but I probably screwed something up.

Swithed to Xandros after almost 9 years with RH

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Red Hat since it was the basis for the Caldera Previews (based on Mother's Day edition I believe). Switching was a semi-emotional event for me.

I don't have the time I did in school and got accustomed to Red Hat 9 and up2date. Anyway, all the cool kids were using debian and Xandros seemed like an easy way to try it. The end of life was enough of a push. So far it seems like a nice compromise. Slick desktop with debian underneath.

Xandros is very slick. It's maybe a little too aimed at the simplified desktop for me, but it's perfect for my wife. I've had to pull in some stuff from debian unsupported to get what I need, but that was mostly libraries for various python modules I use.

If you just want something that works and don't mind $39, Xandros is a pretty good option.

This Is a Great Day

[fire-eyes]

This is a great day.

I'm the linux admin. I used to be a slackware whore, then I discovered gentoo. I reluctantly was forced to install Redhat on our webserver. Went from version 7.2, then to 7.3, then 8.0, then 9 (nice version numbering, guys...).

Then we added two more servers, and I made them both Gentoo. Things have changed, and all of our servers will be running gentoo.

This is a great day because I grew to really dislike administrating redhat systems. Two things: 1) RPM 2) Backports instead of actually upgrading software

Now with gentoo I can actually be up to date. This EOL date marks the date where I can punt the last RH box off of our network. With three gentoo servers running distcc and ccache, compiling doesn't take long at all. The remarkable flexability of Gentoo saves me time, which saves the company money.

So good riddance.

RH on desktop, maybe. Server room, definitely not. Fedora is a joke, as are all distros based on binary packaging systems.

Arg.

[ErikZ]

I'm going to have to downgrade to RH 9 from Fedora simply because my PROMISE S150 SX4 RAID card has very specific drivers for Suse and RH.

Talked to their support. "They plan on supporting Fedora." is all the info they'll give.

Hey Promise, how hard would of it been to add a module? Or did suse and rh pay you guys to write these weak drivers?

apt/yum and rpms

[anakog]

Like many others, I am running RH9 and am too faced with the question of whether to update to Fedora Core (most likely 2, when it comes out) or ditch Red Hat entirely and go to some other distro.

One thing I don't quite understand and worries me is that a lot of people keep talking about installing stuff with apt-get or yum, instead of up2date. Even the Fedora Legacy Project home page talks only about these.

I don't quite understand the urge to move to apt-get and yum --- perhaps they are better. But what really worries me is the package formats. I am fairly anal about what I put on my machine and would be extremely pissed if I install, say, FC2, use a random combination of apt-get, yum and what not to install stuff, and then 2 months later my RPM database gets incomplete or inconsistent because of that.

So my question to those in the know: Can you force these package managers to only use RPMs and is there any guarantee at all that using that many package managers won't eventually messup your package database. Can anyone with experience shed some light here?

Re:apt/yum and rpms

[jdaily]

Simple answer: yum and APT (for RPM systems) install only RPMs and manage the local RPM database properly, just like up2date or the RPM command-line utilities.

There is no special package format for yum and APT.

Re:apt/yum and rpms

[cowbutt]

yum and apt are not replacements for rpm, they're just frontends for rpm that handle automagic dependency resolution.

Take it from me; as long as you stick with sensibly built packages from trustworthy repositories (e.g. RH, Freshrpms), your RPM database will stay sane.

--

Re:apt/yum and rpms

[im a fucking coward]

yum and apt both use rpm repositories by default, so there's no need to force them to only use RPMs.

up2date doesn't use the RHN on Fedora anyway, so what you do is change the RPM repositories in up2date config (/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources) to match those in yum (/etc/yum.conf). Then the crazy little update icon will turn red and alert you to available updates, and obviously they will be in synch with each other. The sources file has a pretty good explanation of this, so crack it open and RTFM. Check Fedora News for tips and FAQs on yum and up2date. (You will want to find the closest, fastest RPM repository to use for your configs.)

apt-get has a different architecture, so I don't know if it can readily use the same package repositories that up2date and yum use. I have used it early in the FC 1 release, and never had a problem with the RPM database.

Wake me up when...

[arfonrg]

...the next version of Slackware is out. (YAWN)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Well, yeah

[r_cerq]

Yeah, RedHat (Enterprise). Or Fedora.
Except now you can edit /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and add as many up2date, apt, AND yum sources as you wish. Found a new great apt repository? Fine, put it in there and keep using up2date.
Or switch to apt. Or run "yum update". Or whatever...
I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to think they must choose something else after RH dropped the "consumer market". I can understand going from RH to a commercial distro like SuSE due to fear or disconfort in using a "community-supported" distro like Fedora.
But going from RH to Slackware or Gentoo because RH doesn't support the distro anymore? Are you people nuts?

Re:Well, yeah

[deanj]

I'm just switching because I don't like the fact that RH dropped the current version I'm using, and now seems like a reasonable time to switch. I don't need "Enterprise" anything at home.

Shame they dropped it though... I paid for the up2date stuff so I wouldn't have to wait until their servers load average went down. I would have kept paying too, if they kept the consumer version.

Anyway, thanks for the info on up2date.

Re:Well, yeah

[r_cerq]

A possible (depending on what people want) advantage in the new up2date is that you don't depend on RHN anymore, and if you don't depend on RHN you don't have to put up with overloaded servers: you can choose a nice quiet Fedora mirror near you and update from there.
Or, if you want more software, add different repositories (besides your main source for updates. As I stated earlier, you can use multiple repositories) like a mirror for http://fedora.us/ or http://rpm.livna.org/

Have fun with the extra work

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just stick with my Microsoft O/S. The only Kernel I need to care about is the one with the secret chicken recipe.

not much difference

[56ksucks]

I installed Fedora Core 1. I really haven't found much of a difference yet.

For me, Debian was worth switching to broadband

[exitstrategy]

I have 2 RedHat 9 boxes at home: mine + my girlfriend's and in preparation for today I bought broadband to replace my dialup account so I can do a net install of Debian without leaving the phone connected for days. I have used slackware, RedHat (4.2?onwards), SUSE, Mandrake and others and, whilst the other distributions usually look nicer on initial install, Debian has always been the least hassle to maintain. I was tempted away from Debian at home by the slick antialiasing in RedHat 9 but now of course I wish I had just been patient and waited for Debian to catch up. I've been using Debian as my desktop at work for many years and I think my personal productivity has been significantly enhanced by Debian as it just works all the time. In fact, having thought about my Debian experience over the last 10 years whilst writing this note, I think I'll make a donation to the Debian project right now.

Coincidence?

[rleibman]

Just this week my hard drive crashed and I had to install from scratch. Moved from RH9 to Fedora. Was there something in RH9 that made my hard drive crash?

fedora legacy

[swmike]

I have been at RH7.3 since it came out and it works very well for me. I used to pay the $60 for redhat up2date support and thought that worked very well. I wish Redhat would have continued supporting it.

I was about to upgrade to Fedora Core 1 when I found out about the fedora legacy project which I think is a very good initiative.

The community driven initiative seems to be lacking support though, for instance the openssl updates have been in "testing" for 4-5 weeks now and still hasnt made it into the released-pool of updates. Being free I know I cannot demand anything, but I can observe that it doesnt seem to be working as well as I thought.

I'll probably go to Fedora Core 2 when it's released, it'd be nice to get the 2.6 kernel.

RH9 is no longer viable

[harlows_monkeys]

I was going to stick with it until Fedora was ready, but it doesn't seem feasible. I've been trying for two weeks to get through with up2date for a kernel update--servers too busy.

While writing this, I finally got through, and it is downloading at 10 KB/sec. It's going to take a long long time for this update.

Redhat really botched this. They should have pushed off EOL until Fedora is out of testing, and kept Redhat Network available until then. Back before all this, when I had a paid RHN subscription, updates were always available promptly, and downloaded very fast.

Re:RH9 is no longer viable

[logical1010]

FC1 was released to public Nov 5th 2003. FC2 will be relesed if all goes well May 17th 2004.

Switched a while ago

[logical1010]

I switched from RH9 to FC1 around xmas and have had no real probs. I use an Nvidia card so I knew how to deal with their propietary kernel module. And now I get Apt-get or Yum for updates, so in the end I'm even happier.

The fedora mail lists (esp. fedora-devel) are always an interesting read. Check em out.

We switched to Debian Stable

[mslinux]

It can update automatically, it's stable and well supported by a great community of users and developers.

And, you'll never end up with a knife in your back while some ivory tower asshole talks about how edu and SOHO customers are useless to the company's bottom line.

Sorry to sound so bitter... but RH still doesn't understand the fullness of what they've done to themselves. They *had* mindshare, they *had* the grassroot movement, they *had* Linux and the only real channel into Joe User's home (that's why MS is now giving Sun and IBM tough competition in the small server market).

Now, RH has a few hundred CIOs in corporate America and they *think* what they did was smart. 5 - 10 years and they'll be a has-been and it will be directly related to they way they fucked-up RHL.

We moved to Gentoo

[CEPi]

I work for an ISP, and except a few Application Servers that run Billing & CRM stuff which were moved to RH ES 3.o because of Oracle support, we moved all servers to Gentoo since the day RH announced it will kill RH as we know. Fedora just seems a too-new thing to be trusted with critical stuff, while Gentoo has not made a single problem - yet. -CEPi.

No Fedora, I left for Knoppix-hd

[winkydink]

Fedora Core 1 would not install on my dual p3-600 machine (which has been running RH since 6.2), no matter how many faqs and mailing lists I consulted for advice. I finally gave up and went to Knoppix. A couple hours of work after the install to get all my little tweaks working and I was home free... no regrets at all.

Still on RH 7! aka Upgrade? WTF4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep my ol 266 Thinkpad is still using RH7. THe major reason(s) NOT to upgrade?

Enlightenment (the still-ninja 16.4 version IIRC) runs, and
mplayer runs as well.

Fedora/RH's idea of multimedia is mplayerless, so to me it's a no-brainer.

Re:Still on RH 7! aka Upgrade? WTF4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we need some distros with fucking balls. Whine whine. No, no mplayer no codecs. Law blah blah. What happened to countries where copyright laws and other bullshit laws don't exist. The internet is supposed to be where laws are not.

RH 8.0

[gatkinso]

is doing everything I need it too.

Altho I run XP and RH9 at work.

Switched to Gentoo...

[Ominous Armed Cow]

Much faster, not as polished, but clean and reliable.

Been migrating several machines over the last few months. Moving the last machine over this weekend.

Goodbye RH. It was fun until your MBA types decided to prove that "non-vendor lockin" has practical limitations, and did so at the expense of those who carried your message into server and boardrooms everywhere.

Whats the difference

[beforewisdom]

I haven't used Red Hat in a long time.

What would Fedora lack that Red Hat would have ?

Steve

Slackware

[jonnystiph]

Good time to try slackware

My two cents

[kuriharu]

I will use RH9 and not even look at Fedora for a while. Maybe I'll go back to Debian

I've switched. What a let down to their customers.

[Lioner]

I've switched to Mandrake. I paid Redhat nearly $300 of "support" for my two Redhat installations. One of my installations was in place for 6 years (with a one time uptime record of 659 days). I used the Redhat installation because of the update support they provided. They have really let their customers down. This is the kind of thing that happens when companies start trying to please their stock holders before their customers. I think this is a very bad corporate move that will cost them leadership in the Linux market.

I moved to gentoo...

[ThinkTiM]

and was suprised at how good this non-commercial distribution is. I've used debian for servers for a while but not really played with the desktop (didn't even install the desktop). But Gentoo is easily more functional than RH9 and FC1 (which I tested on vmware for a while. Now I understand why people complain that Red Hat "breaks" KDE.

moving to gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm moving to gentoo. while redhat was plotting their changes, i was in class getting certified for rh9. the redhat instructor never mentioned a word of it. they screwed themselves, me & many, many others over with this move. anyway...gentoo is a superior distro, in my feeble opinion. advice to all...move to gentoo and leave redhat out to dry.

Updating to FC and RHEL, legacy isn't serious

[menscher]

My servers are gradually migrating to RHEL, most desktops are going to FC1 (FC2 seems a little iffy at present, so I'm testing it on a single box).

Initially I'd hoped to take advantage of the Fedora Legacy project, but they just don't seem serious. For example, one of their primary modes of distribution is via yum. They released packages for 7.2 and 7.3, but never for 8.0. I opened this bugzilla report on it nearly two months ago. They're just ignoring it. Hardly the response you want to see from someone you're trusting for security patches.... Maybe someone will mod this up enough that they'll take note.

As a side note, I'm keeping White Box Linux in the back of my mind as an option if FC2 flops. The legal issues are still a little disturbing, though.

Suse is my new daddy

[Thing I am]

I've switched my personal computing needs to Suse Professional and plan on moving my clients over, also. I have high hopes for Novell/Suse and am willing to spend the money for their product.

Perfect time to switch distros

[hakr89]

I for one am switching my website to Mandrake 10

did anyone notice?

[kjamez]

did anyone running RH9 notice that you recieve four, possibly five RHN secutiry updates via email today and yesterday, basically saying "we've been holding on to these until the last day, becuase we want you to upgrade to [your favorite rh release here] soon!" ... for the first few hours, i was denied the basic up2date nonsense becuase of sever loads. it's a conspriacy, like everything else.

Re:what about Blue

[slickwillie]

I'm waiting to see what IBM will do with Blue Linux. In the meantime I might go back to Mandrake. I keep getting into upgrade Hell. Mandrake 9.something worked fine until I got a new video card, which it didn't support. So I got the latest Mandrake, 9.somethingelse, which kept dying during installation. So I tried Slack, but it had problems. So I downloaded RH9 which DID work, but not on my other machine, but Mandrake did, so now I have two distros.

You are not a "pirate" - I like you!

[anomaly]

I'm sitting here installing whitebox linux on my RHL 9 box at home as I type.

Thanks for your hard work.

My company has settled on RHEL for our enterprise build of Linux, but I haven't been able to get the funding I need from my department to procure a test server and licenses for RHEL3.

This will come in time, but I need to do engineering work TODAY for RHEL boxes that will be production this month.

I have been able to leverage WBL to build a test lab and validate the processes that will be used on the production boxes with a pretty high degree of confidence that what works in the lab will run fine in production.

Without WBL, I'd have spent weeks preparing justifications for hardware purchases and software purchases, and that would have delayed this project significantly.

Since I had access to a great distro that is highly compatible with RHEL, I've made great progress. I really appreciate your labors!

I've only run into a couple of problems applying RHEL errata to the WBL box - related to RPM issues more than anything else.

Other than that, I've loved working with this product, and just passed off a set of media to another engineer as the team was building the VMWare Linux image for many many other tests.

Regards,
Anomaly

Debian Over 2 Years Ago

[bytor4232]

I saw the writing on the wall over two years ago when Red Hat started EOLing their distros. I switched to Debian and interestingly enough, I'm still running off the same install. I've been apt-get dist-upgrade-ing from one version to the next without any problems

Fedora is great

[Wellmont]

Fedora 1 and 2test have worked great for me, personally i've had problems in the past because the linux distro's only support a small ammount of new hardware...but since Fedora is "more" open source it's more akin to fixing problems when the arise formally instead of doing it through releases. But Technically speaking I can't tell if there is a real difference between Red Hat (6, 7, 8....etc) and the Fedora project, besides the obvious upgrades. It's deffinately more stable, and compact, more powerful...but it doesn't have the same support and abilities that it had under official Red Hat support eh?
Hopefully all the distro's from Gentoo to SuSE will get it together and realize it's better to have an offical open source community, much like Red Hat has done. Even if you don't comprimise security you can at least provide a place for support and trouble shooting on a community level, and that is the BEST thing i've noticed about Fedora.

Switched to Debian

[swbrown]

I switched all my RedHat boxes to Debian Woody a few months ago. Fedora wasn't an option as I require a stable distribution. It was initially painful as I had to relearn all the details (I'm a rather hard-core Linux user and programmer), and the install of Woody was a nightmare each time, but it's a much better system than any distribution I've used before, and that Debian basically packages the universe makes it easy to maintain machines with different requirements. Some software I needed more current than came with Woody I could get backports for (PHP 4.3+, Subversion, etc.), and they fit cleanly into the system. Having learned the hard way that 3rd party RPMs spell disaster, I was quite suprised that these 3rd party Debian packages work so well - it's probably due to it being fairly easy to port the logic of the package in unstable to older distributions. It's also much smoother to put together Debian packages, so I've been able to make my own apt repositories for custom software we need on the machines here with minimal work. All in all, Debian was what I should have been using all along (I've been using RedHat since 1996), as it's truly a wonderful distribution, has a well-managed and supported stable branch, and the entire process is open. The only problem is, Woody's installer is a disaster, and it's hard to find installers that support modern hardware (e.g., 137GB+ drives). Hopefully Sarge's installer won't be that bad, and will be kept up to date. As-is, the only 'installer' for Woody I've ever gotten to work is doing a chroot install from Knoppix.

Redhat/Fedora user for a year now...

[Jagasian]

About a year ago, I did the switch. Cold turkey, never used Windows since that day, never looked back since the switch. All of my desktops and servers run Redhat/Fedora. In fact, right now I have a box with Redhat 9, a laptop with Fedora Core 1, and the computer I am typing this comment from is a Fedora Core 2 test 3 install... just finished the install today, btw. Each install is a mostly default workstation install.

With each release, there have been obvious dramatic improvements, from more useful features to performance improvements to bug fixes. Just to give an example of the improvements, I have recently been toying with Debian Sarge Beta 3... I was getting sick of Gnome 2.4, the slowness and buginess of Nautilus, etc... I also didn't like the small Fedora apt repositories.

I was planning on switching to Debian and KDE. ...

Today I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 2 test 3, just to give Redhat one last chance. Wow! Nautilus is really frickin fast! In fact, the entire desktop is extremely fast! The Evolution email client opens instantly, Nautilus windows open instantly, its very impressive.

Is it the new 2.6.x kernel included in Fedora Core 2? Is it the new Gnome 2.6 desktop? I don't care what it is, the fact is that I have a very coherent "desktop experience" with this latest Fedora Core 2 release candidate from install to posting on Slashdot :) The fact that I have been accustomed to the Redhat Bluecurve Gnome desktop and the fact that such huge improvements have been made have convinced me to stick with Redhat... ...well... as with everything in the OSS world, I will stick with it as long as there isn't a better free alternative. Hence the beauty of OSS. It is good to be critical of the distros, and it is healthy to consider alternatives. Try not to be biased, and use the distro that works for you.

If you need rock hard stability, go with Debian stable. If you want a coherent desktop experience, then one good option is Redhat's Fedora. Yes there are others, but at least from my experiences... Fedora is a damn good choice!

Made the switch

[customjake]

Well, i made the switch to Fedora Core 1, and for what i do i notice no change. Of course i don't even run a GUI, or X, but it does everything i need. I don't ask much out of a server, but i've gotten better performance out of the mandrake ADVX server.

I'm still looking for a good high performance web/mail/ftp server distro, but nothing has been outstanding thus far. I like the mandrake distro, as i started with it, and i like the ADVX and most of the collections of packages.

Looking for some good server management, but i'll probably just use webmin like everyone else. I know i should be using bsd, but last time i tried that it was such a PITA that i went to redhat.

Downloaded Debian last night

[LardBrattish]

Almost as if I knew...

question

[themusicgod1]

perhaps I'm underinformed when it comes to this level of computing...but...is there any other */Linux Distro that is designed for use by the 'enterprise level' ? People around me are quoting a 95-98% of business usage of Windows (doubtless mostly non-xp windows). If the rest of the world has to deal with using Fedora instead of RedHat, while the elite gets to continue to use RedHat, I can see their move being a success for everyone : No one lost - Fedora continues where RedHat left off(which they should) and RedHat continues in new directions, specifically in directions dominated by Microsoft. Isn't that a good situation? Or am I missing something?

Re:question

[Lord Kano]

No one lost - Fedora continues where RedHat left off(which they should) and RedHat continues in new directions, specifically in directions dominated by Microsoft. Isn't that a good situation? Or am I missing something?

As I see it, Red Hat's actions are conveying the message that the "little people" like me who have suppored their distro for years don't matter to them anymore. Fedora seems to me to be their beta version. The rest of us get to be the lab rats for their important customers. Their "Enterprise" server is simply out of my price range. I had a feeling this would be coming after their IPO so I jumped ship back then. I have been using Mandrake for several years now.

LK

Re:question

[LnxAddct]

Umm... Mandrake gives the community it's "shitty" version and yes I know it is shitty because I've tried it. Then forces you to pay for anything worthwhile. Red hat is the only linux company worth using. They stick by the open source community, contribute more then anyone, and give away a good free product. They are also the only ones willing to stick their necks out for the community. Fedora is better then any distro I use, and I've used a ton, even now I've got two servers running debian stable. Get your facts straight first, Fedora is a major improvement on RH9 and RH9 had the same development process and all the devs are almost the exact same. Its just now red hat wants to give it away for free and in a few months they will roll out their enterprise desktop. Fedora is more stable the RH9 and RH9 was updated just as frequently and was just as bleeding edge. We aren't beta testers unless you want to try out the tests. You may here alot of bad press by other /.'ers about RH, but the truth is we know where it stands, and it stands above the rest. We are the silent majority if you will, we don't need to brag about how great our OS is. One person can make alot of noise, us RH users will just sit back and watch the rest of you make foolsof yourselves.
Regards,
Steve

Re:question

[LnxAddct]

Yes, because grammar is of the upmost importance in an informal public forum such as Slashdot. Get over yourself guy. I'm not an english major and never claimed to be, I am involved in mathematics and computer science fields. I've typed formal reports and papers many times, both in academia and the corporate world. Quite frankly I've got better things to do than spell check and grammar check my reply to some dumb post on Slashdot. You can show your ignorance and stubbornness by ignoring the information that I've supplied in the prior posting of mine, or you can just except the fact that it was written as a stream of conscience in a short time period. I wrote what was on my mind and then submitted it. The point was still clearly understood by the intended recipients. As far as I'm concerned, I have succeeded in my goal, without wasting senseless time on such trivial matters as checking my grammar on Slashdot. I've got better things to do, and now I must return to them.
Regards,
Steve


P.S. I guess I was wrong for assuming that it was appropriate to use colloquial language when replying to an informal post. One more thing worth noting, I may have made some grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but at least I was capable of arguing my point without the inclusion of unnecessary vulgarities. As a result, I have retained more of my dignity than you have.

Re:question

[SaDan]

Eh, I totally disagree. RedHat's quality has been slipping since 6.2, and continues to slip with Fedora. It's just not stable enough, and they mess around with the software packages and kernels WAY too much. Not to mention it's still one of the most bloated Linux distros you can install (if you adhere to package dependancies).

This may not be the case for you, but it sure is for me, and the hardware I support. I'm sick of finding non-RH kernels, or specially patched RH kernels, to keep stuff running right. They had horrible support for ReiserFS in the 7 series. Dependency hell everywhere you turned when dealing with RPMs directly.

Personally, I don't use RedHat at home, or recommended it to anyone I know outside of work (personally or professionally). There is NO enterprise class Linux distribution, YET. That doesn't mean Linux doesn't have a place in the enterprise computing pool of resources, it just means there isn't a prepackaged distro that's suitable for true enterprise consumption. Heck, aren't we still waiting for Linux to hit the desktop in good numbers, ANYWHERE?

Can RedHat make a true enterprise Linux distro? Maybe. I do think they have the resources to do it. I don't think they'll have a major shift in the thought that goes into building the distro, which is what's going to kill them in the long run.

I use Linux. I don't use RedHat. I try to spread the good word as much as I can, and install it in the appropriate situations. I'm getting ready to build some machines which will be donated to the Red Cross, and I'm going to use Linux on all of them. The distro won't be RedHat, or Fedora.

Re:question

[Anonymous Coward]

The word "shitty" is not a vulgarity? Grammar and spelling are so difficult that you reserve them for your important writing?

Back under the bridge, troll.

Re:question

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude mixing up "it's" and "its" is in my opinion inexcusable for anyone other then a child who is still learning basic english grammer, or someone for whom english is a second language (whew...talk about a run on sentence!).

It's (Note the proper use if It's as a contraction of It is) sad that the attitude of most people has become "who cares, it's just informal writing." Yes it is 'just informal writing' but that is no reason to make the most basic of grammatical errors.

Regards,
-Tango Mike Foxtrot

Re:question

[Dr. Evil]

SuSE is pretty good for a "supported" distro. Debian is good all around... unfortunately the marketing droids at Redhat have convinced management that it is important that their distribution be "supported".

We're seeing problems like this: Vendor A gets their feet wet in the Linux arena by targetting Redhat 8. Vendor A supports their product on Redhat 8. Vendor A doesn't want a lot of hassle from this, Redhat 8 is a perfectly valid modern operating system which should continue to be supported until the OS is genuinely outdated.

Redhat announces that support for Redhat 8 is dropping off. Management says "Oh no, we have to migrate to RHEL 2.1". Vendor A says "we haven't migrated to RHEL 2.1, we're still only supporting Redhat 8." Security says "Hey, you can't run that, it's not secure anymore.".

Vendor A is faced with two options: Figure out what this RHEL 2.1 crap is and update their support documents, or dump Linux support. Since Redhat jumped ship for support so quickly, and there was no good reason for the version incresase other than a cash-grab on their part... loyalty goes out the window.

Vendor A drops Linux support, developers targeting Vendor A's product port their apps to the supported version of Unix.

The long-term outlook, I see three scenarios:

1. IBM steps in... "Holy S#$T, our customers are being hosed on Linux support by our friends Redhat! Redhat better fix it or we're going to pick up where they left off... we should also look into buying them, we may as well save the brand if we're keeping their promises. This is bad."

2. Novell steps in "Remember us? We still support your old legacy NetWare stuff, we're a good company who's been around for decades, we're doing this Linux thing with SuSE. Want to try Linux again? We're already the distro of choice on IBM's big iron."

3. Developers never touch Linux again.

(If you're gonig Fedora, you might as well go Debian or even FreeBSD. They have better track records)

Re:question

[Lord Kano]

Quite frankly I've got better things to do than spell check and grammar check my reply to some dumb post on Slashdot.

If you need to put effort into knowing the difference between "than and then" or "its and it's", then you have no hope.

The point was still clearly understood by the intended recipients.

What point? That you can't spell or properly construct a sentence?

I have succeeded in my goal,

Yep, you successfully trolled me. Don't worry, this'll be my last response to you.

One more thing worth noting, I may have made some grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but at least I was capable of arguing my point without the inclusion of unnecessary vulgarities.

Like "shitty"?

LK

Re:question

[opkool]

Umm... Mandrake gives the community it's "shitty" version and yes I know it is shitty because I've tried it. Then forces you to pay for anything worthwhile.

Sir, you are grossly uninformed.

Mandrakelinux provides Mandrakelinux Community as an "early preview" of the next version. It should be expected to find problems in a "preview such as Mandrakelinux Community.

Also, if you cared a single bit, you could have updated your Community to Official using urpmi/rpmdrake. This would fix most/all of your troubles.

Mandrakelinux $ANY_VERSION (Community, Official...) rpms are available to everybody from Day 1. The ISOs are available first to MDK Club members first. Later, the ISOs become available to everybody. This means that if you pay, you can get the ISOs early, before the servers get "slashdotted". You pay to get a beneffit.

But, again, the rpms are available from Day 1. And, using urpmi, you can upgrade your Mandrakelinux version from the ftp servers, without a need for ISOs. Pretty much like Debian with apt-get.

You ara probably dissatisfied with Mandrakelinux Community. Well, this is (was) the "preview", a testing vresion of the "Final" 10.0 version.

MandrakeSoft explains how their development system works, and what a "Community" and an "Official" thing are here.

Peace

Re:question

[Frnknstn]

What's wrong with "I've"?

I changed to FreeBSD

[neilhan]

I was tired with all different Linux distributions, then I swithed to FreeBSD, and I like it more then Linux. If you have the time I would suggest you give it a try as while.

Get your KDE RPMs here

[ChrisWong]

I think for the average hacker however RHEL3 and White Box are not going to appeal that much, because they are older software - that people are sure works or know the limits of - and not the latest and greatest. No SVG themed gnome 2.6, no current KDE, no 2.6 kernel ...

You can get the current KDE (3.2.2) for RHEL/Whitebox/CentOS/Tao at the same place you would get KDE for Red Hat 9: kde-redhat. Use the "3.0" release for RHEL.

Re:Get your KDE RPMs here

[Wesley Felter]

Maybe Alan's point is that it's easier to just install Fedora than to install RHEL/Whitebox and then add a bunch of RPMs to get it up to date.

I won't use a distro that isn't XFS friendly.

[Anonymous Coward]

XFS is the most kick ass filesystem I have ever used. I won't use a distro that doesn't support it. XFS is the shiznit. I have had pan downloading thousands of pr0n0's and then decide I want to shut down so I just unplug the computer. No programs have ever had any problem, and no filesystem problems whatsoever.

The best part is when it boots and normally there would be an fsck, it just flies right by it, checking thwoop done in literally a fraction of a second.

Use mandrake or some distro that supports XFS during install. SuSE and Mandrake are both awesome.

What about the MAC?

[Imidazole]

I want an official RH9 or Fedora for MAC. I ran YDL for my MAC, on my 17" PB 1.33, and I couldnt believe how damn fast it ran. I've never seen such performance, even out of my P4 3.06 at home with RH9 installed. The drawback - The video was all fuxored because the display was unsupported. Yes, even outside of good ol Xfree it was distorted - heavily. In fact, Xfree wouldnt even load because it couldnt detect a display :P

Enterprise Version

[infra-red]

The biggest reason for the Enterprise version is that it will have a life of 5 years. This means that I can deploy a server, and expect it to remain secure and stable for a significant ammount of time.

This is worth money when your responsible for a significant number of servers, and this is what you pay for. When everyone is running Linux 2.8 or 3.0 or whatever is after 2.6, Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 should still be secure and supported on the servers its deployed on.

This will not be the case for Fedora Core 1, 2 or whatever comes out next. Yes, I'll run FC on my personal machines (or any other distribution) but I don't want to have to rebuild a server for years after its deployed if its a production box.

This is why they have the split, for work, I need the stability of a long deployment life, for hobby, I want the newest sharpest toys to play with. Toys get replaced with the latest toys when they come out.

Re:Enterprise Version

[M1FCJ]

That's a good point. I have servers running Redhat 7 to 9, in production for intraweb or other services within the group/team. I really don't have to bother about malicious attacks although I try to keep my patches up to date.

Now Redhat is trying to move me to enterprise products. The whole point of installing Redhat on these boxes were to save money over the license (plus even Redhat 7 is much more secure and better engineered than NT4! (which was the previous platform for services).

But I want to keep my costs down. FC1 (although worked fine on my desktops) just simply wasn't stable enough. I couldn't wait for FC2 and the pressure to move to Suse was getting unbearable. Now I have a mixture of Suse 8, 8.1, 8.2, 9 and 8 SLES boxen and I am re-installing the Redhat boxes one by one when I have some time. Will those be supported for longer? I don't know but simply I can't sell Redhat/FC series to my boss anymore. At home I have a range of boxes running Suse 8, 8.1, 8.2, 9 and 9.1 when it becomes available publicly, I have FC1 and FC2 test 3, I have a win2k box and a Solaris 10 box. Which one of these I like better? Apart from win2k rubbish, they are all the same. I like the look and ease of use-features of FC1, it is a brilliant desktop system. Suse boxen are running all sorts of things, they are all headless, accessed over the net. Solaris 10 box is running Apache Tomcat so that's ticking like a clock.

Since Redhat split into two, I can't guarantee that any thing I tried on FC1 will work on REL, previously I was a little bit more comfortable with them. I like the idea of FC, putting the distro where it belongs, among the people who like it and want to improve it.

Re:Enterprise Version

[Kenardy]

I have 117 days on FC1 running Apache, Postfix and FTP.

I don't understand your claim that FC is unstable.

Re:Enterprise Version

[M1FCJ]

With Java JDK 1.3 and 1.4, I experienced many unexplainable hangups. The same software works fine with Suse or Redhat 9. I didn't investigate deeply because problem was sporadoic and repeatability was very low but it, one way or the other, always happened. It's fine for desktop, I still use it but not on anything I'm doing Java work.

Blame Sun if you like, it works with other distros.

I moved from RedHat a loooong time ago

[n3m3sis]

Back when I was a nOOB in linux, I used Redhat, but finding it inadequate I moved to Slackware, which gave me the satisfaction I required. I would never move to Fedora, since I regard it as a equivalent of Redhat. Redhat SUCKS!!

Fedora will be EOLed

[Anonymous Coward]

... as soon as it starts to compete with Redhat's "enterprise" linux. But RH does not want it to be able to compete so they setup that 6-month release cycle. Who's going to upgrade production servers every 6 months? That's a joke.

I think Fedora is not an option for former RH users who do not want to go with RH "enterprise" products. Debian is.

Re:Fedora will be EOLed

[DA-MAN]

I think Fedora is not an option for former RH users who do not want to go with RH "enterprise" products. Debian is.

Fedora-Legacy has a triple tap policy on Fedora Core releases. They are stating that updates will continue for FC1 until FC4 is released. That's not too bad, almost two and a half years of use.

Also there are always RHEL Rebuilds like Tao or WhiteBox. Those are free, and work just as well as RH Enterprise.

Bad luck

[becrappy]

Let me say I have used RH since 5.2. It all ways came thrugh for me. Fedora Core though did not. I tried it once on my lap top and the boot process failed every time. No better luck on my second desktop. I switched to SUSE and never looked back. Mostly I switched to SUSE though because I was not happy W/RH for killing there workstation line up.

Alternative to RH

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a small website for a non-profit organization. Up until abut 2 weeks ago, I was using RH8 & RH9. My intention, before the end-of life annoucement sometime last year, my intention was to have a current release running the primary server, then setting up a stable "new" version when it was released (eg, go from RH8 to RH9) as a backup.
Primarily, I was doing this for patches and bugfixes. I also (being a non-profit) wanted a quick, easy cheap fix and little downtime. If a catastrophic failure occured on the primary, I'd just move the CAT5 cable to the backup server, change a couple settings, and the backup is the primary. Then I can turn my full attention to the smoldering dead server.
However, when RH announced their EOL set for this spring, I started looking around for a replacment server OS.

Prerequistites were:
FREE (non-profit = no budget in my case)
Support system
Ease of patch/upgrade

I have a friend who runs BSD. I personally love some of the features it BSD incorperates. I espcially love the ports system. I hated all the file tree seemed foreign compared to Linux-based distros.

I tried everything from Knoppix, Debian, Slack, Fedora, a few no-names I don't recall. I finally settled on Gentoo.

As mentioned above it is a "young" distro. I love the portage system for upgrades. I did a install based off a stage3 tarball, and had my server (P2/400MHz) up and running FULLY in about 10 hours. Granted, that is not an acceptable downtime for some, but I have a mirror-setup between my primary and backup server, making it very easy to change who is primary.

I have been using it for a Desktop for about a year and love it. As for a comparision between RH and Gentoo - RH has ease of "special" setups - Cyrus-sasl + sendmail, etc. But, Gentoo is much easier to patch IMO.

In essence, I was very impressed with Gentoo's overall arrangement and would recommend it to anyone trying to switch from a RH w/o X installed (If you relied on X-windows for configuration of your server, then Gentoo may be a little more complex than that).

But, that's just one former RH admin's opinion.

Re:Alternative to RH

[ktorn]

I second that.

The end of the RH Linux line was a blessing in disguise. Had it not happened I probably wouldn't have given Gentoo a try.

What a gem of a distro.

And not only is it rock solid, it forces you to understand a lot more about linux, but it comes naturally, since you have great step-by-step documentation that guides you through the installation and customization. Compiling a kernel is no longer a daunting prospect. Now I actually enjoy it!
All this because there's such a vibrant community behind Gentoo. If you get stuck, you'll have both the web-based forums and the IRC channels full of people actually willing to help you.

All in all, a great Red Hat replacement.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

are you suggesting a md5sum wouldn't catch that?

Re:Mirror , just in case

[molo]

Key word being trusted. Its a lot easier to detemine trust with a PGP based solution that the PKI X509 stuff.

-molo

I never see that comming

[MrJones]

damn, so we have to switch to fedora now, mmm, this is too much coorporate for Linux.
Lets make debian rule the world

Moved from RedHat to Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

My company originally used RedHat for our builds because that was the most widely used distro in the US. Well, after the problem with getting support for RedHat 7.3, I decided we should move the company builds to Debian (I'd been using on my laptop for years). At first to Debian Stable/Woody, and then to Debian Testing/Sarge. We thought a lot about the move to Sarge vs. Woody, and it was decided that Testing was extremely stable and more stable than any RedHat release. We knew about Fedora, but why move to Fedora when they are just trying to do what Debian has done so well for a decade. We made the move and could not be happier. For those that are using RedHat, take a serious look at Debian. I've seen a lot of hosting companies switch to Debian. Debian gives you back control of your distro. You're not relying on any company to help/screw you. I understand that Fedora is no longer RedHat Linux and development is supposed to happen like Debian. But it's not the same. Most Debian users are very seasoned and experienced. Heck, when the last OpenSSH vunerability came out, Debian Woody had a fix in 30 minutes.

Debian just works. The stable/woody I would compare with RHEL. If you never tried Debian for servers, then I suggest you do.

Chris Dos

President, Open Innovations

I switched to Debian

[ckuske]

I had been using RedHat since the 5.2 version came out, and used every version up to 9.0. I thought RedHat was the best. Then, they crippled half of their user base in my mind. I understand the business need for them to survive, but it's pushed people like me that just want to run a stable Mail/Web Server into other distributions.

I used Debian now (Woody). It's kinda crufty, and some of the packages are painfully old, but at least I know I'll get a system that's maintained, and I don't have to worry about what's going to happen six months down the line. Fedora just seems wishy-washy to me.

Progeny

[phaze3000]

On our network we still have quite a few old Redhat 7.3 machines. We've been using the Progeny updates for a while now with much success. All of the machines are gradually being moved to Debian, however it'll be a while before the transition is complete and until then Progeny can fill the gap nicely.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives

[herberts]

In my shop where we've been running Linux servers for several years without any need for support we are going to migrate our boxes to a RHEL derivative based on the terms of the RHEL EULA which allow recompilation of the sources to create a Linux distro as long as it does not use the name or image of Red Hat.

I know at least four projects of this kind, namely CentOS, White Box Linux, Tao Linux and Fermi Linux LTS from Fermilab.

As they are all based on RHEL 3 we will factor lots of stuff, the admin will be very similar, so will the automated install using kickstart.

And to boot we will not have to worry about some critical components like a JVM being only available on RHEL for example, if it runs on RHEL it has a 0.9999999 probability of doing so too on one of the clones.

And for some apps like Oracle we will go with RHEL since they impose it to us. But in the end we will not get commercial supports for the 70 or so servers we've been running on 6.1, 6.2 and 7.3 without support for all those years.

Anybody else going for this strategy?

Going to? They already did

[msobkow]

RedHat 7.2 was the last release I bought, downloaded, or installed.

I found the entire 7.x series to be an absolute disaster with an absolutely obscene number of patches/updates and hopelessly outdated packages.

Add in their outrageous price increases, and I jumped to Mandrake for a while, which I love on the desktop but not so much on the server side. Now that SuSE has pretty much caught up on the maintainability, I just run SuSE to keep it easy/simple.

The fact that most corporate sites I've dealt with recently are settling on SuSE just makes it all that much easier to choose a distro for doing custom software development.

Why in the world would I pay the obscene prices RedHat charges for an outdated "enterprise" server? I don't need their support, I just need the same distro my customers run.

Yes, I am aware of the developers version of the "enterprise" releases, but they are not identical. That makes it useless for debugging thorny problems, and you sure don't want to be dropping an enterprise license on every developer's desk anyhow.

I'm actually kind of confused about what RedHat thinks their business model is nowadays. They no longer target the desktop. They don't have a viable developer version of the enterprise editions.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that they've decided to target "bundled" enterprise RDBMS servers (e.g. Oracle on RedHat, DB/2 on RedHat, etc.) instead of "regular" developers. In other words, it looks like they only want to work with and support the "big dollar" product vendors.

Maybe they'll end up getting bought out by Oracle and shipped only as an "Oracle Server". Who knows, but I sure don't see them doing anything that will keep them profitable and independant.

Re:RH

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahaha

red hat makes an amazing discovery:

you cannot make money by giving something away for free! as much as they would like everything to be free in the world, your landlord isn't going to stop charging you rent, the grocery store isn't going to give you food for free, and arco isn't going to fill up your gas tank for free either.

you get the point, but i'll say it one more time for those who don't...

you cannot make money by giving things away for free

PS - I'm typing this from a system running RH9!

Switched to Gentoo

[say]

I switched my production workstation + sql server to Gentoo the same day I got the e-mail from Red Hat stating they wouldn't support their child.

And that was a wise choice! My desktop is more stable, faster, more responsive and "cooler". And yes, that is because the switch threw me into kernel 2.6 and kde 3.2.

Now, I'm more impressed with how easy gentoo is to maintain.

Dumped RedHat ages ago

[bazmail]

Moved to SuSE years ago and never looked back.

from redhat7.3 to :

[kinsoa]

-> debian for the important server (file, web, auth) -> fedora on all other (workstation, little server) Fedora is enought for me, I'm just afraid about it's stability (in both term of life-time and uptime)

Updates with 'updateme' possible

[whovian]

first, thanks to sw155kn1f3 for pointing out the Fedora Legacy Project. I had no idea until then.

Installed yum, but WTF is all that header stuff when I could download a package directly and be done with it?

Then I thought of a faster way. I used to use a program called updateme which allows you to view which packages that need updating. Just point it to an FTP site, and voila. Fortunately, fedoralegacy provides FTP mirrors. Then you just use rpm -Uvh as usual.

Re:Updates with 'updateme' possible

[whovian]

Well, the parser could use a little cleaning up, but otherwise it gives some idea what to upgrade.

fedora, fedora, SJD, fedora

[dankelley]

I've run all the Redhat versions since 4.x, and I decided to try Fedora when it came out. I tried each of the systems in the subjectline, and I record below the results of my testing.

It was difficult to get Fedora Core 1 working (I don't remember which test # it was). Similar problems arose with Fedora Core 2 test 1. I won't bore you with details since these versions are water under the bridge; you could surf to a dozen serious bug reports if you were morbidly curious. Eventually I got both of these Fedoras to limp along, but only just.

Frustrated, I dropped Fedora, reformatted the drive and switched to Sun Java Desktop (SJD). This was recommended by our sysadmin at work; his hope is to have the linux boxes and the solaris boxes looking alike, so that users won't be such a pain.

Unfortunately (I'm a Sun investor), I cannot recommend SJD for scientific work. The CDROMS did not contain expected things like f2c or g77, which means that you won't be able to build R (the stats language I use) or the other scientific applications using fortran. Actually, the list of things not included with SJD CDROMS is quite long. Well, you might think, I'll just surf the web and pick these things up. Good luck on that. For one thing, Sun makes it damn hard to access their website to get updates. (This inconvenience alone suggests that they are not serious about SJD.) And it doesn't seem that other folks are rushing to wrap RPMs for this platform. Maybe folks are disinclined to do that for a commercial system like SJD. Given all of this, I recommend you steer clear of SJD if you're doing anything technical. (PS: no, just because it's coming straight from Sun doesn't mean that staroffice is workable, either. It does not import MSword documents faithfully, and I think you'd be crazy to try to export them if you're collaborating with MSword users.)

And that brings me to Fedora Core 2 test 3 (FC2T3). I installed it the other night, and the procedure went quite smoothly (unlike FC2T2, which was a total mess, the installation program even flaking out on reading the cdrom ... same happened to other folks on the hard disk). Although I have not pressed the box much yet, I do think that FC2T3 is useable.

Thus, I can recommend you dip your toe into FC2T3. It gives you the 2.6 kernel, and updated versions of some of your favourite applications. But before you jump into this water, I advise testing. Unless you have some time on your hands, you might want to sit it out until the official (non-test) FC2.

So, you think, why not switch to FC1 (the non-test version) right now? I think that's a bad idea because it doesn't give you much you have now (e.g. same 2.4 kernel as redhat9), and FC2 will probably be ready by summer.

One Word (Re:Debian)

[Anonymous Coward]

Stability

SuSe 9

[Prototerm]

I switched to Suse 9 the day Red Hat sent me the email, offering me the choice of moving to the very expensive enterprise version, or using the "hobbyist" version, Fedora Core.

BTW, I refuse to call that hobbyist version "Fedora", since that name has been in use since 1998 by Cornell University and the University of Virginia for a different project.

In my experience, SuSe 9 is much better at recognizing, using, and configuring hardware than RHL 9. Even the installation of the nVidia drivers was easier.

Oracle 9i works on RHL9 and SuSE 9

[Prototerm]

I was able to install Oracle 9i on both Red Hat 9 and SuSe 9. Red Hat was a huge headache. You run the install until you get an error, fix the error, and continue. You do that several times. There are a lot of small changes you have to make to various script files before you get it installed, but you don't need anything special from Oracle. I even managed to get it to work with RHL 9 running on a laptop (with only 320MB of memory, yet). I was only doing development work, so the database was small, but had no problems.

I installed the same thing on SuSE 9, and had no trouble. Smooth install all the way. No extra files needed from Oracle, no repeated tweeking of scripts. Certainly not the relative nightmare that RHL9 was to use.

You just need to google the web for the appropriate instructions, that's all.

Debian

[BlackHawk-666]

I was extremely disappointed in RedHat after they killed RH 9.0, leaving me with nothing for the money I paid them. I paid a years subscription to RedHat and recevied only 6 months of updates before being end of lifed. If Microsoft had done this then the outcry on Slashdot would have shaken the heavens. An evaluation copy of an OS that I would then have to pay over $1000 USD to use is no compensation.

I have therefore switched to Debian, which is both more ethical, and IMHO a better distribution. With apt-get to maintain the security and up-to-date-ness of my box, and a long term commitment to the freedom, community and Open Source this is the distribution I should have used from the start. Debian has an undeserved reputation for being difficult to use, but what do RedHat and SuSE really give us on top of Debian? In my experience it was just a slick install and some very crappy admin tools. That's right, I called them crappy. The tools were clunky, prone to error, and not as effective as the text based files they were haphazardly trying to replace. Worse still, all they taught me was how to admin the "RedHat/SuSE" way and I needed to relearn that as I changed from RedHat to Mandrake to SuSE.

I refuse to spend any more time learning a fractured piece of Linux. It's the command line and text based config for me now :-)

Keeping it for now

[smoker2]

I am still gonna use RH9 for a while. I mostly use Synaptic for checking and installing the latest packages anyway. I have a FBSD 4.7 web server / mailserver and a FBSD 5.1 SAMBA server running on the LAN as well, so most of the data is safe, but my RH9 machine is dual boot with (:( ) win98, just coz I don't want to pay for XP and also don't want to overwite my RH partition by installing Xp. I only use windoze because I have a crappy Hauppage WinTV usb, which isn't supported in Linux / FBSD. I also like to rip and burn dvds, for which I need windoze.

Until something better...

[dethwulf]

Until a better distro comes along, RHL9 is staying on my computer. I loaded up Fedora at work, and there wasn't much of a change in functionality. I tried Slackware on another computer at work, and (after 4 hours just getting it installed) I soon overwrote it with Fedora. I'm going to give the Fedora Project time to get some documentation going...afterward, I may think of switching here at home.

SuSE baby...

[chunkwhite86]

I just pre-ordered SuSE 9.1. I've been using 8.2 Pro on my dual athlon PC for quite a while now and I have really come to like it!

The large difference between the two is that under SuSE, hardware just works. I plug in a USB printer, I can print. I plug in a wireless card, I can surf the web. It seems like every piece of (desktop) hardware is an uphill struggle with redhat.

That being said, the RHEL server is an excellent product IMO. But for the desktop, SuSE is King.

SuSE 9.1 ships next week. Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2. nuff said.

I will miss you buddy

[The MESMERIC]

You were my intro to Linux
Nice intro affordable at $20
I never quite understood those "better than duct-tape" sayings
But hey - I suppose its some geek in-joke right?
Thanks for introducing me to Linux
You never caused me frustrations
You bugs here and there -
were pretty forgiveable - If not educational
(And I still receive your Erratas !)

You are but one funky dude - with a really peculiar fashion sense
Again forgiveable - each to their own right?

I will miss you pal - truly ... Never once you were pretentious
(Unlike that slimy Green Fella I had the misfortune of meeting)

I will hold to my red-box dearly - even the casing had style.
And indulge myself in fond memories of tweaking ...

See you in Nerd Heaven - So long dude :'(

FC1

[chrisloz82]

I've upgraded to FC1 and keeping an eye on FC2 once the 3rd and final test has been fully fixed up. Shouldn't be too long by sound of things. Fedora's just like RH9 only with up to date packages.. still works the same for me.

Not a problem here. Thanks Debian !

[papason]

Screw RH finally. Debian works on our hardware just fine and then there is always SuSE.

Papason

A few good articles on Fedora Legacy

[darthcamaro]

I submitted this one earlier in the AM on Friday - but the powers that be didn't 'go for it '

This article looks at the end of the line for Red Hat LInux 9 and includes an interview with project leads for the Fedora Legacy project.

Yet Another Mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you.

Why don't you help some project(s) such as Fedora Core, Slackware Linux, FreeBSD, etc.

http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www.slackware. com/
http://www.freebsd.org/

Re:Debian Enterprise? haha

[Anonymous Coward]

enterprise class hardware support out of the box
not even home class
mission impossible

FreeBSD all the way

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an easy decision! Try FreeBSD! It doesn't have as many as Debian security advisories, runs faster than Debian, is more secure than Debian, is more up-to-date than Debian, has a better installer than Debian, is easier to maintain than Debian, etc etc
Let me tell you something I have experienced;
apt is nice, but Debian sucks.
You'll be glad you chose a true Unix (FreeBSD).

Re:Debian woody is not an option because...

[Anonymous Coward]

...

it's got lot of security advisories (more than any Linux distro and, of course, more than any *BSD flavor as well), it's very very very very very outdated, asks too many questions, it's slow, ...

There are better choices than Debian!
FreeBSD is secure, stable, faster than any Linux distro, up-to-date, etc.
Slackware is faster than Debian, more up-to-date than Debian, has less security advisories than Debian etc.
Fedora Core could be a good choice. It's got apt, so Debian doesn't have any advantage over the others.

FreeBSD is a great choice, and probably the best for servers.

Fedora

[votum76]

I upgraded to Fedora 5 months ago and my experience has been excellent I run it on 2 web servers that handle DNS,WEB,EMAIL and SSH services it's a Excellent Stable Server distribution

complain about someone elses grammar in my thread?

[themusicgod1]

If you need to put effort into knowing the difference between "than and then" or "its and it's", then you have no hope.

A mind is a terrible thing to t...waste. Don't learn crap, if you don't have to. Fill your head, but not with crap. Semantics expressed in a part of an insane language that isn't even universal...I mean If this were spanish, then you might have a case(I mean, sooner or later humans have to interact with each-other) but we are speaking a hobby-language here that has millions of words, rules, mannerisms, and freak-incidences. It would be much better to understand the world in symbols of a different kind, then to understand english and know nothing becuase you spent 10 odd years getting good at english. You have a finite time to learn all that you can, and a finite amount that can be learned. Beware!