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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?"
WSAD (WebSphere App Dev) doesn't run under Fedora, so I'm with RH9 until it does. Something to do with libc. Heigh ho.
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.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
So did Marc Ewing ever get his hat back, or was the whole enterprise a failure?
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.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Might as well wait until Fedora Core 2 is released.
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.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
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).
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yes but only when the sun isn't up. RH9 server of the undead.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I decided to switch to SUSE not long after I heard they were going to kill support. I like it a lot better.
...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.
How about the security updates?
- no sig.
yum is a very tasty treat for keeping rh9 boxes up to-date. using it to keep some SAP workstations (for the rovers) running
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Check it out at: White Box Linux
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.
Not to be rude, but why should I download and install security patches from a site that is not an official mirror site?
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?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
the former provides updated packages for EOL'd RH versions; the latter is the basis for new RH versions.
The 9.1 is released already, see www.suse.de
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.
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.
I've written an article on this topic covering about a dozen alternatives, it's available at:r edhat-support.html.
http://www.seifried.org/security/redhat/20031230-
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
Huh? How about dpkg -l to get the full list of installed packages and apt-get remove <unwanted packages>?
The community wrote it.
If you don't trust them, then why the hell are you running the software they wrote?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
...and I will never look back.
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.
Un-news
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.
fedora is good for set it and forget it,
Coincidentally, so is the Ronco Shotime indoor rotisserie and BBQ.
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.
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.
Yeah, but they're not shipping the DVDs in the US until May 8th according to their store.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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?
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!
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
Never heard of pgp signatures? Why should I care where my packages came from as long as they have a trusted signature?
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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.
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.
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...
I am a Linux newbie; C/C++ newbie since 7 years; I feel so much alone without my feu Amiga 500
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.
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
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
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.
"If no one tilts at windmills, the damn things will take over the world!"- christian simpleman
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....
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
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!
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-
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.
--
Power to the Peaceful
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?
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)?
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".
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.
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!
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.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
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...
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
I switched from Red hat to Slackware 9.1. I've been very pleased with the performance, stability and elegance of this distribution.
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.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
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!
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
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.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
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
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.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, RedHat (Enterprise). Or Fedora. /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.
Except now you can edit
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?
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.
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.
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
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.
...
:) 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.
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
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!
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.
Yeah, student edition of the WS. Get the updates just no support (who needs that).s /educati on/indiv/
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industrie
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.
This space available for rent.
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?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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.
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.
are you suggesting a md5sum wouldn't catch that?
Key word being trusted. Its a lot easier to detemine trust with a PGP based solution that the PKI X509 stuff.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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?