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Microsoft Ending Mainstream Support For XP
Slatterz writes "Come next week, Microsoft will be in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP will pass another milestone next week on the road to retirement when mainstream support ends on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the OS originally shipped. While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay. Windows XP accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent."
Funny. I just bought a laptop and it came with Windwos XP installed. If Vista is the "current version of Windows" why are they still shipping new PC's with XP?
Because while Vista may have changed quite a bit, I'm sure there's still a lot of XP code in there.
I would try linux again if they applications were there but they just arent. You can browse, IM etc... but I do more than that.
I have pretty good experience at running Windows as VM guest on Linux. Linux as host for VMs is quite good. But of course it depends for what purposes you use your Windows...
Value of Linux becomes apparent only after you are once forced to buy batch of Windows licenses. But as private buyer concerned - who generally get "Windows [whatever]" from OEMs - there are not much reasons to even try.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
You might want to take a look at Wine. It does not support all applications 100% (Adobe products being notorious for not working as they should), but it's getting there. Take a look through their appdb page, maybe your applications and all you need is already quite Linux-Ready.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep, RHEL is 7 years total with 4 years general support and 3 years of extended support, SUSE is 5 years general and 2 years extended.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Umm. Netbooks are shipping with XP and only XP right now. Not downgraded...
Microsoft is still selling XP as a current OS for that class of machine.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember something about headers for the kernel being no longer available, but I just logged into my Apple Developer account and was able to download all the publically available source for the kernel for OS X 10.5.6 just fine: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.6/
-mkb
They do already. It's called the "Upgrade Edtition" which, contrary to popular belief *CAN* be used to perform a clean install of the OS, rather than requiring an older version to be installed first.
As can be seen on Microsoft's own website, the upgrade editions are all discounted $100 from the price of the full (new license) version.
Migrating to a different distro is typically much easier, and cheaper. I worked on a machine in 2008 that was a version of RHEL from 1999. I made a full system backup to a separate partition on the same disk, migrated it to CentOS, cleaned up dependencies, rebooted into a new kernel, then ran yum to update CentOS. After that, it was just a matter of time taken to download updates for each release up.
It really involves a bit of research, I spent about 2 hours reading release notes before actually starting the operation. Then spent another 2 hours downloading and installing updates (carefully watching for conflicts). I am not a kernel hacker and was able to accomplish this. Now that this is done, the updates and upgrades are much easier!
And Microsoft thinks it is OK to discontinue support?
Microsoft is still providing support; security updates will be available until sometime in 2014. There is right now one, and only one Linux distribution available today guaranteed to still be supported in 2014: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its knock-offs like CentOS)
The things Microsoft is not support is updates Microsoft has been giving XP over the years like giving XP Clear type support, support for WPA2 networks, support for SDHC cards, etc.
New drivers will continue to be available for Microsoft Windows XP for the foreseeable future, it's up to hardware makers to decide when to stop supporting XP.
This, should I point out, is better than the situation with RHEL 5 where new hardware doesn't work since the Linux driver model isn't stable; I tried to install CentOS 5 last week and gave up when I couldn't get drivers for my touchpad (Windows XP, of course, has drivers) nor current stable drivers for my WiFi card (supposedly there are drivers, but the last time I was able to use WiFi with my laptop in CentOS 5, the driver would crash unless I pinged the router every second).