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Red Hat Software Businesses Upgrades

End of Life for Red Hat 7.x, 8.0 433

Posted by CowboyNeal from the moving-on dept.
thelenm writes "Red Hat announced today that the 7.x and 8.0 distributions have reached their errata maintenance end-of-life. Red Hat 9 reaches its end-of-life on April 30. The options for those who want to stick with Red Hat are Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Fedora Project, as described on their Migration Resource Center page. Or of course, you might take this opportunity to select another option." This day's been a long time coming, but it's finally here.
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End of Life for Red Hat 7.x, 8.0 More

End of Life for Red Hat 7.x, 8.0

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  • Other options? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sp00 ( 639381 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:39PM (#7992343)
    Why is debian always the "other option" when there are lots of alternatives?

    • Re:Other options? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TwistedSquare ( 650445 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:42PM (#7992379) Homepage
      Clearly there is only one other option [gentoo.org] ;-)
      • Well, I tried Gentoo, and oh my god was it hard to install. It didn't recognise my 3Com 509b ISA card (OK a little old) and just left me at a command prompt for things. So I gave up.

        I admit I'm a lazy jackass after being spoonfed by RedHat for seven years, but with Fedora going all wobbly who knows what they'll do, I really think Gentoo is gonna scare the bejeezus out of any newbies.

        Please Gentoo: lose the hubris, sort our the installation! I'm ready to believe that you're the best distro ever - just as l

        • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Informative)

          by bryhhh ( 317224 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:11PM (#7992684)
          Please Gentoo: lose the hubris, sort our the installation!

          I'm no Linux newbie, but I'm not an expert either. I recently tried gentoo, and I love the manual install approach that Gentoo offers. I suspect that I have learned more about Linux during the past few months of installing and using Gentoo, than I have from using Redhat since version 5.2 was released. For people keen to learn more such as myself, I would highly recommend Gentoo.

          It's not as easy to install as redhat/fedora/mandrake etc. etc. etc. but it's hardly difficult for anyone with nothing more than basic understanding. The documentation is excellent, and the community forums on the gentoo site seem to have some of the most helpful people.

          Gentoo isn't meant to be a 'user' orientated distribution, and I think to make the installation procedure similar to other distributions would take more away from the distro than it added.

        • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Master Bait ( 115103 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:02PM (#7993238) Homepage Journal
          Please Gentoo: lose the hubris, sort our the installation! I'm ready to believe that you're the best distro ever - just as long as I could just run you!!

          Awww c'mon! Gentoo is for sissies. Manly men use Linux from Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]

      • Other options I would choose:

        Gentoo [gentoo.org]
        Slackware [slackware.org]
      • Well, I suppose there's always this [sco.com] option.

        [Cough...]

    • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Informative)

      by epiphani ( 254981 ) <epiphani&dal,net> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:44PM (#7992412)
      Speaking of other options, Lets not forget that Progeny will be offering Redhat support for those distributions as per this slashdot story [slashdot.org].

    • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Informative)

      by qortra ( 591818 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:54PM (#7992532)
      Yes Yes, there are many distros; everybody who reads /. knows that. But in the long run, distros boil down to rpm-based (named for Red Hat which designed it), deb-based (debian and all derivitives), and source-based (slackware, gentoo; neither of which are in competition for the mass market though they do have a loyal following). So really, if you don't want to wait hours for things to compile, you have two major option to choose from; debian based or red-hat based package management. Thus, the assertion that debian is the "other-option" is still mostly true even in the presence of so many choices.

      • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:30PM (#7992893) Homepage
        Slight misconception in your post.

        Slackware is _not_ a souce based distro. It uses it's own packages (commonly referred to as slackpacks) which are actually plain tarballs (.tgz). It even pre-dates RPMs (possibly even debs, but don't take my word on that... I'm no Linux historian).
    • I think I'll just use the Caldera [caldera.com] version of linux instead.

      What? What, do I have programmer funk? Why are you backing away?
    • Reminds me of a comment from the Linux to FreeBSD wipe-your-disk 'upgrade':

      How does one moderate an entire article as flamebait?
  • Out of curiosity which of you out there will be effected by this? Is it more in the home or in the office? What services are you depending on these "older" systems running and what changes have you done to take care of them? I am just curious to hear from people out there.

    SuDZ

  • Or.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by xankar ( 710025 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:41PM (#7992372) Journal
    Or you could chose an alternative here [distrowatch.com]. Considerably more options.
  • http://distrowatch.org/ [distrowatch.org]

    It seems to me that there are TONS of viable options...
    • While there are a lot of options, I wouldn't call them "viable". To be viable option for *RedHat* users, it must: (1) have a significant support base, (2) be as easy to use, if not easier, and (3) be well known.

      That limits the list severly - to a small list even: Debian, Gentoo, Suse, Mandrake, and Country-specific distros.

      However, the slashdot "peoples" are right in picking Debian as "another option" simply because it's *different* (and they're biased).

      There are three "foundations" to build from: Redh

  • Fedora Updates for Outdated RH Distros? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jmt9581 ( 554192 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:42PM (#7992383) Homepage
    How long will Fedora be providing RPMs for RedHat 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0?
    • I keep an eye on the Fedora Legacy mailing list and quite frankly the project is just now getting off the ground.

      Let me preface this comment with this:
      If you've had experience with this type of project (and don't need to be told step by step what to do, when to do it, and why you should do it) head over to the site and volunteer, they could sure use some help. I hope this post will kick start some talented folks to help out. I'll explain:
      There is a lot of arguing over petty things such as the layout of

  • This is unfortunate (Score:3, Informative)

    by coolmacdude ( 640605 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:42PM (#7992385) Homepage Journal
    Red Hat is easily the most accessible distro to the average Joe. It's easier to set up than debian and it's had good support. If Linux is to gain greater acceptance on the desktop, we need more distributions like Red Hat.
    • What about Mandrake? Installation of that seemed easy enough. Though, I'll admit the menus weren't as well organized as Red Hat 9.
    • i never got what was so hard about debian installer. sure it doesn't have a flashy X intaller with pretty graphics, but it work and is easy to use as long as you're not trying to use LVM or software raid (which most people aren't)

    • Mandrake (Score:3, Informative)

      by lpret ( 570480 )
      I recently installed Mandrake that uses the 2.6 kernel and I was blown away. I connected my digital camera and it popped open a window that had all the pictures in there. My RAID, which has never worked in linux before, worked just fine. My mp3 player was able to run right out of the box. This is in stark contrast to Windows XP, in which I had to get online and find the drivers in Japanese. Mandrake is the distro that will get on desktops sooner than later.

  • Select the other option! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mrpuffypants ( 444598 ) * <mrpuffypants@gmailTIGER.com minus cat> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:43PM (#7992395)
    Windows! [microsoft.com]

    Paul Thurrott called it "The Alpha, the Omega, the XP to your Fedora!"

    /me puts on flame suit covered in asbestos...
    • Ok, it may bave been intended as a troll, but he has a point. I got XP free with my dell. I felt no great need to reformat it, and I have a linux partition for when I want to tinker with linux in a power enviroment, not to mention the 3 or 4 scrap boxes... But as a desktop enviroment, that just works, it has no rival (Except possibly OSX.) Everything just... works. Ok, if you want to fanny around customising it, it's shit, but if you just want to write some emails, watch some movies, play some games, linux

    • Windows98! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by danknight ( 570145 )
      Hey Microsoft will now support it til 06 right ?! Thats 8 years of support. With the Evil RedHat people Dropping support in only 2 years Does that mean Microsoft good, RedHat Evil ? (Oh the Humanity !)

      • Re:Windows98! (Score:3, Informative)

        by GoofyBoy ( 44399 )
        >With the Evil RedHat people Dropping support in only 2 years

        Redhat 9 was released in April 2003. Dropped in April 2004.

        Thats 1 year of support.

  • Progeny already has updates (Score:4, Informative)

    by fo0bar ( 261207 ) * on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:43PM (#7992398)
    Progeny [progeny.com] has already announced two updated packages, one for tcpdump and one for cvs. Can't find a public announcement, but they were sent to subscribers a few days ago.

  • Future (Score:2, Interesting)

    by CelticWhisper ( 601755 )
    It'll be interesting to see what the future holds for Red Hat, though, as well as a few other things. With Win98SE losing its support come June and RH9 come April, I wonder how many will migrate to something different and how many will stick it out, hoping nothing catastrophic happens to their legacy platform of choice.
  • I'm not shure, if this really was a smart move.
    Community support will definitely go down.

    Even Micro$oft got big in the enterprise OS market by way of their consumer OS.
    ($ sign added after I figured I didn't critisize MS enough. Hopefully this will please the mods. ;-) )

  • Too bad realy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:44PM (#7992414)
    The new pricing policy really hurt RedHat and Linux at our school. What folks had been promoting as a cheap alternative to MS software has now closed ranks on price. It took a pile of work to get admins to understand that "RedHat = good", and the fact that "RedHat" as they know it now costs money has been enough to push a variety of departments off the Linux path.

    I know they have to make money, I just wish it wasn't at the cost of marketshare. It would really make my life easier if I could port more people to Linux or OSX.

  • More options (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:45PM (#7992418)
    For those that are used to RH and don't want a big change, there are many distributions that are compiling the RHEL source and making their own distro. Thank you GPL!

    Whitebox Enterprise Linux [whiteboxlinux.org]
    cAos [caosity.org]
    Tao [taolinux.org]
    just to name a few

  • Why not use Fedora Legacy's yum repositories? (Score:5, Informative)

    by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:46PM (#7992429) Homepage
    I set up yum recently on Red Hat 8.0 and pointed it to the appropriate repositories [duke.edu] - a free way to get backported security fixes for 8.0. A shame that Red Hat never mentioned this as an option in their e-mail to all the RHN subscribers...
    • It's unfortunate but not unexpected that they wouldn't advertise about free alternatives to their paid support, they probably consider up2date a valuable part of their business model.

    • I'm sure they didn't mention those repositories for legal reasons (ie. We don't mention it, we're not responsible for anything that happens if you use them). In any event, the word should get out a little better about those repositories. Myself, I've got clients on everything that has been dumped (7.3-8.0) and what will soon be dumped (9.0) and am getting even more clients wanting to make the switch. None of them are duanted by the decision of one distributor of one distribution. It's about the level support they get directly from their supplier (me) as opposed to the company putting it out.This can't be said for large installations, that I know, but a school of all places (primary, secondary, high schools, etc) shouldn't have a problem with it. Hell, that gives and computer studies courses a serious project throughout the year as far as I can see it. Let me throw a little situation at you:

      1) Walla Walla High School decides to convert all internal student systems to Linux (including student servers, library systems, etc)

      2) Once the framework is in place, students are picked out of each computer class whom have a level of skill and competency (and trustworthiness) to let administer the student network.

      3) Students suggest upgrades or changes that the school admin never thought of or didn't have the time to implement

      4) Students implement changes. Some work, some don't

      5) Everyone learns

      6) School offers "innovative learning environment using the latest software to enrich your childs knowledge of computing in the digital age" (why couldn't I come up with lines of BS like this when I had to)

      In any event, now that I'm thoroughly off topic, I'll end with this. RedHat doesn't mention the repositories because, if they did, they can be held liable for anyting that happens to systems using said repositories. A recommendation can and would be construed as an endorsement.

      CliffH

  • Fedora and up2date (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anybody found that running up2date on Fedora core 1 has been a trying experience lately? I realise that this is the lazy way of keeping a machine patched, but up2date has been a great facility since redhat 8.0 (I had a bad experience with 7.3). I think their (fedora) site is having trouble coping with the load.

    I really hope that Fedora core can fill the shoes of Redhat 9! Time will tell.
    • Most of us haven't noticed that because we don't use up2date on fedora. I personally use apt-get as a cron job to update my system. Other people probably use YUM. You should try it.

  • Lots 'o OT (Score:4, Informative)

    by Wheaty18 ( 465429 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:46PM (#7992439)
    I have a feeling that the shameless Debian plug will generate more discussion than the subject of the article -- and yes, there is another option [slackware.com]. ;)

  • Can it be? (Score:5, Funny)

    by amybaum ( 738214 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:46PM (#7992440)
    Am I the last remaining Slackware user?

  • Microsoft supports customers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And this same week Microsoft just added two years to the WIn98 EOL. I have a RH9 server that gets no support after April this year. That doesn't make me happy. I have a backup with Trustix standing by, but they haven't been real stable either. I'm looking at possibly picking Win2k3 as I know it will have support for 5 more years guaranteed. Redhat needs to step up and offer something to paying customers that want to stay with RH9.

    I guess the Linux community can stfu about the great support.

  • Inevitable? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by x0n ( 120596 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:49PM (#7992468) Homepage Journal
    Was this inevitable? Why should anyone be surprised? They are only keeping on the line that is making them money, like any normal company would, no? I guess this is a product of their staffing level reaching a critical mass; a level whereby their own popularity has killed off their product line. Bandwidth costs, and plain old time and money are an unavoidable part of the Free Software mentality. Good will don't pay the bills! However, it is sad nonetheless. Plenty of smaller distros left that can afford to keep themselves going until they become so popular they have to become commercialised in one way or another too. Let's hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

    • Re:Inevitable? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GoofyBoy ( 44399 )
      >Why should anyone be surprised?

      Because its a stark contrast between what MS just did. They extended support for Windows 98 until 2006.

      RedHat 7 came out in 2000. Redhat 8 came out in 2002.

      • Re:Inevitable? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by x0n ( 120596 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:12PM (#7992702) Homepage Journal
        Am I missing something here? People paid for Windows 98. People are still paying for Win98. Every time a machine is shipped with 98 on it, the boys in Redmond have another beer. And in "stark contrast", Red Hat aren't making any (comparable) money off of RH6/7/8. Noone pays for it. Every time someone downloads Redhat 7/8 off from a RH server, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Never mind the time/money spent on maintaining it, for _free_.

  • Huh, and so what??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by justsomebody ( 525308 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:49PM (#7992473) Journal
    Two of my servers are still 7.2, while both are updated up to today and both secured as possible.
    Up to recently I still had one 6.x but machine died and that was the end of it

    latest kernel
    proftpd instead of vsftpd
    samba 3.0
    apache 2.0
    opengroupware (in testing mostly)
    mysql 4
    qmail instead of postfix (or it was sendmail)
    latest cups
    openldap
    squid
    etc, etc

    No one stopped support, just up2date from redhat doesn't work anymore (I have 5 enterprise server licenses but not even once I used up2date), all apps and services are still compatible, and all of them are still patched and updated, which is far more than someone could say about NT

    Sorry, but as such I don't see difference
  • To moderate or not, that was a tough one. :)

    There is now a very good chance my next server purchase will just be that X-Serve with the G5. Um, yeah, I'll be in the computer room ... ALL DAY. :)

  • Bad decision. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 1lus10n ( 586635 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:50PM (#7992485) Journal
    From a redhat customers perspective this is bad. To many this is the exact reason they moved away from microsoft.

    Redhat hasnt been my distro of choice for quite some time, but for many people it is the "only" linux they know of or use.

    Personally i hope novell/suse take advantage of this and prevent people from moving back to the evil empire.

    And although I personally use gentoo on my systems and I know people who use debian, I wouldnt recomend a non-experienced admin use either, and most linux admins are really windows admins which is why you see so many linux boxes that get broken into ......
  • guess it was too much money being spent without any inflow, so it had to stop.But didnt expect it to stop so soon. Always thought that RH was someone who would provide support as long as possible.

  • what the hell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:05PM (#7992627)
    What the hell is with all these people bitching? You can upgrade to Fedora for free.

    "Waah, redhat isn't supporting my free OS even though they've released a free upgrade for me"

    • Re:what the hell? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JMax ( 28101 )
      I have to ask the same question. Why are people so freaked about Fedora? I downloaded it, installed in in place of my trusty RH8, and it's great. Looks like RedHat 10 to me. Up2date's caused zero problems for me, and everything else is slick as a whistle, too. The only difference is that I no longer worry about whether my RHN account is still active. This is a great distro. Why are we all having fits about having to find another one?

    • Re:what the hell (Score:3, Insightful)

      by leighklotz ( 192300 )
      Except that the up2date service doesn't work right, and yum requires you to futz with repositories and takes days to get updates, and neither works through proxy servers(ignoring /etc/sysconfig/rhn values and /etc/yum.conf values), but they kinda work if you set http_proxy, or if you use a TSOCKS proxy with LD_PRELOAD, but that doesn't work all the time either. And half the fedora web pages are about the old Hawaii release and the other half are wishful thinking about what ought to work. It's enough to dr

      • Re:what the hell (Score:4, Insightful)

        by irix ( 22687 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @10:16PM (#7993855) Journal

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

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

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

    • Re:what the hell (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lobotomy ( 26260 )
      You obviously have never had to support any production servers or you would never make such a stupid statement. Let me guess: you are a 13-year-old with a computer in you bedroom. Yep, in your case, upgrade to Fedora. No problem. I have updated my home system and my laptop to Fedora -- works great, I like it.

      There is no way in hell I am going to update my servers at work to Fedora. Production systems cannot be updated lightly. It was only 7 or 8 months ago that I updated our mail server from Red Hat 6.2 to

  • Hey, if you shell over $699, they damn well better give you some sort of support. :)

    Or, you could give Gentoo a shot. Even SuSE is still a viable option.

  • whitebox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by einer ( 459199 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:07PM (#7992653) Journal
    I'll throw a plug in for whitebox linux [whiteboxlinux.org].

    It's RHE3 isos without the support (and with different brand graphics).

    Not sure what the differences between Fedora (RH9) and whitebox (RHE3) are. Sure would appreciate enlightenment though.

    • Re:whitebox (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nailer ( 69468 )
      Red Hat will release security and bugfix updates for RHEL3 for the next five years, while Fedora will have new releases every six months and won't go much longer than that. RHEL3 has official support and Service Level Agreements. Fedora doesn't.

      Technically, one main difference is the kernel, which is patched in a way to increase the amount of continguous memory an application can get from around 1.3G to, IIRC, 3 GB. This makes RHEL kernels good for databases which need large amounts of contiguous RAM. You

  • Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:08PM (#7992659) Homepage Journal
    Okay guys, when it was announced that Microsoft was pulling the plug on a much older and obsolete product, we all aimed our pitchforks at them. Are we going to do the same for Redhat?

  • Other option... SuSE! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starsong ( 624646 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:08PM (#7992669)

    A good friend of mine just got started in Linux and chose SuSE Linux [suse.com]. I've been using Redhat 9 since last year, and had never seen SuSE, so it was a lot of fun to set it up together. Once we got past the FTP install (I'd never done that before), it was a dream. I mean it really blew me away. It found his TV tuner card (Winfast 2000 XP Deluxe, I think) automatically and put a link to a tuner application on his desktop. He literally logged in for the first time, double-clicked and was watching TV, color, sound, everything. This was amazing to me, as I spent two weeks trying to get my Audigy 2 and winmodem to work with RH9 way back when, before finally giving up and deciding You Can't Get There From Here.[1]

    It's really slick, polished, and the installer (YAST) is the first thing I've ever seen in a Linux distribution that would make me willing to spend money.[2] This weekend I'm going to wipe RH9 and give it a try. They even have a live-eval CD image if you want to try it out first, before giving up HD space.

    [1] Eventually fixed, but if I hear "emu10k.o" one more time I'm going into orbit.
    [2] Plus the lizard thing is cute.

  • Do people around here have a short term memory or something? Red Hat may be ending their support, but these versions can still get support from somewhere else [progeny.com].
  • I'm presonally a little bitter. It's definately not been "a long time coming". Specifically, I purchased 2 seats of RHN last March. I was led to believe that I would receive "paid-for support" for those two machines for 1 year. But now, the one running rh7.2 is no longer supported. Yeah, I could update it to rh9 to get my remaining 3 months, but I'm not going to do that... because I'm feeling bitter. That is a firewall machine that currently doesn't even have a monitor and keyboard attached. When I g

  • This won't be worth the effort. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by waxmop ( 195319 ) <waxmop@@@overlook...homelinux...net> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:16PM (#7992755)
    Getting up2date to work through a tight firewall with multiple proxies was a huge hassle. The fact that Red Hat intentionally makes installing new packages and updates difficult (without up2date) has always turned me off. They want to protect their revenue stream, so they don't make it easy to mirror everything locally to do lots of updates to different machines behind a firewall.

    I'm sure I'm not the only person that loses goodwill when I have to explain to my boss why he has to write another check for something he thinks he already bought. I suspect that this move will lead to a hell of a lot of unpatched Red Hat 9 boxes sitting around after April 1st. Red Hat has made it difficult to keep boxes secure by charging for updates. Savvy sysadmins have already installed apt-for-rpm, or something similar, but Windows shops that tried out Linux for fun are going to feel burned.

    Anyway, I lobbied for Mandrake at the beginning, but the PHB wanted something he had heard about. But I think I can use the specture of us needing to pay for the top corporate up2date subscription as a way to argue for Mandrake. 9.2, here I come.

  • Why is Fedora not the other option? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JMax ( 28101 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:24PM (#7992837)
    Why does it seem that Fedora is getting dismissed out of hand here? I installed it' it looks great. Why are you not taking it more seriously?

  • The problems with the others (Score:3, Insightful)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:28PM (#7992880) Homepage
    Debian. Stable is too old. What I like about Redhat on our servers is that it is up-to-date enough that when I want to use something, it is there.

    Slackware. Looks promising. Only noticed two annoyances on my brief test so far. First, it doesn't set up each user in their own group. Second, it uses LILO rather than GRUB.

    Have to investigate the user per group thing, see if it would break much to switch a Slackware installation over to that. For booting, I tried installing GRUB, and something wasn't happy--haven't had time to investigate that yet.

    Gentoo. Didn't have time to go through all the install steps, so have to come back to this one. It seemed to me I was doing a lot of things that would be common to many people installing it, leaving me wondering why the heck I'm having to waste my time. A good install should only make me do things or specify things concerning the ways my setup is going to be different from other people's.

    SuSE. Not a contender until YaST is released under a free license.

    Mandrake. I've never been impressed by them in the past, and so haven't really looked into them since their financial troubles. Still, probably worth another look.

  • Still supported (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Queuetue ( 156269 ) <queuetue AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:44PM (#7993024) Homepage
    Many posts are drawing a parallel between this action by RedHat and Microsoft's eol'ing (or not eol'ing) Win98.

    1) Yes, they are both doing this for the same reason: MONEY

    2) No, it's not the same because THIRD PARTIES CAN SUPPORT REDHAT. If you want to start your own DEAD RH support company, go ahead. You have the full source.

    3) No, it's not the same because YOU CAN UPGRADE FOR FREE. Go download it. No one is left behind here.

    4) No, it's not the same because NO ONE IS LOCKED IN. If you want to jump off of the RedHat ship, nothing is stopping you - you're not stranded. Copy and run those same binaries on debian, gentoo or roll-your own, anytime you want to.

  • Come to the dark side! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:01PM (#7993224) Homepage Journal
    Bob (resembles Pyro but with Luke Skywalker's whiney voice): "Waaah! They're dropping Redhat!"

    Tom (resembles Emperor Palpatine but with Magneto's charm): "Come to the dark side, Bob!"

    Bob: "The dark side? What's that?"

    Tom: "BSD."

    Bob: "But that's evil! All my penguin friends tell me so!"

    Tom: "You're friends are flightless waterfowl that smell of herring. You are better than that. You have the potential."

    Bob: "But it's not under the GPL!"

    Tom: "Just pretend it is. There's nothing in the BSD license preventing you from fully and completely treating it as GPL."

    Bob: "But it wouldn't really be the GPL. I would know and wouldn't be able to live with myself."

    Tom: "We have gcc..."

    Bob: "You do?"

    Tom: "...and all the other GNU software in ports. Even glibc."

    Bob: "Wow, I never knew. No wait! You're trying to trick me! I happen to know that BSD is development in a 'cathedral' like environment, instead of the politically correct chaos of the 'bazaar'."

    Tom: "Words, words, just words. Yes, we have some procedures we adhere to, to prevent random code from entering the system, but is that any different from Linus holding the keys to the Linux kernel repository?"

    Bob: "But BSD users are elitist!"

    Tom: "Yes, we are. But you are worthy to join us. Look in your heart. You know you are better than flightless antarctic waterfowl."

    Bob: "Hmmm, I guess you're right. But what about the software? What about my GNOME and MPlayer?"

    Tom: "We have them too."

    Bob: "But what about my NVidia card?"

    Tom: "We have NVidia drivers."

    Bob: "Opera? Java? Oracle?"

    Tom: "Yes."

    Bob: "Well okay then. I guess I'll switch."

    Tom: "Fine. First I need you to sign this contract in your own blood. Then you need to renounce all that is good. Finally, you have to wear these horns..."

  • Options For Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Ha (Score:3, Informative)

    by seifried ( 12921 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:19PM (#7993406) Homepage

    I've covered a much larger set of options including Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat Enterprise, the Progeny transition service, etc, etc. The article is available at: http://seifried.org/security/redhat/20031230-redha t-support.html [seifried.org].

    It's also available on a rented slashsite, which I doubt can take a slashdot style beating, but if you want to post comments feel free: http://security-site.seifried.org/article.pl?sid=0 3/12/31/067227 [seifried.org].

    The solutions I cover include:

    • 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

  • To be expected, unfortunately.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @10:08PM (#7993776)
    RedHat has in the recent past tried to make it crystal clear that if you want a long period of support, long time of provided updates, and a long product lifecycle in general, that you shell out for the 'enterprise' editions. 2.1 is a 7.x era product and is still well supported and remained the 'latest product' (as defined relative to the RedHat enterprise offering) for a long time. The release of RHEL3 has done nothing to slow that support down, and it looks like these enterprise editions will be similar to MS product lifecycles, which is reasonable. So this move is consistant with their strategy. Their take is that the 'freeloaders' will buy into the Enterprise product line, and if they don't, they weren't worth the effort to appease in the first place. Perhaps a tad short sighted in the scheme of things (bad public image is apparent), but they have failed to really break out of their state as a fledgling company with their old strategy, and, from the business perspective, had little choice and not much to risk. They hope to make RHEL a corporate standard, and therefore being short on new features relative to the community will not be so obvious, and then the companies can feel good about long lifecycles and their 'latest and greatest' Red Hat.

    Of course, the bad thing is that these *extremely* short lifecycles will be held up high by the likes of MS as examples of how RedHat will leave you out in the cold long before MS will. Even if not completely true, it has enough truth in it for MS to put a strong, believable, verifiable spin on the situation. That is the consequence of this strategic change that they will have to face. And don't try to make it sound like 7.x is *ancient*, it feels that way to the Linux community because that is the pace it is used to moving at, but in a company, it is still a 'new' product.

    I personally use Gentoo, but in professional work I deal primarily with SuSE and RedHat, and for both technical and business reasons, I think SuSE has managed to get things right. With SuSE, they have a much more complete, coherent feeling solution. Things just work. Their strategy to all sorts of things is far more flexible once you appreciate it. And with the Enterprise edition, they have enough partnerships in place to truly offer a comprehensive solution. In dealing with RH Enterprise offerings, it is essentially RH9 with some spit and polish. No extras, nothing you couldn't really get from any free distribution, with only RH support to differntiate it. SLES, however, includes a few niceties, such as an included, well behaved, supported JVM. Sure, you can download those for free, but it is important in such a product to have a complete solution out of the box.

    Couple this to their pricing model (RH WS costs at least $179, SuSE Professional costs $79), and it seems like a much more reasonable product when compared to the likes of RH and MS.

    For North America and Europe, SuSE and RedHat are virtually the only 'professional' Linux platform solutions. Others have some fantastic technical merits, but are not real professional-grade businesses for the enterprise to deal with. I love Gentoo, I like Debian, and on technical merit alone I would place both above RedHat and SuSE (as long as the user is a highly competent linux enthusiast), but the support infrastructures are simply not there in a meaningful way as far as businesses are concerned.

  • BSD? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @10:17PM (#7993868) Journal
    I've been thinking about the daemon lately. He's calling me.

    This Redhat thing may have just pushed me over the edge. My thinking is that this is a good opportunity to make a clean break.

    Maybe it's time for me to finally give BSD a spin on one of my test boxes instead of switching LINUX distros. I have to learn a whole new setup procedure and distribution ens and outs, I may as well leanr a whle new OS while I'm at it.

    Now would that be Free BSD, Open BSD or Net BSD? Hmmmmm..

  • I Don't Know Why End-of-Errata Means Doom (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @12:03AM (#7994751) Homepage
    Look, if problems crop up with Red Hat 7.x or 8.0, the community is going to notice and post it somewhere. Then the community will fix it. And post the fixes somewhere.

    So you have to be a little more alert, and not just depend on up2date to solve all problems.

    Doesn't mean you have to throw away your distro and switch and spend another six months re-ironing the kinks between the way you had your system before and the way you have to do it with another distro.

    Let's stop the panic before it starts, alright?

    If you're a naive user who only uses the GUI, maybe you should switch. But if you have any knowledge of the innards of Linux (i.e., config files, the overall structure, etc.) and can handle the command line, I don't see why end-of-life is a nightmare.

    Linux is meant to be continuously upgraded forever. This is not Windows where you have to throw everything out every two (or ten, depending on how delayed the next release is) years.

  • Problem? No Problem! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by $ASANY ( 705279 ) on Friday January 16, 2004 @12:39AM (#7994991) Homepage
    A few here complain that their support is being "dropped", and the /. crowd comes up with alternatives ranging from progeny support, to switching to any of eight or ten other distros, to looking at three or four BSD distros, to keeping RH9 and doing manual updates. I don't like to see pain, but if this is what pain is these days then life has gotten ENORMOUSLY better.

    Back when the choices were "Mac Classic" and Win95, had we heard that one of these was getting EOL'd, there would have been real pain. After just a few years, the debate isn't about how you're going to have to start using a typewriter or something, but how you're possibly going to make a good decision given the actual hundred or so choices available.

    Would you have thought this possible in 1995? Your choice for the most part then was staying with WFWG or making the leap to Win95, although the choices we have now were beginning to come on-line then.

    So RH ends, Fedora moves forward, and there are more reasonable choices available than most of us would have time to evaluate well. It's like the end of Tandy CP/M, only a hundred times better!

    Qwitcher Bitchin.

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