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

[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.

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.

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.

mmm, tasty

[Triumph The Insult C]

yum [duke.edu] 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 [whiteboxlinux.org]

Fedora Legacy != Fedora Core

[jbellis]

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

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[tftp]

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

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.

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 [seifried.org].

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: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: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: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.

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 /.

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: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: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 [suse.com].

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

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

[freaksta]

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

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.org].

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

[Anonymous Coward]

er... debian?

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...

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: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....

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!

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.

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!

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.

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: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 [e-mail] or http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ . Linux helps those who help themselves.

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: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: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.

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: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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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: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 [fedoranews.org] 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.

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: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: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: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

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 [fedoralegacy.org] 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 [fedora.us] 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 [whiteboxlinux.org] in the back of my mind as an option if FC2 flops. The legal issues are still a little disturbing, though.

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

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

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 [centos.org], White Box Linux [whiteboxlinux.org], Tao Linux [taolinux.org] and Fermi Linux LTS [fnal.gov] 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?

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: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. [caosity.org]

Peace!