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?"

Fedora Core 2

[xconsulting]

Might as well wait until Fedora Core 2 is released.

Re:no update for us

[danidude]

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

How about the security updates?

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Homology]

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

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

Re:just a few more days till SUSE 9.1

[iggymanz]

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

Re:Who's responsible?

[GigsVT]

The community wrote it.

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

The Support Angle Always Mystifies Me

[Trolling4Dollars]

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

Re:Who's responsible?

[wookyhoo]

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

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

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

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

Re:WSAD

[Dr. Evil]

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

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

Re:Who's responsible?

[Jezza]

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

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

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

So what's the problem again?

Re:Mirror , just in case

[molo]

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

-molo

Re:Who's responsible?

[ZiggyPiggy]

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

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

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

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

Re:WSAD

[Wesley Felter]

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

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Homology]

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

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

Re:Who's responsible?

[node 3]

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

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

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

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

Re:Mirror , just in case

[ComputerSlicer23]

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

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

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

Kirby

Get Slack

[sybarite]

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

Fedora Core and legacy

[danny]

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

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

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

Danny.

apt/yum and rpms

[anakog]

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

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

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

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

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

We switched to Debian Stable

[mslinux]

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

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

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

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

Redhat/Fedora user for a year now...

[Jagasian]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:RedHat Enterprise 3.0

[shane2uunet]

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

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

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

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

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

[Bronster]

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

I'm sure I misheard you saying:

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

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

question

[themusicgod1]

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

Re:question

[Lord Kano]

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

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

LK

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

are you suggesting a md5sum wouldn't catch that?

Re:Enterprise Version

[M1FCJ]

That's a good point. I have servers running Redhat 7 to 9, in production for intraweb or other services within the group/team. I really don't have to bother about malicious attacks although I try to keep my patches up to date.

Now Redhat is trying to move me to enterprise products. The whole point of installing Redhat on these boxes were to save money over the license (plus even Redhat 7 is much more secure and better engineered than NT4! (which was the previous platform for services).

But I want to keep my costs down. FC1 (although worked fine on my desktops) just simply wasn't stable enough. I couldn't wait for FC2 and the pressure to move to Suse was getting unbearable. Now I have a mixture of Suse 8, 8.1, 8.2, 9 and 8 SLES boxen and I am re-installing the Redhat boxes one by one when I have some time. Will those be supported for longer? I don't know but simply I can't sell Redhat/FC series to my boss anymore. At home I have a range of boxes running Suse 8, 8.1, 8.2, 9 and 9.1 when it becomes available publicly, I have FC1 and FC2 test 3, I have a win2k box and a Solaris 10 box. Which one of these I like better? Apart from win2k rubbish, they are all the same. I like the look and ease of use-features of FC1, it is a brilliant desktop system. Suse boxen are running all sorts of things, they are all headless, accessed over the net. Solaris 10 box is running Apache Tomcat so that's ticking like a clock.

Since Redhat split into two, I can't guarantee that any thing I tried on FC1 will work on REL, previously I was a little bit more comfortable with them. I like the idea of FC, putting the distro where it belongs, among the people who like it and want to improve it.