RHEL 6 No Longer Supported By Google Chrome 231
sfcrazy writes "Google has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 obsolete, showing a notification which says, 'Google Chrome us no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete.' Red Hat evangelist Jan Wilderboer says: 'We release new stable versions of RHEL every 2-3 years. The API/ABI stability is what sets it apart from community distros. Customers need long term stability. Google knows (and uses) that itself internally. By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.'"
Thats funny because... (Score:2, Informative)
I think RHEL 6 will be supported until 2020.
WTF.
Re:Why would you need a web browser on a server? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need a web browser on something that won't even have X installed.
RHEL is for servers, you could use it on a workstation , but fedora is better suited to that task.
Disagree.
Developers and Linux desktop users often need the stability of a commercially supported desktop/workstation distribution. RHEL, although not as bleeding edge as Fedora, is great on a PC.
Re:Go where? (Score:5, Informative)
RHEL is used for hardened unix workstations, too. RHEL5 is the only enterprise linux distro I know of worth using with FIPS 140-2 and DoD APL certification, meaning that it's the only option for military workstations other than Windows.
So, take that arrogant "enterprise distro is only for servers" attitude elsewhere, please.
Re:Okay, I'll say it... fragmentation (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL
There is a reason Chromium has not made it into Fedora's repositories (and by extension, RHEL):
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium [fedoraproject.org]
Basically, the problem is this: Chromium depends on extensions to libraries that have not been merged with the main releases of those libraries, and so having Chromium on Fedora would require either static linking (giant packages) or maintain separate sets of libraries just for Chromium. Neither of those options is something that Fedora will do, and if Fedora is unwilling to include a package in its repositories the package as almost no chance of being included in RHEL. Years have passed since the problem was first discussed with Google (see the link), and there has not really been much progress, mostly for the same reasons that RHEL6 is not supported by Chrome: Google does things their way and is not going to change that for someone else (regardless of that other person's reasoning).
Re:RHEL is for servers not desktops (Score:4, Informative)
Red Hat has a desktop version of RHEL, with the same support cycle.
Re:RHEL 7 isn't even out yet! (Score:5, Informative)
RHEL 6 came out in late 2010, while Windows 7 came out in mid 2009.
Their respective latest major patches were mid 2012 (6.3) and early 2011 (SP1).
Short version: RHEL 6 is newer than Windows 7 by more than a year by any metric.
There is no excuse for Chrome dropping support for RHEL 6 and keeping it for Windows 7 (let alone XP). Linux may be more of a moving target, but it's not so bad that something can't run on the latest release and one from a couple years ago. This is almost certainly the result of wanting some latest-and-greatest feature and not really caring that some people might want to have stable OSes.
Re:RHEL is for servers not desktops (Score:5, Informative)
Frankly it annoys me that there are no desktop distros that are maintained for longer than a year or two
Allow me to rid you of your annoyance:
https://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/desktop/ [redhat.com]
Re:Why would you need a web browser on a server? (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually 10 years; 13 if you pay extra.
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ [redhat.com]
Re:RHEL 7 isn't even out yet! (Score:4, Informative)
Google Chrome is not free software, it is proprietary freeware. There are many differences between Chrome and Chromium apart from the bundled Flash plugin.
Re:RHEL 7 isn't even out yet! (Score:3, Informative)
Did anybody actually even see this, apart from mr. Wildeboer? I'm running an up-to-date 64-bit CentOS 6 and an up-to-date Chrome beta on CentOS 6, and I have not seen this.
Re:Uh? (Score:2, Informative)
>The headline, while someone oddly phrased, says that Google Chrome will no longer be built with concern running on RHEL 6.
Google Chrome has never been built with concern running on RHEL 6.
Download chrome for linux, it says "For Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE)" , fact which was told in the original googleplus discussion and that the RH evangelist failed to address.
So basically, the headline should be "Due to Red Hat choice to maintain old librairies for long time, chrome now fails to compile on it". Not very sexy.
Re:Chrome on Debian? (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure, but I doubt that Debian would distribute it - that would need to be purely on Google's part.
Chromium might get shipped by Debian, but not Chrome. The latter is closed-source, trademarked, etc. They don't even ship Firefox under that name, so the chances of them shipping Chrome are VERY low.
I run Gentoo and they've dropped Chrome. Being closed source it is just a pain to support in general. It packages everything under the sun internally, etc. Chromium is nearly the same and while it takes work it is possible to strip out most of the 3rd-party stuff so that you're linking against system libraries (Gentoo has been one of the leaders in that). For kicks try downloading the source tarball and run du -s * and you'll see just how much junk it bundles.