Wrt the upgrade path of older RHL releases (7.x and up), Google for FCL (Fedora Core Legacy). If you like that, please support them actively (I mean by doing stuff, not by only leeching rpm's).

Just a short comment on Fedora - I'm a home oofice user who has used RedHat since about version 3.1, and several versions of SuSE, and played with others.
I tried RH9 and liked it but read the reviews that said SuSE was better so I paid for that.
SuSE 9 wouldn't recognize the same hardware that version 7.1,7.2,7.3 did - that's going backwards for me.
So I went Fedora. The only thing I have tried that doesn't work is adding a new program to the menu - it errors.
Otherwise, it recognizes all of my hardware, runs gvim nicely and I'll let you know as soon as I get the Oracle tools installed.
Overall, I would say *nice job* - but I would opt for a situation with a support contract....

and then

Wow.. Sure you didn't just "bash" the other distributions by any means right there, but being someone involved very closely with the Gentoo situation that was brought up, this hurts.

You "are above all that" because thanks to the Debian and Savannah compromises, you now have a kernel notice and update that protects you from local users, or any local user accounts that become compromised themselseves.

You "are above all that" because thanks to the Gentoo mirror compromise, you now have an rsync advisory and update that will keep all of your mirrors (including rhm1 and rhm2) secure from outside attacks.

I hope that you enjoy your time above the rest of us.

Um. That were a joke. You might say it was insensitive, but I don't at all think he was making light of the situation and other distros - I think that was more aimed at how RH *isn't* above all that. More poking fun at RH than Gentoo or Debian.

I'm all for RH going down in flames, but I'm just trying to be fair at the same time.

What I think is more objectionable is the initial quote all by itself. RH is perhaps trying to achieve a detente with Microsoft. They are aggressively attacking Unix in a dynamic sense and they are trashing *all* Linux distros with the 'not ready for the desktop, use Windows' crap. And then they turn around and say, 'Oh, don't criticize us - that's just anti-Linux'. The hell it is. It's anti-MicroHat. Because MicroHat *sells* Linux, but it isn't Linux to me anymore, if it ever was. The reason RH is compared to MS is not because people are groping around for an adjective for 'success' (RH wishes that was the reason) but because RH adopts MS-like *tactics* and styles, whether successful or not - RH is *more expensive* than Windows, does funky stuff with busted compilers, patched kernels, the RPM 'standard' - make our own procedure and call it 'standard' - and on and on and on. And now this 'renting' of an OS - and apparently RH users had to 'register' for updates? And so on.

And if RH thinks they can achieve a detente with MS or lull MS to sleep and attack when they aren't looking - well, all the market-seizure from Unix and promoting Windows on the desktop in the world isn't going to stop Microsoft from trying to destroy them. Unless it's Microsoft directing the detente. (Note, I'm not putting on my tinfoil hat and saying that's the case - just that that would *have* to be the case if MS and RH could peacably co-exist.)

That's the problem I have - not with the joke, which I thought was pretty funny, if taken in the right spirit. And ignoring that it's indicative of a sub-conscious attitude - one of these days, they do hope to above all things. They - RH - not, they - manifestations of Linux and open source.

unfortunatly Fedora is not an option for me at the office. I have RHL runnig anumber of my core infrastucture (DHCP,DNS, Network monitoring and managment, etc) so i want/need commerial support.

my gripe is that Redhat hasnt provided a clear migration details on the rubber to road part of movign a RHL to RHEL sever.

Necrogram,

There's a whitepaper that covers the things you need to know to migrate.

https://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl/

It's also excerpted at:

https://www.redhat.com/advice/tips/

RE: bgmilnes comment:....

...."Well, then wouldn't it be more sensible to run a distro that actually ships packages of grass (and many related packages such as up-to-date gdal, mapserver etc etc) instead? ..."


No advantage is gained! Turns out that major apps like MySQL & GRASSx are pretty easy for the casual lusr to install & maintain under RedHat. Those serious apps seem have PROCEEDURAL(?) rather than systematic motifs ... if that's the proper way to say it.

So the crucial point becomes stability of the underlying OS. What do I trust my IRS data to ?! A+ there to RedHat. My impression is that at Mandrake the "... monkeys run the zoo..." with clubs, magic handshakes and decoder rings. gawd ... -- analogous to the ' ... Respect Thou (our) Flinty Meanderings...' motif of the Debiolian & Slackmolian crowd.

All aspects considered, my RedHat box had become quite a success narrowband "appliance" ... Redhat pulled-the-powercord.

.....taken right from Redhat's site

the Fedora Project is for developers and high-tech enthusiasts using Linux in non-critical computing environments.


Um....my home PC that I do everything on is definately not "non-critical". Which is why I will continue to use Slackware 9.1

On another note:

-jeremy,

Thanks for the interview. Good Stuff

And you don't see the problem here? Red Hat took the decision to EOL their base distribution around a year ago and still doesn't have an answer to give a large percentage of their userbase as to where/if they have a place in the RedHat worldview. By they time you get around to figuring out whether you want us around, don't expect too many to still be hanging around in the Red Hat camp. Many have already moved, pressed by the impending drop dead dates you guys have been swinging as a club to force the Enterprise customers to go ahead and buy RHEL, but since you weren't offering ANYTHING for us small fry we have had to DO something.

Me, I rolled my own based on the SRPMS to RHEL, told a few folks and am now up to my butt in coping with the flood of interest from others you have orphaned. We aren't generally mad at RH, but we are confused.

Yes the Enterprise customers will give you serious coin for RHEL and that is great. More power to ya. But there are also a lot of people who just want to drop in a small server and forget it, we aren't running Oracle, we don't need 24/7/365 support, we just need a stable distribution with a long enough errata window that we won't have to always be twiddling the machine. We will pay, not those Enterprise figures, but we also don't need the sort of labor intensive support the Enterprise customers expect. Give em RHN as it exists now for 7.3 and a lot of folks would be happy.

It would seem to me that the Code base/functionality for RHEL and Fedora will fork. This concerns me.

I switched to slackware on my workstations. Problem solved. Used Red Hat for 6 years. The handful of RH servers I have at work I might migrate to RHEL to get the support next year.

Since this thread is apparently still live and being looked at by Jeremy, I'll put in my two cents worth.

Especially now that I understand better what the rules are, I really only have two complaints about the new scheme:

1) The lack of flexibility. Most especially, I miss the option of "don't pay anything for it, don't get anything for it."

A few months ago, I had to build two RH9 servers on an emergency basis, because our mail gateway got hacked. It had been on a pair of Sun "network appliance"-style boxes, but the group that had put that in wasn't doing any kind of maintenance to them, or having anybody else do it either. I'm a Unix adminstrator, but we're primarily an AIX shop -- I'm not expert with Solaris. Add to that the fact that there was no CD or any other obvious way to reinstall those boxes, and we were in trouble.

I built a couple of RH9 boxes to do the job, the first one being up a little over an hour after we found the problem.

Under the current licensing scheme, I have absolutely no way to do that. I have to place my order, wait 7 to 10 (business) days, and then, and only then can I fix my problem.

In this case, in addition to being our external mail servers, these machines were our external DNS servers. Not being able to do mail for two weeks would have had a huge impact on our business. Not having a web site for two weeks might have put us in bankruptcy.

If I could install RHEL on any box I needed it (legally), and then get the support later (or if I could even order the damn thing in a reasonable timeframe) I'd be okay. As it is, I have GOT to find an alternative. Red Hat (in its current incarnation) simply won't work.

2) The current prices are rather on the greedy side. I don't mind $2500 for AS Premium, because on the types of boxes I'm likely to use that, $2500 is not a terribly high price. $350 for a simple (non-public) FTP server, is.

$350 would be a suitable price for an RHN-only AS instance. RHN-only ES ought to be more like $100/yr.



The one thing that concerns me most is that four or five years down the line, this could mean the demise of Red Hat, or at least its relegation to a niche market.

Before the change, Red Hat got a lot of free publicity from being the biggest Linux distributor. After April of next year, that's almost certain not to be true anymore. It may (even "probably will") have the lion's share of the enterprise market, but all the desktop installations (like my two) are going to go away. In the public's eye, that means somebody else (either SUSE or Mandrake, almost certainly) is going to be "the world's biggest Linux distributor". In the case of SUSE, they have an enterprise version, as well as the everyday version, and it's supported by people like Oracle.

I'm fairly certain most companies are like mine -- we're much happier using the same stuff for everything than having to keep track of 15 different versions.

What I'm afraid will happen over the course of the next several years, is that somebody else will take over the everyday "do whatever you want to with it" version of Linux, and provide an enterprise edition also. In order to keep from having to mess with too many versions, many companies like mine will switch to that version for everything, and Red Hat will have left themselves hung out to dry.

The reason I care about that is Red Hat is the only vendor I've seen so far that seems to "get it" when it comes to business. They put out a version, and all of the updates to those packages from that point on are bug fixes. They don't add functionality that I might or might not want, and break stuff I definitely do want to do it.

Most of the other distributions spend a lot more time worshiping at the "We've got the latest and greatest" altar. I usually don't care about the latest and greatest, I care about it being several times MORE solid than a rock.



Last subject:

For anyone who didn't know, Red Hat has not made it impossible to use the code in RHEL without a licence. That's what I thought at first, but the whiteboxlinux people got me straightened out. Look at the EULA on the first binary disc. It will point you to two RPMs that you must change the images in.

Once you've changed those images, so that it's no longer "Red Hat" EL, you can install it anywhere you like, as often as you like. You can never get support (including RHN) on it from Red Hat, though. If you're going to put it out for anybody else to use, make sure it's clear that this is not Red Hat EL. RH isn't going to support one of these (at least in part because they have no idea what ELSE you might have done to it), and they don't want to have their name attached to it unless they know what it is and trust it.

I had originally thought they were trampling all over the GPL, but they're not. They ARE being picky about their name and trademarks, but that's a different animal. They've actually been quite couth about putting all the stuff you have to watch for in a couple of RPMs.

I have implemented several Linux servers into our company over the last six years or so. Having tried multiple distributions over the years I have consistently returned and finally standardized on the Red Hat distribution. I had been testing out the Red Hat Network update service and thought it was a great service and was preparing to subscribe all of our servers to their offering.

Then came the announcement by an old friend and I felt as if the bottom fell out. I have touted the benefits of Linux and recommended many to try Red Hat as an excellent server distribution. At present I can no longer do that. Being short-staffed as many IT departments are these days, it is increasing difficult to keep systems up-to-date, apply security fixes, and to keep all systems communicating in a mixed OS environment.

We don't mind paying Red Hat for the initial enterprise license and paying a reasonable annual maintenance fee. But having to pay for all of the servers installed just to get updates and security fixes is a problem. Our company has never had to use Red Hat for support issues, nor do we anticipate that we would require that on an ongoing basis, so why pay for it? With Red Hat's current pricing structure it appears as if it would be easier for us to just standardize on Windows 2000/2003, much to my chagrin.

That said, I will not willingly return to the whims of MS and their constantly changing licensing agreements and product groupings. What we are left with is the fact that we must once again search and review other Linux distributions. A distribution that does not price us out of their offerings, nor one that pushes us to use an ever changing, non-stable, many-releases-a-year testing version.

Red Hat will harvest and maintain the stable portion of the Fedora release and incorporate those features into their enterprise offering. Unfortunately for us, we are currently pushed out of their future plans due to cost constraints.

Farewell good friend, it was good while it lasted and best of luck to the future, for all of us.

Microsoft's attempt to be on the bleeding edge in the market has produced more bugs and holes in their software which makes it a prefect target for hackers.

I see Fedora going down the same path. Bleeding edge means that your system is more open to the world then one might know or want. As more and more hacker start to hack this code more and more users will leave for a more stable and secure distribution. Lets face it, hacker will adopt Fedora because of it being on the bleeding edge. This means to them that there are bound to be holes that have yet to be found and they might be the first to exploit it.

Bleeding edge is good for some but not all. I would think that 90%+ don't want to be on the bleeding edge. I know I don't want to be on the bleeding edge, I want to be safe and have my data safe. When I started using Red Hat I believed this to be the case, but now being pushed to Fedora I'm not so sure now. The only way I see Fedora to survive is to also have 2 different distributions. One being secure and not on the bleeding edge and one being the bleeding edge. Bleeding edge is for developers not normal users.

Just my two cents...

As Jeremy Hogan stated Red Hat hasn't quit the desktop market, they are working on a viable product scheme for SOHO and SMB users (like me).

IMHO people saying they don't want to spend a lot of money on RHEL for their servers don't take into account that one can successfully run a reliable server on RHEL WS for under $200. Don't use a bomb to kill mosquito.

Of course you can drive a Ferrari to office and back home everyday, but a Toyota would do the job. Not everyone needs the extra muscle.

I think we face a bigger issue with the desktop: under $200 is not so expensive but my concern is about RHN annual fee. Again it is not set yet, and Red Hat says they’re working on that.

Remember: free as in freedom not as in free beer. The truth is that some people doesn’t like to pay for the stuff, I include myself. But consider that there is no reason to use the paid alternative if you can get it for free, unless of course that there is a reason.

IMHO this is the case with people that like free as in free beer. Let me explain myself: if Fedora is not good enough for you, and you think RHEL is too expensive you should be using FreeBSD. It is very reliable, open source, community driven, and free of charge.

Ooh, it’s community driven like Fedora. I don’t see any real advantage because if you let Fedora grow it will become something like Debian or FreeBSD. That’s what Red Hat try to explain and a lot of people don’t seem to get it.

Everything arrives on the right time, not before neither after, just in time. What I’m going to do is to continue using RHL until April 2004, and then I’ll choose RHEL WS, Fedora, or anything else. By then Red Hat should have figured out what to do with users like us, be it to continue supporting RHL or lower RHEL prices, whatever the way they choose I am confident it will be good. By then Fedora should be a lot more stable –by the way I think it’s very stable already- and more appealing to a lot of people.

As a business owner I know there is no such thing as a static business, you either grow or become smaller. I also know that when times change one should change with it. So is Red Hat doing, I don’t see anything wrong here. They differentiate from the rest of the Linux offerings by their particular ability to success in business. Some people are afraid of change, and panic very easily with news involving changes.

I was surprised with the EOL announcement at first, but then I realized it’s the logical thing to do considering what’s happening in the Linux –and non Linux- world. I’d been using Red Hat since version 5.2, I love it, but I could change it for something better for my organization and for me if I have to.

My advice is to plan and prepare for the future it’s very important, a wise man do so, but keep a strong grip in the present and focus on your goals.

___________________________________
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