it's as bad or even worse than Windows!
At least with Windows you dont have to register to the "Big Brother" to get any updates!(and that is how I feel for trading my email for updates)!? (oh and the updates that do not work at all, for that matter)! huh!

I said what the hekk and got the login anyway and registered but now the up2date command returns all sorts of errors and tells me to read the /var/log/up2date file?!
There seem to be problems with python scripts I guess? I was just trying to first get vsftpd program installed and then get the general updates .
but nothing works, as soon as I log in it kicks me out?!

I am sticking with My Ubuntu for now...

Thank You!

Red Hat has gone enterprise and you have to pay for updates. If you want get CentOS. You wont need to pay and still use yum.

Oh OK.. Thanks I did not realize that!
I know they also ask for some serial numbers? like that of M$ (on back of XP, Vista etc. boxes.) ...
I installed it to learn it so I guess I have to do with the water-down version for now.
Thanks a lot!

CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux enterprise without the logos and customer support (prepaid?). it's very stable and the release cycles are relatively long.

If you are learning, then I recommend using Fedora. You can think of it like the test bed and future direction of RHEL. The release cycles are about 18 months.

Yes CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux minus the cost and about three weeks behind. If your running Enterprise servers three weeks behind for critical security updates isn't ideal so naturally people still pay for RHEL itself to keep their servers secure, you also get Red Hat support. Also I am assuming what you signed up for was the 30-day trail. RHEL costs quite alot of money for a license, also please note that RHEL uses YUM (Yellow Dog Update Manager I believe) as it's primary package manager, not up2date.

Official RHEL repositories I believe are not avaiable until you have paid for a license anyways, you have to search yourself for third party repositories and you can install RHEL without registering but alot of functionality is just missing, however going down that route it's just easier to go CentOS anyway and more secure.

!!Warning Joke alert!!

That is the kind of anti-redhat propa... <snipped because of possible copyright issues and I don't want to upset anyone>

!!End of Joke alert!!

The Bleeding edge Redhat stuff is Fedora, a lot of the Coders at RH help out on that linux project. The stable and free end of the chain is, as r3sistance suggested, Centos and has an update cycle of a few weeks behind RH.

The reason RH charge, for the service they offer, is because they do extensive testing before issuing an update and their support team is not too shabby either. I have only had cause to use them four or five times, over the years I have been a customer, and each time I have had a first time resolution.

At home I tend to use Debian as my main platform but I still have a Redhat 7.2 alpha box which has been running as a maths processor on my net for about 10 years now. As it still does what I want it to I have had no need to upgrade it.

I do, however, run FC8, FC6, NetBsd and Solaris 10 (Intel 386) as VMmachines on a FC6 box for compile testing and I also have a Ultra Spark 10 running solaris 8, 9 and 10 (multi Boot) a SGI Indi running Slackware (2.4 kernel) and Irix. My Sparc 5 is in bit's at this moment with a dead NVRam chip (I need to reprogram the replacement chip but it can takes hours) and My Digital MP433 (which has 4 * dx4 100mhz chips in it and a whopping 64meg of ram) is also suffering from a battery issue (if any one knows where the eisa chip battery is, and is willing to tell me where it is, I'll buy you a pint).

One of the things I like about Linux is that if you don't like the distro you are using you can switch to another with out having to learn all of it again.

Thanks Admiral;
that is good info. (I was looking to install centOS but couldnt find the CD so i went with Radhat instead (not knowing the details)..


Thanks to r3sistance (cool name btw)
its funny what you said about YUM. just yesterday, I was trying to change my pc name from localhost to RedHat and somehow the name was changed to RedRat?! I checked those conf files and even did a grep -R for the redrat to no avail? I guess may be when I put caps in the name some thing happened?
thought it was funny tho!

+1 fedora

If you choose to go with Fedora, be aware that they only support any one version of 13months(no updates of any kind after that) . They release a new version about every six months and the official advice is to do a clean install each time. Fedora currently is having some issues with cleaning up bugs. There are many bugs that showed up in F7(or before) that still exist in F10. The numbers of these types of bugs is increasing with each new release(rather than decreasing). This is one of the many reasons that RHEL6 was not based on F9 (and possibly not F10) as their prior schedule would have indicated.

For anyone wanting to learn RHEL, Centos is the perfect option. It is built from RHEL source code (just the logos and other proprietary stuff removed). I have yet to see an rpm built for RHEL that would not function just the same on Centos. Most of the small (non .X) updates are available within 48hrs of RH releasing them. The major updates (like 5.2 to 5.3) generally take about a month to show up (a ton of packages have to be rebuilt and tested).

CentOS 5.2 .. DVD, cd's
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/centos/centos-5.2/

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=centos

http://www.centos.org/
....