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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life 470

Posted by michael from the switch-to-debian dept.
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?"
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Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life More

Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life

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  • WSAD (Score:4, Informative)

    by jobsagoodun ( 669748 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:47PM (#9023140)
    WSAD (WebSphere App Dev) doesn't run under Fedora, so I'm with RH9 until it does. Something to do with libc. Heigh ho.

    • Re:WSAD (Score:4, Informative)

      by Mr. Sketch ( 111112 ) * <`mister.sketch' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:03PM (#9023320)
      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:WSAD (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

        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:WSAD (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Wesley Felter ( 138342 )
          On the contrary. The whole point of the 18-month development cycle for RHEL is that the ISVs can keep up with it.

        • Re:WSAD (Score:5, Informative)

          by r_cerq ( 650776 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @08:00PM (#9024358)
          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:WSAD (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 30, 2004 @07:31PM (#9024125)
      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.

  • I'm already using fedora legacy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sw155kn1f3 ( 600118 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:47PM (#9023141)
    I'm already using fedora legacy to update rh8.0 and 7.2 boxes (only four fortunately).

    No complains.
    apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade from fedora legacy work flawlessly.
    • 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 la
      • :) 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

  • The hat (Score:3, Funny)

    by RotJ ( 771744 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:47PM (#9023142) Journal
    So did Marc Ewing ever get his hat back, or was the whole enterprise a failure?

  • SuSE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nlinecomputers ( 602059 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:48PM (#9023153)
    I switched the few units I had on RH to SuSE about 6 months ago. Sure you don't have ISOs to download but you can WGET the FTP site and do your own private, in house FTP install just as easily. SuSE stable and has good documentation.

    • Re:SuSE (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hawkbug ( 94280 ) <psxNO@SPAMfimble.com> on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:07PM (#9023366) Homepage
      Yeah, me too. I actually have the pro version of 9, and will purchase 9.1 when it comes out. I moved like 5 boxes to it. I'm just so disappointed by Red Hat - I know they say FC is the same thing, but with more open source support.... but I tried FC1, and the installer locked up on me 3x in the same place on a machine that has Suse 9 running on it flawlessly. I used to have Red Hat 6.2, 7.1, 7.3, and 9 all running on this machine before, so I know it's not bad hardware. When the installer crashes, they can't convince me that FC is as stable as RH releases.

      • Re:SuSE (Score:4, Informative)

        by bcs_metacon.ca ( 656767 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:47PM (#9023694)
        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 fedora-list@redhat.com or http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ . Linux helps those who help themselves.

  • Fedora Core 2 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xconsulting ( 590727 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:48PM (#9023158) Homepage
    Might as well wait until Fedora Core 2 is released.

  • Debian (Score:2, Informative)

    by DaLiNKz ( 557579 ) *
    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.

    • Re:Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

      by justsomebody ( 525308 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:56PM (#9023249) Journal
      When RedHat decided to throw in the towel for any real distro

      When did this happen'?

      Redhat just moved people distro where it belongs. Between people.

      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). You'd notice if you try to search package for RH9 and same package for Fedora.

      I really don't know what is people problem with Fedora and neither does anyone that didn't jump to conclusion before even trying.

      • Re:Debian (Score:3, Informative)

        by Dunkirk ( 238653 )

        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

  • switched to Debian (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gevmage ( 213603 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:49PM (#9023171) Homepage
    Once the announcement came out that the only free version would roll over every 6 months, I switched to Debian on all my work systems (I already run Debian exclusively at home).

    • Re:switched to Debian (Score:3, Informative)

      by itsdave ( 105030 )
      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

    • so did they (Score:5, Informative)

      by Crayon Kid ( 700279 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @07:08PM (#9023913)

      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.

    • Re:switched to Debian (Score:3, Informative)

      by batkiwi ( 137781 )
      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 upgr

  • Java Desktop System (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:50PM (#9023191) Homepage Journal
    I am still planning to stick with RHL9, for a while at least. How many others are planning to do the same?

    Looking at JDS myself.

  • Frankly on my system (p2 266, 32MB TNT2 M64) I find the only distro that
    seems to run GNOME with any decent speed is Red Hat 8.0. Whenever I try more recent distros like Gentoo/Knoppix the GUI is extremely slow in comparison.

    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.

    • Re:Stuck with what works (Score:3, Informative)

      by SoTuA ( 683507 )
      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>?

  • Short life span ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:51PM (#9023196) Homepage
    Isn't it a bit early to kill off RHL9 ? I haven't really been paying attention since I'm a Debian whore (and Debian releases are few, far-between and far-too-few-things-changed), but it seems it's a rather fresh release.

    Or is this being done to give their commercial offerings a little more real estate ? 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".

    Aww heck it's a theory.

    • Re:Short life span ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:11PM (#9023394)


      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.

  • Just switched... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:51PM (#9023199) Homepage Journal
    I just switched for security reasons. I pointed nessus at an install of RH 9 and it came back with 6 or so remote exploits (Apache/SSL, PHP sendmail, named, mysql and openssh)

    I installed Fedora 1 with the same services and only got back the openssh bug, and that was easy to update from source. Yeah, I know I can patch 9 from source myself but it's too much of a pain in the ass to do regularly. I'd rather have something newer just because there's less to patch. It's like racing against the hackers. I'd rather start at the pole than at the back of the pack where they are.

    • Re:Just switched... (Score:5, Informative)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:57PM (#9023262) Journal
      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.

  • I went to SUSE (Score:2, Interesting)

    by digicide ( 775989 )
    I decided to switch to SUSE not long after I heard they were going to kill support. I like it a lot better.
  • By the time I was about to choose a web host for my site, the RedHat 9 end-of-life issue was already known and they offered Fedora (not RedHat 9.0) as the main OS. I strive to configure my systems in such a way that I can freely upgrade to the latest packages without worrying that anything would break.
    ___________
    naija geek [afriguru.com]

  • With RH 7.3... (Score:3, Informative)

    by SoTuA ( 683507 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:52PM (#9023206)
    ...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.
  • 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ehackathorn ( 168173 ) <erichackathorn@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:53PM (#9023222) Homepage
    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]

    • Re:white box linux (Score:3, Informative)

      by opkool ( 231966 )
      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 yo

  • Mandrake... for now (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vDiver ( 62458 )
    Having to bring along (kicking and screaming) several other folks in the office that need a bit of a crutch, I'm working the Mandrake way now.

    Will it stay that way? Probably, at least until I see a reason not to.
  • Some systems have already been migrated to debian, some aren't publically facing and the time/money isn't there yet. Overall our plan is to migrate everything to debian. Using stable and a quick apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade makes patching quite easy.

  • Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OblongPlatypus ( 233746 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:55PM (#9023240)
    I'm managing a remotely hosted Redhat 9 server. Does anyone know how risky (or even possible) it would be for me to upgrade to Fedora Cora 1 by simply pointing my sources.list at an FC1 repository and doing an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade?
    • Not a good idea (at least not in my experience and that was on a non-production box). I had countless conflicts, unresolved dependancies and general mess. And that was just installing the Fedora artwork :-\

      • Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Alan Cox ( 27532 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @09:13PM (#9024845) Homepage
        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

    • Re:Remote upgrade to Fedora Core 1? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:20PM (#9023463)


      I'm managing a remotely hosted Redhat 9 server. Does anyone know how risky (or even possible) it would be for me to upgrade to Fedora Cora 1 by simply pointing my sources.list at an FC1 repository and doing an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade?

      I did this with a laptop at work. I installed apt-get for RPM. Modified my sources. Did an "apt-get update" followed by an "apt-get dist-upgrade" followed by an "apt-get upgrade" to finalize a few trailing edge packages. It all went fairly smoothly.

      There was one odd bug having to do with some library for GNOME that, once I had it figured out, required removal and re-installation of the appropriate package. Sorry - I forget the details. None-the-less... I was half expecting to have to reload the thing. Went fairly well.

      Of course - this is a laptop sitting in front of me. Keep in mind that my very tired and currently fuzzy memory may not be recalling anything that would have caused massive heartache if I had been doing this process remotely.

      YMMV. ;)
  • I have a half-dozen production servers using RedHat 9, and I've been wrestling with this problem as well. The first thing we've done is make sure all the machines are up-to-date as of today (4/30). We will likely subscribe to Prodigy's support service, since replacing the OS or going without security patches will be impossible for us, and we like the convenience of the up2date mechanism. We will defintely wait to subscribe, both because there are no announced patches post-today yet, and because we want to h
  • I started on RedHat and it was a very nice distro for a beginner - I still recommend Fedora to those just setting out with GNU/Linux and have a couple of friends who recently switched. I myself however am burning a Gentoo CD as I post (still on Fedora), since usability is no longer a major issue and the customization of Gentoo just has too strong a draw. One thing that put me off staying with Fedora is the lack of upgrade compatibility between the Core releases - that and the huge CDs for install. The "upgr
  • I am still running 7.1 and 7.2 at home. I will switch to Debian, Gentoo, or something when my OS or HDD dies. :)
  • I liked the convenience of Red Hat. But I figured if I was going to have to deal with something else, I might as well learn something. Plus, others, like SuSE, wouldn'd recognize my 3ware RAID controller.

    So I switched to Gentoo. It was a pain to set up, but I'm very happy with it now.

  • Nope (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:01PM (#9023301)
    I went to Debian, and I'm happy. I figure if anyone's going to support their (free) product for a long time, it's the Debian Project.

  • Dealing With The End Of Life Of Red Hat Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by seifried ( 12921 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:02PM (#9023315) Homepage

    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

  • I've already moved to Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sunscream ( 678851 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:04PM (#9023328)
    ...and I will never look back.

  • Fedora is awsome (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yiliar ( 603536 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:17PM (#9023441)
    The only real change is that more people are working on the project, and telephone support is not really an option. So did you ever call before? I thought not.

    I have been using Fedora Core 1 at home and Fedora Core 2 beta on my work laptop since it became available. No complaints here!

  • switched to gentoo and debian (Score:4, Informative)

    by bolind ( 33496 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:25PM (#9023512) Homepage
    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.

  • Gentoo/Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smkndrkn ( 3654 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:26PM (#9023523)
    I use gentoo almost exclusively and I have slack 9.1 on a laptop. I can't bring myself to stop using slack since I used it since my first dealings with Linux many years ago but gentoo is just too sexy to deny. I'm installing stage 1 right now on an old PIII 500Mhz with 512M of RAM using 12 servers to do the work with distcc. mmmm emerge + distcc

  • Suse 9.1 Pro ISOs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Saeger ( 456549 ) <farrellj@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:31PM (#9023566) Homepage
    I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Suse 9.1 Pro [suse.com], which is due to ship on May 8th, but I'm guessing the 'unethical'-but-still-legal ISOs will be leaked [suprnova.org] to the net a little sooner than that, and definitely way before the FTP-only version is made available.

    I've got a gut feeling that Novell's SuSE is going to eventually unseat RedHat as the #1 solution for server AND desktop, so I'd might as well dump my RH9 desktop for it now.

    --

  • 7.3 and going strong (Score:3, Informative)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:35PM (#9023598)
    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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by poppageek ( 115260 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:35PM (#9023600)
    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.

  • Just upgraded last night (Score:3, Informative)

    by pyrrhonist ( 701154 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @06:40PM (#9023640)
    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.

  • Fedora Core and legacy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by danny ( 2658 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @07:12PM (#9023954) Homepage
    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.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @07:34PM (#9024152)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • fedora legacy (Score:3, Informative)

    by swmike ( 139450 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @07:53PM (#9024296)
    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.

  • We switched to Debian Stable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mslinux ( 570958 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @08:17PM (#9024462)
    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.

  • No Fedora, I left for Knoppix-hd (Score:4, Interesting)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Friday April 30, 2004 @08:28PM (#9024541) Homepage Journal
    Fedora Core 1 would not install on my dual p3-600 machine (which has been running RH since 6.2), no matter how many faqs and mailing lists I consulted for advice. I finally gave up and went to Knoppix. A couple hours of work after the install to get all my little tweaks working and I was home free... no regrets at all.
  • 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.

  • Redhat/Fedora user for a year now... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @10:42PM (#9025265)
    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!

  • Alternative to RH (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 01, 2004 @01:16AM (#9025900)
    I run a small website for a non-profit organization. Up until abut 2 weeks ago, I was using RH8 & RH9. My intention, before the end-of life annoucement sometime last year, my intention was to have a current release running the primary server, then setting up a stable "new" version when it was released (eg, go from RH8 to RH9) as a backup.
    Primarily, I was doing this for patches and bugfixes. I also (being a non-profit) wanted a quick, easy cheap fix and little downtime. If a catastrophic failure occured on the primary, I'd just move the CAT5 cable to the backup server, change a couple settings, and the backup is the primary. Then I can turn my full attention to the smoldering dead server.
    However, when RH announced their EOL set for this spring, I started looking around for a replacment server OS.

    Prerequistites were:
    FREE (non-profit = no budget in my case)
    Support system
    Ease of patch/upgrade

    I have a friend who runs BSD. I personally love some of the features it BSD incorperates. I espcially love the ports system. I hated all the file tree seemed foreign compared to Linux-based distros.

    I tried everything from Knoppix, Debian, Slack, Fedora, a few no-names I don't recall. I finally settled on Gentoo.

    As mentioned above it is a "young" distro. I love the portage system for upgrades. I did a install based off a stage3 tarball, and had my server (P2/400MHz) up and running FULLY in about 10 hours. Granted, that is not an acceptable downtime for some, but I have a mirror-setup between my primary and backup server, making it very easy to change who is primary.

    I have been using it for a Desktop for about a year and love it. As for a comparision between RH and Gentoo - RH has ease of "special" setups - Cyrus-sasl + sendmail, etc. But, Gentoo is much easier to patch IMO.

    In essence, I was very impressed with Gentoo's overall arrangement and would recommend it to anyone trying to switch from a RH w/o X installed (If you relied on X-windows for configuration of your server, then Gentoo may be a little more complex than that).

    But, that's just one former RH admin's opinion.

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