[NBLUG/talk] Red Hat go bye bye

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Wed Nov 5 15:06:02 PST 2003


On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 02:38:01PM -0800, Walter Hansen wrote:
> Ok. Red Hat Enterprise is not a valid solution to my Linux needs as I
> suspect it will not be for many of the people on this list. I even emailed
> sonic support and they may be looking into Debian.
> 
> So obviously, except for my RH7.3 machine that is going to stay that way,
> I'm wondering what might be good migration options. I know that there is
> another distrubution that uses rpm files (I like em, but can do without
> them). Also there is this Fudora, which I know next to nothing about, even
> after going over the web page. Is it going to be a less well supported
> version of RH?
> 
> I know that service scripts are handled differently amongst the
> distrbutions and admit I am fond of the RH style "service start xfs" etc.
> 
> Anyhow I thought this might be a good time for those wiser in the ways of
> the force (er, linux) to lend their input to the less fortunates. Are
> there other distrubutions that have an update service or program? What are
> the pros and cons of the varrious distrubutions?
> 
> I'm sure there will be much chatting about this at the next meeting.
> 
> 
> 
>                                      Walter Hansen
> 
>                       -hey where'd that rug that was under me go?
> 

I don't know whether I want to touch the whole "Pro and Con of various
distributions" question here, but I will tell you a bit about Fedora.

First, if you have a lot invested in your Redhat install, I wouldn't go to
the trouble of switching your distro entirely without first trying Fedora,
especially if you just downloaded the Redhat ISOs for free from somewhere
and installed that way.

Basically, Fedora is for all those people who haven't been buying support
from RedHat in the first place.  The packages will be there, and you can
even get support for unsupported versions of Redhat through the Fedora
Legacy project.  

With Fedora you can use up2date to update your packages like normal, and
up2date can work with yum and apt-get tools as well -- this means automated
dependency checking, with a (hopefully) large package repository that is
updated frequently.  RedHat won't sell support for the Fedora Project, but
there will be lots of development and packaging going on continuously, it
seems -- kinda like Debian unstable.

The Fedora installer is the Redhat installer with Fedora replacing mentions
of Redhat throughout.  Really it should "feel" the same as any Redhat
install and desktop you have used.  I'm pretty sure you can migrate and
upgrade your Redhat 7.3 desktop there as well more or less seamlessly, but
you might want to back up some configuration settings (and your /home
directory) just in case.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



More information about the talk mailing list