[NBLUG/talk] RH Linux 2/28/04 "hot deals"

[E Frank Ball]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 09:25:03PM -0800, HarryH wrote:
} Hi,
} 
} I received the following e-mail from Red Hat saying that I
} could have "2 years for the price of one" of their new ES
} Linux.  It looks like one would be "renting" the OS from RH?
} Anybody have any thoughts on this RH offer?  Good, bad, so
} what?  I was thinking of getting SuSE 9.0 Pro (very good
} reviews) from Amazon for $65.  Any thoughts on SuSE?  Or is
} Fedora really RH 10 with rough edges and the best way to go?


I've already moved all of my home machines to Debian.  No
way in hell I'm paying even half price for RedHat Enterprise
(still about $100/machine/year).  I'd buy an Apple first.  I
think the "rent" analogy is right on target.  If you stop
paying you have to wipe the hard drive.  If you only pay for
one machine you can't use the security updates on another.

At work we are considering setting up some RedHat Enterprise
machines, but only where we have to.  We have some non-open
source software that may only run on Enterprise (one of our
vendors doesn't seem to have made up their mind yet).
Debian, SuSE, and Fedora have all been mentioned as
alternatives.  I'll probably setup one Debian machine of my
own at work and have one that's either Fedora or Enterprise.
It's also likely that we will stretch RedHat 9 long past
April.  Somebody was offering security updates for
$5/machine/month after RedHat dropped it, they may get some
business.

If you have modern hardware then I have nothing bad to say
about SuSE.  If you are trying to stretch old hardware to
see what you can get out of it Debian is the clear choice.


-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at efball.com