Category: Toys, Tools, Tech
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Terrific -- so I spend hours setting up Red Hat 9 on my home system, just in time to learn that Red Hat Linux has been officially discontinued. Now Red Hat is going to split its work into two projects, a commercial effort ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux", in 3 editions from workstation to datacenter) and an unsupported open-source project (the "Fedora Core") for the audience that traditionally would have gone for the standard retail-box RH Linux product.
Woo hoo! Yeah, there's no better feeling than bending over backwards to install software that's end-of-lifed before you can even get it working 100%. Grrr...
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I feel your pain.
But Fedora Core, while not supported, will probably work out fairly well, with the added bonus of not having to pay for it. Just like Mozilla.
And, of course, there's always Mandrake. I'd cozy up to Jo, he's your friend in such matters, and has the patience of a saint about issues that matter to him.
And if you need further proof that I feel your pain, I'm compiling my own binary of Perl in my local directory on my shared host so I can run the trackbacks that MT requires.
*sigh*
For Red Hat to live on, it has to be done since they aren't getting that much money from supporting home users. How many home users are going to plunk down money for the RH updating service (the name escapes me...)?
Answer: not many since they will install apt or figure out some alternate way of getting what they need. Not that this is a bad thing, but I don't think there really is a "Linux using in need of handholding" demographic here.
You're right about the sales issue -- I'm using ISOs I grabbed from their site rather than a paid-for boxed version, which I'm sure makes me part of the problem :-/ In fairness, that was only because I was planning to evaluate RH9 though; if I stuck with it I would have been happy to shell out the cash. But I can see how many people probably haven't been.
As for the updating issue, I dunno. Based on my (limited) experience the Red Hat Network is pretty slick -- it's very close to Windows Update, and I mean that in a good way (nice GUI, things get packaged and installed easily, etc.). Is there a front-end for apt that does the same?
I don't have a big problem with them ending sales of the low-end product so long as Fedora Core users can still connect to RHN. Otherwise they've effectively cut off those users from updates (other than those that 3rd parties bundle together). The Fedora site is ambiguous on whether Fedora users will be able to buy RHN subscriptions, so I guess we'll have to see how it shakes out...