Linux.com

Aah! Don't you just love choice? =)

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More secure, better layed out and its gonna be kinda hard for them to start charging for F R E E bsd

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But I thought that BSD is dead

Sorry, couldn't resist

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RedHat's inability to update older versions of their distro (for all but the most frightening security holes) is one of the reason I left Linux altogether for FreeBSD.

That, and I was experimenting with the linuxfromscratch project, and wanted to compare with the competition. Everything I wanted to accomplish with my "roll-your-own" distro was already done, and better than I could have imagined, in FreeBSD.

Don't know what I'm talking about? You have nothing to lose in merely trying FreeBSD. If you find you like it, stick with it. If it's not what you're looking for, that's fine too. For my money, FreeBSD is where it's at.

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I'm with you on Slackware! I just installed Slackware 9 last night along with dropline gnome, and it's very cool! I'm impressed with it... It doesn't feel all slow and bloated like Red Hat and Mandrake do.

So I'm not going to miss Red Hat!

Although it is truly an end of an era. I started out with Red Hat 4.2 back in '97...

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It's a sad day for linux today. We now see one of ours becoming one of them. Yes Red Hat as contributed to the open source but OS community have given back. So now they just tell to everyone that they want to become the next Microsoft ?
I think that the Red Hat decline has now started and I won't trust them anymore from now on. How can you be sure that they won`t try to create a new monopoly ?
Greed. It`s just greed.

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Red Hat is getting a bad rep. They have contributed more to Linux than any other distribution, ever.

Debian is adopting Anaconda. Connectiva and Mandrake have adopted RPM. Alan Cox's work on the kernel has been paid for by Red Hat for years.

On the commercial side it is Red Hat who is primarily responsible for Linux's successful entry to the enterprise.

The next time someone tells you Red Hat is the next Microsoft, or the M$ of Linux, ask them what they have done for Linux that puts them in a position to look down on the contributions of Red Hat.

Joe Barr

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Although it is a little sad to see, I believe it will benefit all linux users in the end. If Redhat makes this work, it should help to bolster linux into the mainstream business environment. In turn, this should tempt companies that have written software only for Windows in the past, to write for linux as well. As more "commercial" apps are written for linux, more game developers should follow suit.

So in conclusion, I do believe it will help us out in the long run.

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The Windiotish style of RH 8.0 already shown
that something is wrong at RH.
That's why I left them (for Slackware)
half a year ago<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)

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I am have been very faithful to slackware from a very early age. I am glad to see more and more seeing the greatness in slackware =)

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what are u talking about? Gnome/KDE Desktop Environments? cuz those are totally independent from RH...

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This is nutz, REDHAT seems to be going the UNIX sun solaris way, what gives. Hope no one decides to go to the enterprise edition Redhat being good as they are, there are many flavors out there that are just as good. Yes SlackWare is my best bet. Main

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It's called capitalism. Companies can't stay in business without making money. Obviously they found that their desktop distribution was not bringing in enough money to justify further work on it.

Making money is not evil.

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Yes, I agree with you guys, both FreeBSD and Slackware
are great. But I don't understand what is all the fuss
about, RedHat Linux will just be extended by the Fedora
project (which is also Free).

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Folks,

Fedora is not the answer. There are some fundamental problems with the model, clearly designed to make it unstable. The propaganda tells you the truth -- Fedora is meant for the bleading-edge enthusiast with 2-3 releases per year and no long support tail. The distribution is controlled by a RH committee, which can pick the best nuggets for the commercial distro, i.e. the rental agreement for Linux. If you want free and support, its Debian!

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I guess they've grown big enough that they don't have to worry about the little users. Seems like a crap way to treat old school users and the community, but hey if they don't need us anymore...
Almost seems like an MS tactic, "Sorry we don't make enough off of this, so all of you can just f@$k off". At least there are a lot of other distros out there, but too bad most companys certify on RH. I use several distros, but always used RH for a stable distro to bring my friends into Linux.

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As a consumer or customer I always look for a good deal. But I also like it when the company selling the product is making money off me - respectable profits when aggregated over all those customers like me. Otherwise I know it's probably too good of a thing that won't last. In the short term, Mandrake, SuSE, Lycoris etc. will benefit, but eventually they'll run into the same issues (well they have already).

I think one long term solution will be Linux distros with proprietary applications running atop a FOSS kernel + middleware base. Maybe a bit like Lindows, except not marketed by used car salesmen.

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use several distros, but always used RH for a stable distro to bring my friends into Linux.

Sigh. Guess you're going to have to make the huge, huge switch to Fedora.

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I've tried Redhat 8.0 and recently RH 9. Then I took a look at SuSe 8.2 and I loved it to the point I ordered SuSe 9 and got it last week.

I installed it last week and it recognized my home network and allowed me to access my laptop (winxp) over the network with no extra configuration from my part.

They also got great online documentation, check out <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/us/private/support/online_help/howto/" TITLE="suse.com">SuSe</a suse.com>

you gotta love german engineering!!

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Almost seems like an MS tactic, "Sorry we don't make enough off of this, so all of you can just f@$k off".


Surely Microsoft's tactics almost always involve making money from stuff and locking the users in so that they can't "f@$k off", or at least not in any practical way.

I'll accept that I haven't really sent lots of money Red Hat's way (having bought a cheap retail edition a few years ago and then got some CD-Rs about a year or so ago). The Red Hat Network stuff is pretty decent, but if the future involves Fedora with various apt/yum packaging systems, I can live with that. I would have considered paying for a RHN subscription, especially if they'd sent out CD updates, but there's no way I'm upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise.

Otherwise, there's always the possibility of migrating to another distribution. When such advantages exist with one's chosen platform, why squander them?

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Red Hat has put a LOT of TIME and MONEY into the Fedora project. This isnt an F-off, its a reorganization. If anything they are saying to the community that their products will be built off a Debian-style community that caters better to the community's needs. Check out fedora, its great stuff!

If you a business user, pay for the "real deal", although I think their prices for small servers are a bit too high...

Cheers,
Ryan

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"Red Hat has put a LOT of TIME and MONEY into the Fedora project."

You obviously haven't used it.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-( I had it installed on two machines up till last week when I blew one away, can't wait to get it off of this one too!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-(

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Its also still a beta... but I've been using the beta and it works great! Fedora rocks!

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Dont be so quick. Ive been using it for monthes and it hasnt broken a sweat. Very solid for a beta, the only thing glitchy is RHN.

Back on topic, I have to admit they have mismanaged execution on this reorganization through...

Cheers,
Ryan

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"Red Hat has put a LOT of TIME and MONEY into the Fedora project. This isnt an F-off, its a reorganization." - I totally agree.

The Fedora project will still be a reliable product. IMHO RedHat has introduced open source software to a lot of non technical computer users. They are not an M$. The move to make the RedHat distro an open support model is not a new concept. It makes perfectly good buisness sense to do so.
Have you ever called and paid for support from M$? I know I couldn't afford it.

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That's nice. Did you ever BUY anything from Red Hat?

If not, then no. The DON'T need you. They need customers who are willing to pay something, so they can pay their developers.

Red Hat is not a charity. It is a business.

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you dumb cluck --

many people DID buy from RH. If you've purchased a dell server over the past 3 years, you would have received RH 7.3, 8, then finally 9.

There are -thousands- of dells in racks running perfectly fine with RH 7.3 and 8. The only updates needed are for security & errata. People who own these machines almost universally subscribe to RHN to get these updates conveniently and easily.

And now, RH is saying "sorry, we don't make enough off your RHN subscriptions, upgrade or go away". This is microsoftian.

What are people who have perfectly-running servers supposed to do?

debian, here i come

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Who's the "Dumb Cluck" here???

The beauty of Open Source is that, if Corporation X says, "We can't afford to support these old products for free any more," then you aren't simply screwed like users of older versions of WinBlows are. Those users have no choice other than to either keep running with unpatched software, full of more and more security holes by the day, or to shell out major $$$ to upgrade not only their version of Windows, but probably their hardware too. Linux is Open Source. That means that OTHER people can pick up support for it, such as... perhaps... the Fedora project maybe?

I still think it sucks that RH is dropping support for these packages, but to be honest, I haven't used their support for the past two or three years anyway! I've been using Ximian Red Carpet, which for a free patch server, blows the doors off the Red Hat Network any day of the week!

Over the next couple of weeks, I have plans to stand up a couple Red Hat servers at work here. We're going to pay real money for real support contracts, and it is still going to be thousands less than the equivalent Microsoft or Sun servers. On the other hand, the little network I support at the small school where my wife works will keep running on Red Carpet support. It all depends on what the needs are. In both cases, the servers will look very much the same. It's just a question of what level of support I need for them, and how it gets paid for.

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No different than MS... Yet you typical LUsers (Linux Users) hate MS, cause it's a childish Linux mentality trend. Well, I believe in using the right tool for the job, not something that's nothing more than hype!

Oh well, there's always Slackware, Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD! Nothing else compares.

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At least MS tells you to pay up front... bait and switch sucks.

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Clear my confusion.

What did they bait you with?

What did they switch it for?

How much did you spend?

How much value do you think you are loosing?

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$99 up front, $60 a year for updates. per machine. They assured me that if I paid my $60, i could get security updates.

That's all i wanted. The server has been running flawlessly for years.

Now they are telling me that I have to take a perfectly running, production server, strip it down to bare metal and install RH enterprise. (that's right, virginia, you just can't "upgrade" to enterprise, you need to -reinstall- the entire farking machine.)

On top of the expense of the several-day downtime period to reinstall RH and get my service back up and running reliably, they now want me to pay $400 a year. What a kick in the ass that is.

Sorry, i'm going elsewhere. I don't like guns being placed to my head, whether it's by MS, RH, or any other vendor.

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They still produce a free product it's now called Fedora and is still RH, but instead of support from RH you can find support in the open source community.

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Be fearful of becoming the Dragon Itself

I am filled with gratitude that one of us (Open Source community) is rising in the ranks to tackle Microsoft. Arthur Anderson will be pleased. IBM is happy. Red Hat has paved the way for Open Source development and helped get our little software community into the newspapers.

As for us, I still just want an operating system where I can write my own printer drivers. I am going to keep playing with my open-hood, transparent operating system that does nothing for me unless I tell it. And, that is not Red Hat anymore.

But, grateful I am that Microsoft's Computer-World domination has not gone unchecked. That they are losing ground 1% at a time!

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LPI offers tests for RPM or DEB package systems. And no the sky is not falling.

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This title worried me as did the onminous "Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line." but in the end, this is just a smart branding move and certainly doesn't mean "No more freebies!". They want to steer businesses to their enterprise line and having a line of products called "Red Hat Linux" would be distracting. So: "The Red Hat Linux Project, as this used to be called, is merging with the Fedora Linux project." At this point I see no reason to panic, its in Red Hat's best interest to be good members of the community, and if anything, it will serve the community better to have this line of development out front and more independent of their enterprise stuff.

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They could/should have mentioned Fedora in their message though...

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I think Fedora is a smokescreen to get out of the freeware business. The Fedora site says this: "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products." The key words are "may eventually", which implies no guarantees. They also state that there is a lot of work that will go into merging the Red Hat and Fedora code bases, which just ain't going to happen if Red Hat has no dependency on the project.

What's really sad about this announcement is that the guys like me who don't have any problem paying a minimal recurring fee (like the $60/year for RHN) are now cut out of the loop. We switched from MDK to RH because we wanted to be consistent with what most data centers run, but since we now own our own machines then we can run what we like. We'll also look again at FreeBSD.

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"It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."

So is debian unstable to debian stable.

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I agree Redhat's move is no big deal, and I'm astonished at the Redhat bashing in the discussion of this article. Redhat sells *services*, not software. They are doing the right thing to focus all their efforts on their enterprise customers. They have no obligation to support us individual users, other than to complete their current contracts. The $10 profit they make on a box of Redhat 9 disks does not cover the cost of a single call to tech support, and I have made 2 or 3 calls with each upgrade. I've known for quite a while that this cannot continue. I would much rather they bow out now and not raise any false hopes about further support.

Worries about Redhat becoming a monopoly are silly. The software is open-source. They would have to figure out some way to monopolize services.

Even though I recently migrated from Redhat to Debian (due to installation and upgrade problems), I wish Redhat the best. I love to see ever more corporate desktops running Linux. That can only happen with the kind of "enterprise" support that Redhat offers. I am very pleased to see Redhat donating millons to the legal defense of Linux and open-source licensing. That is not a selfish move. They would survive quite well in the corporate world even if they had to add a $10 royalty to each license. I am pleased to see Redhat supporting industry standards, like rpm and the File System Hierarchy. If they were thinking only of themselves, they would not be helping the smaller distributors by promoting such standards.

The free ride is over. We need to pay for our technical support, or rely on self-supporting communities, like www.debian.org. Will Fedora provide such a community? If it fails, it won't be because Redhat didn't do everything it can to give it a good start.

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Why choosing something that you need to pay with nothing more than just a brand name but not our lovely free Debian Linux? Go!Deb!Go!

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> our lovely free Debian Linux?

Isn't this the Linux distribution whose main 2 features (other than being completely free, which is the only good thing I admit) are:

1. uses incredibly old software (e.g. kde 2.2) with the claim that old == stable

2. is one of the few remaining linux distros to make floppy disk access a pain (no automount) and completely inaccessible to beginners?

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1. - True; there are reasons for that though, such as the need to make formal releases. Don't fixate on KDE, it was just unfortunate timing that KDE3 was released just about at the same time the last 'stable' (woody) release was made. There is a new release due "soon" (december... more likely a couple of months after that), which will include KDE3.

Besides, Debian also makes it very easy to install KDE3 if you want.

2- Even with KDE2, a couple of clicks on the desktop will make it easy without to do dubious patches to your kernel. Besides, floppies are a thing of the past (hell, they already were 10 years ago), and are finally disappearing now. That's not a real issue.

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I've been using RedHat Linux for many years for various network projects at my work. These systems have been firewalls, VPNs, data collectors. e-mail servers, database servers, and my personal workstation. I've always been able to count on RedHat Linux being an inexpensive but very reliable OS and application suite. In contrast to just about every other OS distribution I've tried, RedHat installed reliably on just about any hardware it claimed to support. I had only to read the instructions to understand what it couldn't do. During that same period, I was also working with Mandrake and Suse Linux, OpenBSD, and various Windows flavors on PCs. As a cheap way of using old computers for various network functions, RedHat had no peer.

Now, unfortunately, that may no longer be the case. Certainly, the days of being able to convert old hardware to other uses without considerable travail would seem to be over. At $350 per unit (the price of RH Enterprise that I'd have to purchase to do what I've used it for) RedHat is no longer an option economically.

It would be nice if Mandrake or Fedora could fill the void, but I doubt they can. Neither is oriented toward commercial users. I've never been comfortable with Suse's installation procedure, which I've found to be complex and failure-prone. There are many choices, but I don't see any good ones.

All I know is that RedHat has priced itself out of at least one market. I work in an environment where anything that isn't Microsoft is viewed with suspicion or outright hostility. The only thing RedHat (and thus, Linux) had going for it was that I could deliver solutions for little or no money in a much shorter time. Those days are gone.

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Everyone, Fedora is Red Hat Linux... Let's not shed too many tears. Red Hat's Development team probably does 90% of the Fedora Coding/Improvements. It's no differnt than Red Hat Linux.

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Fedora is not RedHat Linux. This is what the Fedora website says. It's financially supported by RH, its website is in the RH domain, and it's based on the old RH Linux, but it's composed of both RH and non-RH participants. It's no longer meant to be sold to people who depend on it for business, government, or other commercial use. It's a research and hobby tool now, and if it works for people in commercial environments, it's just a side benefit. IOW, it's Mandrake Linux.

As long as continued profit from delivering a solid, reliable distribution suitable for commercial users is not a motivation, I see no reason to believe that a large distribution like Fedora can be made to work reliably and with sufficient support for commercial use. Making a software project that large reliable is a discipline that hobbyists and researchers don't need and frequently don't have. That's why I'm not confident it can replace the old RedHat.

I'd like nothing better than to be proven wrong, however.

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"Making a software project that large reliable is a discipline that hobbyists and researchers don't need and frequently don't have. "

Funny, Debian seems to be quite stable and reliable. By far the most stable and reliable Linux distro I've ever used and a much larger project than Red Hat has ever been

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> Funny, Debian seems to be quite stable and reliable.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Debian has never tried to be cutting edge either. When I looked at one of their releases, most of the packages were at least one or two major revisions behind the equivalent RH package. They were still running a 2.2 kernel when everyone else had switched to the 2.4 kernel. Again, there's nothing wrong with being that far behind, if the only thing you are looking for is "stability", but it is often impossible to run up-to-date applications on your system if the glibc libraries are two or three years behind everyone else...

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My first try at installing Debian failed, with no hope of a fix, so I gave up and haven't tried since. In fairness, that was several years ago and it was a beta release.

The "crustiness" of Debian, as mentioned by Zrd11, is the main thing that has discouraged me from trying it, however. Change seems to happen slowly in that world, and there doesn't seem to be as much package support (IOW,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.deb or<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.rpm) support for Debian among the applications I typically use as opposed to RedHat.

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the debian crufiness myth is just that. a myth.

1. go to http://www.knoppix.net. Download and burn
2. Boot up CD. Loads right into X.
3. Pick "Copy to HD". Knoppix will copy itself to your HD. Reboot.
4. in your apt.sources file, make sure your default is "unstable" -- this is the testing branch
5. apt-get update && apt-get-upgrade.

There, you now have a debian system that is bleeding edge, and it was not painful in the least.

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Who wants to be the lab rat?

How is "Fedora" going to be the stable old Red Hat Linux, especially since RH (Red Hat) never, until now, had the ymmy bleeding edge-of-technology distro where the latest and greatest hardware could be bought off the shelf, plugged in, and made to work without hours of kernel tweaking? RH always succeeded in being the conservative and reliable choice, but are they so conservative now? Isn't Fedora competition with Mandrake and an RH solution for those types of you who love to overclock CPU's and count down the CPU's seconds to meltdown?

To most of the desktop community using RH, this shift is great, but to the commercial world who runs Linux on servers where stability is the concern, this posess a threat. I tried Mandrake, and it was definitely not conservative. It even crashed! In my opinion, anything that crashes isn't worthy of being on a personal computer to begin with; M$ seems to have set the PC crash precedence. Now seems to be going too far with compatibility; even to the point of crashing and giving weird alert messages that say nothing useful. That is out of this scope, but the main reason I used RH, because I wasn't going to chance bleeding edge and lose my commercial rep, nor was I interested in paying M$ prices, especially since Linux is Open Source to begin with.

The fact that RH is making different flavors of Enterprise Server to support or not support 1, 2, or 4 processors with a high limit set on RAM based on how much you pay, brings my thoughts back to the very reason I denied further utilizing M$.

Is this why there are so many Linux Distros out there?

What distro is good these days? Or should I start putting together my own distro?

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Dude, hold on. Look at how many people are touting OpenOffice, but that has no 'offical' support really. Yet, it makes it no difference to all kinds that are hoping it can take on M$ Office.

I've been running many of the Fedora nptl kernels and while I have had an issue with Firewire, everything else seems to be no worse than with RH 9 on the same machine. All my RH 9 software worked just as well or better on the Fedora beta.

I think another way to look at it is this. Most corporations will pay for software. What's waking them up is M$ forced upgrades. If a company can pay $175 for RH ELWS and just get a free OpenOffice install, then they've probably saved an upgrade cycle and reduced their chance for virii attacks.

I think Fedora will be fine for servers just like RH 7, 8, and 9 were. While it's true that Fedora's not 'supported', that's not stopped Linux from making inroads in the past, nor will it stop it in the future. The fact that Fedora has RH tied to it will also be enough for some.

Sure, it would have been nice not know that all my servers now - 1 x RH 7.3, 2 x RH 9, 1 x RH 8 - are basically unsupported. But as long as I'm not installing a ton of new apps on them, they should still have legs for a long time. Plus, someone will make patches for these systems out there. And, in fact, I wouldn't be too suprised if many of the Fedora patches worked on stock RH 9 boxes.

I for one am not worried. The Linux community is very resourceful and while it was nice have supported versions for free, it's not the end of the world that that's not the case anymore. Fedora will pick up some slack and then, probably, RH Enterprise will pick up the other.

Remeber, an alternative to buggy, virii prone M$ products are worth paying for for a lot of companies. The downtime they will not experience might be worth it alone.

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The problem is that there is no longer a RedHat solution for small businesses. I certainly can't afford $350/year per seat. I don't need phone/e-mail support, I just need backported security updates. The $60/year RHN up2date deal was awesome. I never needed to worry about licenses, just a contract for each machine that went into production. So if the server got upgraded or replaced, the new machine could assume it's contract. It was all very nice and tidy.

Fedora's 6 month life cycle and bleeding edge style make it completely unsuitable for production environments.

So where does that leave me? SuSE or Debian...

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As a sysadmin that has to maintain 100% uptime with minor maintenance requirements on multiple production web sites, there's no way in hell I'm going to use Fedora. Sorry, but I have zero interest in being a guinea pig for a Fedora distro that I suspect is going to eventually mutate into something that I won't be happy with.

As another admin here said, Enterprise 3 is an option, but frankly, the cost of the mid-range solution is too high. Don't forget that we're then going to get jacked for support costs in addition to that.

I hope RH can make it - they've done good things to help my business, but as a RH loyalist for almost 8 years that's turned a lot of people onto RH Linux, it sure would be nice if RH returned the favor in the form of a more affordably priced server solution.

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"I've never been comfortable with Suse's installation procedure, which I've found to be complex and failure-prone."

Just guessing, I'd say it's been a while since you've tried SuSE. You should try it again. The 8.2 and 9.0 Pro versions have a better installer (IMHO) than any other distro. And at ~$80.00 for the Pro version (including automated sec/bugfix updates), you can't beat the price!

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Are you new to Linux?

You don't need to buy the high end server. You can buy the workstation and install your server software on that. It will cost less than Redhat 9 Pro...

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I suspect that I've been in this business a good deal longer than you, actually. "install[ing] your server software" requires time to figure out how to install it and verify that it works at even the most fundamental level. This is something that RedHat, and other distros to a greater or lesser degree, do for me. There's plenty of software that I generally have to install and test already in my work, I don't need to figure out of this version of sendmail (procmail, whatever) works with this libc and bind version, etc.

Doing all this "installing" stuff takes time, which costs money (I don't work for free, and neither do most of my colleagues). The more of the configuration I build on my own, the more potential configuration management headaches exist, also. Remember from my original post that I work in a place where Microsoft is the politically correct solution. Seeing me flailing around for days creating a working, manageable solution when they can "just download it from the Internet" (nevermind there's more to it than that even in a MS environment) in Windows doesn't go well in that sort of environment. RedHat did much of the work of making a Linux server system functional.

Just as a fer instance, let's say I bought five of the WS verion of RHEL at $170 instead of the $350 for the server version. The time of a senior software developer costs a company like mine roughly $50 an hour (it's a small company). The differential in costs is $900, equal to about 18 hours of the time of someone like me. If, over the operational life of those systems, it costs more than 18 hours of engineering labor to integrate, install, and troubleshoot those systems than it would have if we'd just bought the server version, then I've cost my company money. If you're creating an Apache installation from scratch, with modules and PHP and a database connection, that could take two days right there. What's worse, if you run into trouble, it could take considerably longer. Or, you could spend a couple of days researching all the free or non-free third party packages. Don't forget, if you buy a WS, RedHat isn't going to be very helpful if you screw up your Apache server installation.

IOW, I'm perfectly capable of building my own distribution if I wanted to, but my employers would probably take a dim view of it - and I really couldn't blame them.

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It's always fascinating to watch a company try to move upwards on the 'margin' ladder. Sun did this when they abandoned the cheap techies and went for the telecommunications boom (thump!).

I wonder if there is ever a way to do this gracefully. Although the techies are tight-fisted with their coins, they do control the 'action'. The 'suits' have the big bucks to blow, but they tend to steer suppliers over the cliff.

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> It's always fascinating to watch a company
> try to move upwards on the 'margin' ladder.

Microsoft moved up and abandoned the techies in favor of non-technical users. There was a backlash called the Free/Open Software movement.

> The 'suits' have the big bucks to blow, but
> they tend to steer suppliers over the cliff.

Like lemmings.

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There's always debian and alot of other distros.

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Well this won't score points with us admins or software engineers. It's time to move on to Debian or OpenBSD for servers and MacOS X or Mandrake for desktops.

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As I read over the posts, I often wonder what is wrong with MDK? I run MDK 9.1 at home and work and it works great.

I also have installed MDK 9.1 on several clients' machines (usually as a Samba/proxy/MySQL) and it has been running realy great.

I tried running RH 8 and 9 and and I often find myself running back to MDK...why? Cause it has better packages on CDs and over the Net. Urpmi is also so cool!

I have heard many problems many have faced with MDK. I never had any problems. Then could someone enlighten me on why MDK is not for commercial use?

Eric
Malaysia

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Mandrake just isn't conservative; like they have to prove they're better or something.

Why do people overclock CPU's?

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(I was one of the ARs bashing Mandrake).

I think it depends what you're looking for. If you have fairly mainstream hardware (IDE disks, midrange processors) and you're looking for a big variety of packages, Mandrake is your distro. OTOH, I need a distro that installs on just about any old piece of hardware (486s, old SCSI disks, Jurassic-era ethernet boards), and I like to be able to find packages of "third party" software that are built for my distro, or have at least been compiled on it. RH fits the bill better for me.

My experience with Mandrake has been that it will fail, without any explanation, to build or upgrade on one of my systems. Then, I pull out the RedHat CDs and load it with no problems. This has happened enough times that I just no longer bother with the "try to load Mandrake" step.

Any distribution that makes you spend hours or days trying in vain to discover why it won't install on your computer (particularly when another distro of the same OS can install with no problems) is, in my opinion, not ready for commercial use. Perhaps the folks who program the Mandrake installation software have finally discovered what "return value", "exception" and "errno" mean, but I gave up several distributions ago (8.1, IIRC).

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My last experiences with Red Hat was... awful. On three different machines: 1) it installed (mostly) well 2) it installed well and X freezed randomely once every minute 3) it didn't install at all.

No issue at all on these machines with recent Mandrake (9.1) which offers, in my opinion, the best hardware support.

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I'm less concerned with X, although I've had no RH problems with it on most systems I install. I tend to avoid Nvidia-based boards, though. Is that what you were using on the systems RH failed to install onto? RH9 did have a bit of trouble with a GEforce 4 board on one of my systems. I just told it to be a vanilla VGA card and straightened it out after the install (by getting the NVidia drivers from their site).

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Of course Mandrake won't install on a 486 or on other old hardware - it's a 586 system. It isn't designed for this kind of thing. That doesn't mean it is worse than Redhat, obviously. If you really need that kind of compatibility with older stuff, there's still Slackware and Debian, amongst others.

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Hmmm<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... just a couple of hours ago I installed RH 9 and it missed my monitor. It was easy enough to correct, but both Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1 got the monitor on the first try.

No one, it seems, has complete hardware detection.

Other than the miscue on the monitor, though, so far I like RH for being very similar to the MDK I am long used to. I am in the process of securing it and Apache (default Apache install was 2.0.47) before opening the NAT flood gates on my router. One small point in RH's favor was the plain vanilla default index.html page. Basically it said "Cool, it works" without giving away any state secrets.

What can I say? It's Linux. I like it.

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I have found mandrake to work better as a server than Red Hat except in the case of VA boxes which had Red Hat hacked for the VA hardware. Mandrake has better security than Red Hat in my opinion. Fewer insecure options turned on by default. I know people who don't like that. They want insecure telnet and such turned on by default. I say good luck, hope you don't get hacked right away. Last time I checked Red Hat was a PITA for racks of servers. We didn't have a cdrom in each 1U and Red Hat made it miserable to install or upgrade over the net. Maybe they fixed that now but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Now the outrageous prices. Where is the advantage over Solaris if you charge more to license? Mandrake I can get for free but do belong to the club to support the distro a little. I am much happier with the direction Mandrake is going.

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Mandrake was bashed by other Linux distro's supporters since it was born, but it didn't prevent it to silently gain a massive user base over the past 5 years. And I confirm that it's an excellent product for server use in a commercial environment (BTW they have plenty of professional products based on their distro at <A HREF="http://www.mandrakestore.com/" TITLE="mandrakestore.com">http://www.mandrakestore.com</a mandrakestore.com>, including security solutions and an affordable clustering solution...)

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What upsets a lot of people with this Red Hat announcement is that their trusted, reliable older releases won't get updated/patched for much longer. Exactly that kind of problem is what Mandrake users seem to suffer today - I helped a friend out with some USB stuff on Mandrake 9.0 but the USB stuff was broken in the kernel and no (convenient, non-kernel-recompiling) update was available to fix it, whereas RH7.3 had been patched ages before, even though RH9 was out.

Mandrake's view seems to be, "Oh, since we just released version x.y, you shouldn't expect things to be fixed in version x.y-1." And since upgrades are presumably best done as reinstalls, you can see why serious users don't have Mandrake as their distribution of choice.

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Bullshit!

Why do Linux users do this to each other? I don't know. I use and support both Red Hat and Mandrake and both work great.

You, sir, ought to be ashamed for spreading lies.

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As I recall, Mandrake followed RedHat's lead in providing one year of support for the previous release after a new version was released.

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Uhm, of course this will be a problem. However, I see an option that would solve this problem. No it is not switching to another distro, but rather add the opensource way of thinking into the pot.

My suggestion would be to gather a community, that would take the initiative to build their own updates and patches for the unsupported RH versions.

If this initiative would give fruit, why stop with "outdated" RH distros? Would it not be possible if the knowledge existed (which is surely do) to build updates for other unsupported and outdated distros?

Why not call the project "distilla"?<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)

Anyhow, that are just my 2 cents regarding this matter.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/XeZa

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I think you're on to something.

I think a distro that will be a take-off of the last good RH free download, that has an alternative RPM update database, would be a good idea.

People would need to read security advisorties for Linux services and somehow incorporate this as RH did until now.

This is alot of work, but very potential.

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Something like "Fedora Legacy" perhaps?

http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraLegacy

As someone said it already, this all not that bad.

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As I understand it, isn't the Fedora project part of the plan for RedHat to drop RedHat Linux support? Fedora has the same apps, uses the same ftp servers and is sponsered by RedHat.
The way I see it, RedHat may be offically dropping their "freebie" line, but has helped to set up Fedora to take its place.
While I may not like the idea of a split in RedHat or the decreased support, I do have to admit that they've planned this out well and it looks like we will have a RedHat-like OS through the Fedora project.

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they haven't thought this one out well at all.

The issue isn't the future -- it's the present.

Existing customers who have functioning, stable servers are being forced to take their machines offline * install RH enterprise from scratch (you just can't 'upgrade' over an existing installtion). OR they face hte prospect of having no more updates (and being insecure) starting 1/1/04

This is no choice at all. This is going to severely hurt any business that relies on RH for a production system. (yes, even the ones that have been loyally paying $60 a year per machine.)

RH has no good answers for this. Shame on them for putting their customers into this situation.

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I looked at the Fedora site, and I don't get a clear indication if they will be providing support for older RD releases. My questions then are:

- Who is going to provide support for older RH releases (7.1 through 9.0)? (Ximiam does an excellent job of providing this, but at the expense of changing over to their slightly different way of packaging things.)

- What mechanisms (RHN?) is Fedora going to use to support their own releases?

To be honest, I really hate pawing through FTP archives once a week, looking for packages that need to be updated, especially when you multiply that times a dozen different systems, all running slightly differet configurations. Patch servers like RHN and Red Carpet make my job as a SA a whole lot easier. I didn't see any specific mention of this on their site, but I'm hoping that Fedora can set up something like this some time in the near future.

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Fedora will use both up2date and yum to provide updates. up2date has been updated to be able to query and use yum repositories as well as the regulat RHN based repositories.

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I agree completely. This was going to be nescissary eventually...the old system wasn't going to scale up much longer. The enterprise linux will be well-worth the price to enterprises...just not to casual users...me included. I want to run an enterprise system without paying enterprise prices. Up until RH 7.3 that meant manual updates.


    The real question, as you said, is will fedora include a RHN-like update system. Sure, I'm a big linux geek, but keeping up with updates still sucks. I'll probably be looking into another distro.

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Two that I use on RH today:
1. Ximian Red Carpet
2. Synaptic/apt-get from Freshrpms

Both work as well or better than RHN. Apt-get works well for remote machines where you may only have an SSH session running. You can also script it easily into automated cron jobs for autopilot operation. Red Carpet works get with a GUI.

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I am a Red Hat 7.2 + Ximian user in the process of creating my own small business.

Novell recently purchased Ximian. How is this going to affect me?

Novell has also now acquired SuSE.

All of this simultaneous change really has me scratching my head about what direction I'm going to take.

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When I first received the email (being an RH9 user) I was shocked that they were not going to be providing a free version only the overly priced Enterprise versions.

However having looked at the Fedora project page this could be a good thing. Just looking at on face value they appear to be taking the idea from Debian's book and making the release entirely Community based.

The bad thing I see if that small business who may have considered RH Linux as a possible windows switch and were glad they could still get support (if they wished to pay for it), now they can only get that with the Enterprise versions which IMHO are ridiculously overpriced. Even the basic workstation version is almost as much as Windows XP Pro ($189 according the RH website, $299 with support).

Oh well I was thinking of switching to the BSD's or Mac OS X anyway.

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I'm using Mandrake and I'm very happy with their security updates. They offer it very professionally through <A HREF="http://www.mandrakesecure.net/"