Re: Re: Fw: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning

[Steffen Kluge <kluge () fujitsu com au>]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 03:22, Jonathan A. Zdziarski wrote:
> Does Fedora even have a CD image or is it just another repository?

Yes, there's ISO's for your convenient d/l and installation.

> A CD
> image is probably one of the easiest things they could put together,

Easy maybe, but it still takes time and resources. Are you going to
volunteer to build ISO's for Fedora? I thought not. But it's "the
easiest thing they could put together"...

> and
> one of the most important things if they ever plan on being a viable
> desktop solution for commercial enterprise.

Well, did you even read what RedHat, the Fedora Project, and lots of
people in this giant thread have been writing? Fedora is *not* meant to
be a "viable desktop solution for commercial enterprise". RHEL 3 WS is.

Apart from that, I feel it needs to be repeated that RHEL, apart from
proprietary software RH might have thrown in, is still mostly GNU/Linux.
As such they can't keep it from us, and they don't. If you want to build
your own RHEL, go ahead, download the SRPMS, build them yourself, and
even benefit from updated SRPMS whenever security issues need fixing.
It's all there in the open.

That way you also benefit from any other contributions RH has made to
GPL'ed software, such as architecture specific ports/fixes/extensions,
admin tools, RHDB, etc. The two things you don't get is support from RH,
and the convenience of getting it all served on a silver platter.

Although I have yet to build my first RHEL 3 box from SRPMS, I'm going
to investigate this as a serious option for moving forward in the
enterprise space. I wouldn't be surprised if small PC dealers and
software distributors found selling Free-RHEL CD's at $50 a pop to be an
additional business opportunity.

For my own machines - give me Fedora any day. I've always found Red Hat
Linux (as we know it) too conservative for home use. I like to live
closer to the bleeding edge and ended up replacing lots of packages with
self-compiles, causing all sorts of dependency problems... %-)

(Jeez, I don't know why this topic is to hotly discussed on FD of all
places. You don't see nearly as much about it in Linux newsgroups.)

Cheers
Steffen.

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