[Techtalk] RedHat - Fedora Linux

[caitlynmaire at earthlink.net]

Hi, everyone,

> <angry>
> But I, a RHN subscriber, don't like this a bit.  I chose RH precisely
> because it had a commercial update service available for a reasonable
> fee.  I'm perfectly willing to pay for updating if it's fast and
> convenient.  RHN is.  If they won't have Fedora support in RHN (for a
> fee, naturally), I have to think about switching to something that
> supports Gnome nicely.  I don't want to tinker with updating important
> things.  My computer gets all the errata automatically every two
> hours, and that errata is GPG-signed.  I DO NOT WANT ANY SORT OF GEEKY
> DIY UPDATING IN MY PRODUCTION MACHINE!  
> </angry>

Before RHN what happened was that e-mails were sent out with
a notice about a vulnerability.  You downloaded the patch(es) in 
the form of an rpm and insatlled them.  DIY, perhaps?  Difficult, no.
Errata will still be produced.  I don't see RHN as such a big deal
unless you are supporting a bunch of systems.

> I also think that 200-euroish a year pricing (for the most basic
> enterprise thing) is simply overkill for me.

Agreed.  I plan on running Fedora.  I already run Vector Linux on 
three of my personal machines, and I have to install the updated
packages on my own with that as well.  It really is no big deal.

> t won't.  I work in a big NGO, near the IT dep., and this just cut
> away one of the nice things about Linux: reasonably priced, automatic,
> non-fiddly[1] updating, without reboots, I might add (but now only if you
> remember to switch the auto-reboot off... oh, darn).  Another reason
> to stay in XP...

Now you're being ridiculous.  Stay with XP?  Thank you, but no.  It's
expensive and grossly insecure.  There are several other Linux distros
that do what you want.  Mandrake offers a service similar to RHN that
works quite nicely.  I would be surprised if SuSe didn't as well, though
I haven't run their distro lately.

I don't think "having to think about updating", meaning doing a download
and running a single command is such a big deal, but it obviously is to 
you.

All the best,
Caity