[Techtalk] RedHat - Fedora Linux

[Diggy Bell]

I haven't seen anything come out of Ximian about Fedora.  That might be one
place to consider for keeping up to date.  I've used Red Carpet on a few
machnies just to play with it and have had pretty good luck.  For some silly
reason I use KDE instead of Gnome, and Ximian is pretty Gnome-centric.  But
other than that, it seems to work well.

I took a peek at their web site and it looks like Red Carpet Express would
be the way to go.  I tried finding pricing for it and all I could find was
their web-based support.  One year is 99USD (~86EUR).

For the corporate folks, you could even consider their enterprise product
for an internally hosted update server.  Don't know anything about it except
the name, and would imagine you better have deep pockets, but that might be
something to quiet the rumblings filtering down from the rarified air from
above.

I will add one caveat.  I haven't really been following Ximian's stuff to
see if there are any typical or unusual problems.  My use was limited, but
it seemed to do what I wanted it to.

One small admission...  For the stuff that I actually have exposed to the
world, or that I use in my own applications, I'm hardcore enough to still do
my own builds from the tar.gz source from the maintainer.  If it's really
important, I want to be able to get my hands on the fix just as soon as I
possibly can.  I am paranoid enough to think that the time difference
between the release of a patch and the availability of the rpm MIGHT be
critical. (...they MIGHT get security/stability into Windows too...)
[apache, php, postgresql (NO!  NOT EXPOSED!  Behind the wall only!), ssh,
bind]

Of course, I think 'tar xvf <blah>;./configure --prefix=/usr2/<blah
blah>;make,make install' is kind of fun too. :P  Just for kicks, you might
look at rsync'ing /usr2, or throw it on a NAS somewhere.  I know that's sort
of DIY, but you shouldn't get any more messy than you would changing a tire
or your oil. ;)

Diggy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eeva Järvinen" <eeva.jarvinen1 at luukku.com>
To: <techtalk at linuxchix.org>
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 10:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Techtalk] RedHat - Fedora Linux


> On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 03:37:33PM -0400, caitlynmaire at earthlink.net
wrote:
> > Thank you so much for the clarifcation.  It seems that support
> > (patches, etc..) for Red Hat through version 9 will die.  It seems
> > that 9.1 or 10 or whatever will instead be called Fedora Core 1,
> > but that it is essentially the same thing.  Of course, no shrink
> > wrapped copies and support limited to community and mailing
> > lists, but there will be errata (patches, whatever) available for
> > download.  That seems reasonable to me.
>
> <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>
>
> I also think that 200-euroish a year pricing (for the most basic
> enterprise thing) is simply overkill for me.
>
> > I don't know if this will help Red Hat turn a profit.  I seriously
> > doubt it.  I also don't think this will help corporate acceptance
> >  of Linux at all.
>
> It 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...
>
>
>
> Eeva
>
> [1] non-fiddly meaning the sysadmin doesn't have to know about
> sources-lists, meaning that it works the same way year in, year out,
> meaning that you do not have to think about updating.  up2date+rhnsd
> is not perfect, but it's the best thing I've used.
>
> -- 
> Ja nyt minä painun ruusutarhoihin
> jotka puhkesivat tänne
> ennen syntymääni.
>
>                                               Mirkka Rekola
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