arctic Posted January 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 ...the bit I don't actually like about all this is this. A proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. you might be thinking why? Look at it this way. Fedora is a free release. It's cutting edge, with all the new technology and Red Hat is using Fedora's users as a test bed for any problems with these new technologies. Then, they get introduced into Red Hat, for money to be made using these services. But, the people who used Fedora to iron out the bugs, etc, etc, what do they get from it all? No free version of Red Hat Linux? Don't get paid? Red Hat use the free community to achieve their business goals to make money without having to have to recruit and pay for their own testing team. That's what I don't agree with. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I will answer to it although I am not a Red Hat guy. :P If you complain about Fedora technology being included into a corporate release by Red Hat, than you should also complain about Mandriva and Novell and others, too. Mandriva uses the Community/Powerpack editions as a "test bed" for their corporate releases as well. Proven technology from OpenSUSE is the base for Novell-Linux. They all want to gain money. And they have a right to do so imho. Yes, we all, even Debian users are a test bed of some sort. Just like Windows users are a test bed for Microsoft products. You ask what we (the fedora users) gain. In fedora, Mandriva and Novell/SUSE it is quite simple: We get proven developers. In case of Red Hat, they sponsor the fedora project. They iron out bugs, they build packages, they care about security, they offer the development platform, they offer servers and the costs involved and they work together with the fedora-community. I don't see any real problems with that. After all, every testing that is done in fedora is not only useful for Red Hat, but also other non-commercial fedora/Red Hat based distributions like CentOS, Whitebox (two free versions of RHEL) or Aurox or Fox (Fedora clones). Without the support of Red Hat, the amount of packages for fedora would be heavily reduced imho, the release schedule would be difficult to maintain and you wouldn't have people who care about a distro 24h a day. Also: Red Hat still has people testing the RHEL, as RHEL is never a 1:1 copy of fedora. Some things from fedora will go into RHEL, some things won't or only in an altered state. So they need to test their releases before they sell them. And, let's be serious: RHEL is not cutting edge. Do you think fedora users would drop back to a "dated" version? You could just as well ask yourself: Would you drop back from e.g. the bleeding edge Gentoo to e.g. the rather dated but proven Debian stable? I doubt it. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 Fair point, it's the way they word it that makes me not like it :P Do Mandriva or Suse/Novell have the same price tags that Red Hat have though? The way I see it should be is that the OS should be free, since it's been contributed to for free, and that you just pay for the support you require. Red Hat used to be free, but now you cannot get it without paying, which gives you the support. Since, if your looking for support, that's the way it should be. Note that if you purchase Mandriva Powerpack as a single user, you get crap support anyway from Mandriva. Unless of course you are a corporate user paying thousands more!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 Oh, and Mandriva do have a free version, but Red Hat do not. Fedora is what you would say is the equivalent of Cooker, than a tried and trusted release. So of course, Mandriva have paid versions, but at least you get the free ones as well. Fedora although it is free, is bleeding edge, might have lots of problems like cooker, but there's no Free stable release if you like that's the equivalent of Mandriva 2006 Free, or LE2005, etc, etc. Unless I'm missing something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 AFAIK the services are included in the price when you buy RHEL. Novell and Mandriva are not much cheaper for corporate servers from what I heard/read. And as I said: The free versions are CentOS or Whitebox. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 CentOS/Whitebox is a different distro though surely? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 They are 1:1 copies of RHEL that are thus 100% compatible to RHEL and its patches/bugfixes. The only difference is that you do not get professional/paid support for those releases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 That's OK, I would't expect support if it's free. Why don't they just call them Red Hat Free then? Instead of being branded as another distro. Do they come directly from Red Hat as another distro? Or are they put together by someone else? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 (edited) Fair point, it's the way they word it that makes me not like it :P Do Mandriva or Suse/Novell have the same price tags that Red Hat have though? The way I see it should be is that the OS should be free, since it's been contributed to for free, and that you just pay for the support you require. Red Hat used to be free, but now you cannot get it without paying, which gives you the support. Since, if your looking for support, that's the way it should be. Note that if you purchase Mandriva Powerpack as a single user, you get crap support anyway from Mandriva. Unless of course you are a corporate user paying thousands more!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You can get it for free, have at it! ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/ent.../os/i386/SRPMS/ Or just d/l CentOS 4.x :) RH is charging for support, the OS is free. Heck, if you don't want to mess with SRPMS. http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/details/eval/ Download the real ISO's for FREE and use RHN (very nice) FREE for a month. After that, either rebuild SRPMS-updates and install them, or switch to CentOS by d/l these rpms: centos-release-4-2.1.i386.rpm centos-yumconf-4-4.3.noarch.rpm python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.i386.rpm python-sqlite-1.1.6-1.i386.rpm python-urlgrabber-2.9.6-2.noarch.rpm sqlite-3.2.2-1.i386.rpm yum2.4.0-1.centos4.noarch.rpm RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4 or there updated onese by now. cp /etc/redhat-release ~ rpm -e --nodeps redhat-release rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4 rpm -Uvh *.rpm yum update Now you have a RHEL 4.x clone with yum :) Edited January 5, 2006 by cybrjackle Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 That's OK, I would't expect support if it's free. Why don't they just call them Red Hat Free then? Instead of being branded as another distro. Do they come directly from Red Hat as another distro? Or are they put together by someone else? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The free isos are built by independent guys, so they cannot use the trademarked Red Hat name or logo. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 Something else off topic. What the hell is the srpms stuff? I saw this when I was downloading Fedora, but picked the normal iso's cos I had no idea what the srpms iso's were. How does Red Hat work then if you use the srpms? It doesn't time-out after 30 days? And if so, how do I get an OS working with srpms? Same way as using the normal iso's? Sorry about this, I've no idea how all this works, I've only played with Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake/Mandriva and Xandros so far. Oh, and FreeBSD too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 the srpms are simply the source-rpms that Red Hat and fedora provide. That way you can recompile all packages against your hardware for maximum performance. Some people stick to the i386 compiled binaries, some people prefer to compile the srpms against e.g. their i686 hardware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 once your 30 days is up, you can either mv to CentOS, using yum to keep updated or you can down load the updated srpms and: rpmbuild --rebuild package.src.rpm Which you would actually pull the updates from here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/upd...AS/en/os/SRPMS/ Which you could find new updates by following stuff like this Security Advisories https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/advisory/ Mailing list for Security Advi. https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ent...ise-watch-list/ RSS feed: http://rhn.redhat.com/rpc/recent-errata.pxt UPdate Notes (package list) from one quarter update to the next: https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/notes/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 5, 2006 Report Share Posted January 5, 2006 Cool, I've learnt something new today :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Installed Fedora Core 4 today on my work laptop (replacing Gentoo). And posting this from Fedora too :P Had a few problems, but nothing that was a major showstopper. First time around, the installer created the partitions, but then when it came to installing, failed saying it had to be rebooted because of changes to partitions or something. So I rebooted, and from the CD again, and tried the installation again. Second time around, the partitions were still there, just had to set mount points, and then format ext3 and swap. Found it rather disappointing that the only Linux file system types are only ext2 and ext3. Where is reiserfs? Where is xfs? I've also found this to be the same under my Red Hat system too (currently under evaluation). Also during second time round, on changing CD's it sometimes didn't recognise them, so I had to remove, and then reinsert to get around that. Glad it wasn't a bad burn :P I made sure during installation that selinux was disabled, since arctic's recommendation about speed. Then went through all the services, and disabled all the ones I didn't want, that related to nfs, portmapper, gpm, kuzdo (hw detect), and others. Then made a few other tweaks that I usually do that's supposed to speed things up. vi /etc/sysctl.conf vm.swappiness = 10 default is 60 normally when no entry is present. No idea what this does exactly but I always do it from an article I read on speeding up system. vi /etc/inittab comment out some of the tty's (no's 3 - 6) I don't need 6 tty's, 2 are suffice. vi /etc/modprobe.conf alias net-pf-10-off disables ipv6 from the system. And updated signature accordingly for all my distros :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Just out if interest, what's the equivalent to urpmi in Fedora?!? :P Am figuring out how I can install additional packages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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