[ic] OT: Alternatives to Red Hat

Lyn St George lyn at zolotek.net
Wed Nov 5 18:20:05 EST 2003


On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 13:50:47 -0800, Ed LaFrance wrote:

>Dear all -
>
>I apologize if this is a bit off-topic, but I think that this is a good 
>forum for this issue. As many of you probably know, Red Hat is undergoing 
>some strategic changes which will result in the near-term demise of Red Hat 
>Linux as most of us know it: versions 7.2 - 8.0 will no longer be supported 
>as of the end of this year; currently-shipping version 9 will no longer be 
>supported after April of next year. Red Hat will instead focus on their 
>Enterprise product, which is no doubt impressive - and has mandatory 
>licensing and subscription fees.
>
>For those of us primarily concerned with building and operating web 
>servers, this is a bit much. Red Hats Fedora project might be a 
>possibility, but it's unclear what shape that is taking just yet. I would 
>appreciate hearing any opinions on the other Linux dist's from those whom 
>have had the opportunity to use them for some time, again in the context of 
>interchange and web server services.
>
>Thanks in advance for all remarks!
>
>- Ed LaFrance

I would have suggested Suse as a good alternative, except that they've
just been bought out by Novell - and knowing what they did to 
WordPerfect I would now write them off the list. Lots of people will
recommend Slackware and Debian. Gentoo looks interesting.

I'm thinking of a different approach - take an existing RH distro, remove
everything except the kernel, glibc, sshd and wget, and then write a 
script to grab and install everything you need from tarballs. (I have
developed a pathological hatred of that Redhat Package Mangler)
I'm half way to this point now anyway, getting sources from the 
original developer rather than using RH's mangled versions. Updates 
could then be done with a Webmin interface, using a script totally 
under your control, and you would have a very lean and secure server. 
Only  a thought at this point, but it has its attractions ...


-
Cheers
Lyn St George
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