Greetings! Just my luck. This past spring our organization (a Community Net) did an in-depth evaluation of different flavours of Linux. We were looking for two critical factors, both rooted in the fact that our organization often find itself lacking in technically qualified personnel: 1) We wanted a Linux distribution that would be relatively 'stable' over the course of years, so that we could write a single procedure manual that would not becoce outdated too quickly, and, 2) We wanted a Linux distributions that would have a good set of tools for (near) automatic updates of the software for patches/errata. We settled on Red Hat because of the above, and as a bonus, we were able to get Red Hat Network which would inform us of when patches were released. And all this fit within our meager budget. Now, less than a year later, Red Hat (basic) is being dropped, the RH "Enterprise Edition" is ridiculously expensive (for a small not-for-profit community net, anyways), and while everyone seems to think that this 'Fedora' project is an adeqaute replacement, there are no real documents on *how* to make this migration/transition, and whether 'up2date' will continue to work in the same way. Or how it *will* work if it is different. There is also no clear indication in the downloads page of which versions are 'stable' and suitable for a production server environment, and which ones are 'test' versions. Or I'm looking in the wrong place. To me there is a much stronger flavour of Fedora being a 'test' or 'development' site that than a place to obtain stable Linux distributions. But this can't be right, can it? So, exactly how would I go about making a *smooth* transition to running Fedora (from RH9), and what manual procedures would I have to run to replace the functionality of the Red Hat Network, and keep things 'trained monkey' simple.....?
