Charles Gregory wrote: > 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: Unfortunately you asked the questions in the wrong order...let me use a little cut and paste magic to make it a little clearer. First, there is a lot of information in the About and Participate sections of the webpage. (My one pet gripe about the webpage is that expanding menu on the right hand side, seems a lot of people have problems inuitively knowing that the Schedule page is under Participate menu and even fewer people seem to want to explore the menus, for exploration sake..a static expanded menu/sitemap would make some sense as an option to the collapsed menu) > 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? There is not a stable version YET. The name change to Fedora has happened during the middle of a a beta/testing cycle for RHLproject (which by the way was the original name change from RHL, RHL->RHLp->Fedora..its a mad mad mad mad mad mad world.) General availability of Fedora Core 1 seems to have slipped a few days, but last i heard it should be available by the end of this week....but I'm still catching up from being unplugged from the net for over a week. Now whether FC1 is going to be suitable for you production needs is going to be a decision you will have to make. Hopefully it will be an informed decision: http://fedora.redhat.com/about/faq/ http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.html http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/ I think i heard some people were going to start a Fedora EOL policy Blues Band, to travel the country playing soulful, cathartic laments for packed houses of Red Hat users who are pining for an affordable(ie without cost) solution with errata/update lifetimes of at least 1 1/2 years. But they all decided that have negative musical ability so instead they are trying to build up the Fedora Legacy idea (as loosely defined in the terminology page) as community solution to the short EOL policy which is summaried in: (http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html). Fedora Legacy has a mailinglist at: https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list And by the way, the EOL issues with RHL and Fedora has been rehashed about 17 billion times on the mailinglist threads, the /. headline about the impending EOL doom, probably isn't going to help the signal to noise ratio on any of the lists..sadly. I'm pretty sure from reading your post that the EOL issue is going to be a stumbling block for you with Fedora moving forward...so if I were you I'd take a good hard look at what the Fedora Legacy (and similar attempts at a post-EOL world) are doing and see if you can contribute to the Legacy effort in a meaningful way. > 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. Well, as of now in the test releases of Fedora, you should be able to upgrade from RHL9 (for example) to a Fedora test release using the cd media. Not very unlike how someone would upgrade from RHL8 to RHL9. (I won't get into the works-for-me situations of using something like yum to do the upgrade without using cd media...) I have not had any indication that upgrading (using the cd media) from RHL->Fedora Core 1 will be especially more broken than previous upgrades from one RHL to the next. But I'm sure any lingering bug in the anaconda installer will be construed by about 30% of the userbase (the ones who wear the tinfoil hats and underwear) that its a malicious attempt to break the upgrade path. As for up2date, I'm not really sure if Fedora Core 1 will be using RHN at all...but up2date has gained support for community based yum repositories...and so has the rhn-applet (the graphical thingie that gives you a big red middle finger when you need updates.) So, essential...right now, looking at what's in the test release of Fedora Core....how i interact with up2date and rhn-applet as an end-user, isn't very different. But, how up2date is actually working could be considered significantly different. the up2date that makes it into Fedora Core 1, might not work exactly the same (I'm not sure that it can grab advisory text without rhn for example unless it has rhn support), but it should get the update job done...you just might have to spend a little more time configuring it to use your favorite fedora mirrors..but the fact that you CAN configure it to use fedora mirrors is a pretty important community oriented feature, and its important not to underestimate the significance of broadening the up2date tool. > 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.....? Depends on exactly which functionality of RHN you are trying to replace. Some of the more advanced features of remote update scheduling using the rhnsd service, I don't think have been replicated. But the real answer is stay tuned..... Any answer the community can give you now about how to use up2date with Fedora Core 1..will be a partial answer at best...and worse it might be the wrong answer for what you want to do...since you don't want to run a testing box...and right now for the testing release, up2date is geared to make testing easier. I am expecting some clarification on specific up2date issues as part of the release. So my best advice to you is to wait for the release annoucement, which should come out this week...then read the announcement and the release notes...then drink a shot of tequila and read the announcement and release notes again. Do that last step a couple of times more, get a good night's sleep and then if things still aren't clear enough, ask questions again a couple of days after the FC1 release. -jef"Conferences....bah humbug"spaleta
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