All,
At the moment, we have four downloads of the Debian version of our software
in comparison to over a hundred for RedHat 9.0. Fedora appears to be the
choice, and it does say that binaries will be available. Mandrake is also
another option; I get a significant number of users saying that they use it.
Debian is always way behind RedHat and Mandrake in terms of software
versions and hardware support. I would like to know in advance how this
would affect the ability of users to get the latest hardware.
If we had the computers at RAL to run several brands of Linux, then it would
be relatively straight forward to support our software on these. I would
prefer the community to build their own versions of our software, if they
need support for a different brand of Linux, we could help them.
Steve.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter W. Draper [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 November 2003 10:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The future of RedHat
On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Tim Jenness wrote:
> Sorry if this has been discussed to death and I missed it but, now that
> RedHat have said that RH9 is the last non-enterprise RedHat Linux that
> they will be shipping (ie you have to pay if you want binaries) does
> anyone have a feeling for which linux Starlink will be targetting their
> binary distribution in the future? Fedora seems to be the obvious
> solution [www.fedora.us].
>
> We are interested since JAC have to make a decision at some point on which
> direction we are going with Linux OSes, so any thoughts from Starlink
> would be appreciated (we won't want to rebuild all the Starlink packages
> for example - I assume that LSB will help with that sort of thing though).
Hi Tim,
I don't know if there's been any internal discussion at RAL, but clearly
since people will need to pay for RHEL (or face building it from source,
themselves), that's unlikely to be a route that we could exclusively
support.
As far as I can tell (from Durham) most people are sleep-walking into this
change and waiting to see what happens under Fedora, the most crucial
parts being how much extra effort supporting a secure system without a
significant period of backported fixes will be.
Since the proposed release date for Fedora Core 1 is this week, I guess we
may have a better idea soon. For those of you that want a quick appraisal
of what this means see:
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
Personally I'd like to see more binary releases by us (for Fedora, RHEL,
Debian, SuSE), and get out of the worrying about such things business.
Peter.
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