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On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 23:19:35 -0400, Allan Adler

Frankly, I don't actually think every package in your system is insecure. Things like emacs may not have had any security problems during this time, or the gnome minesweeper. :) All services, kernel, web browsers, and a lot of other packages will though. There's no list of RH 7.1 vulnerabilities, because RH is not searching for them anymore.

Every operating system has a lifetime, and Linux distributions tend to reach their end-of-life pretty quickly, except a few "enterprise" distributions. I don't blame them, RH has released (out of my head) two dozen distributions, and it would be bad business (and even technically impossible) to support, say, RH 5.0. Red Hat supports their enterprise linux for perhaps five years (I'm not sure about the exact time).

It's certainly true that new Red Hat versions would not run on your machine. OTOH, Red Hat is more expensive than a new computer anyway these days. Their free version is called Fedora (which wouldn't run either). Still, I urge you to install a supported distribution. Debian and Slackware for example can be installed in very light configurations. Distributions such as Vector are specifically built to run on low resources, while still being fully usable desktop systems.

If you insist on using an old Red Hat, you can find support for 7.3 from

-- Juha Siltala