Is linux free 5039

HalcyonWild wrote (in part):

Use whatever distribution you like.

I happen to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 ES. I got it for about $175-year, not $100 (in any case, half price for two years because I had already been a subscriber to Red Hat Network). It comes with some "installation support" or some such thing, for three months, but I do not recall needing it because I could follow the directions of the installation program. But in addition to that support, they also provide on-line support that works pretty well for registered customers, and continuous updates for the duration of the subscription (typically one year, renewable) using RHN and the up2date program. There is a little blue icon with a white checkmark on the panel that changes to a red icon with a flashing white exclamation point when updates are available. Usually the updates are a very small set of rpm packages, but since RHEL3 came out about 2 years ago, there have been 6 major updates. The little ones are security updates that they bring out as soon as a problem has been detected and a fix available. The biggies tend to be fixes of little bugs and other annoyances that they bunch together (e.g., total replacement of X Window System, new kernel, libraries, applications). It is this last feature that I find the most important. Before RHN and up2date, maintenance required finding out (by rumor, divine revelation, intuition, etc.) that an update was available and desireable, locating a source for it, downloading it, and trying to install it with the constant fear that installing it would require major updating of libraries, etc., that when done, would make the system incompatible with other programs. I was glad to be rid of that.

Now the same kind of thing was available for Fedora Core 2 (the only FC I ever tried), but it rummaged around on many web sites, some of which were down, many of which were incompatible with each other so if I downloaded an updated package from one source (that up2date picked seemingly at random), it would not install because it needed another package from elsewhere, but the site it would pick for that had not been updated yet, so it would not download (since I already had that). This got to be too much. Free just was not good enough for me.

I had other troubles with FC2 that I have complained about before (e.g. CUPS so incompatible that FC2 running CUPS as a server would not reliably act as a print server to RHEL3 machine even though the ame machine running RHL7.3 or RHL9 does). Maybe when FC 5 or FC 6 comes out I will try it again on my old machine, but not yet.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:25:00 up 8 days, 1:27, 3 users, load average: 4.12, 4.17, 4.08