On Monday 12 August 2002 15:11, Rafael Skodlar,,, wrote: > On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:28:29AM +0800, John wrote: > > On Monday 12 August 2002 08:33, Rafael Skodlar,,, wrote: > > > Redhat made a big mistake with major differences between 7.0 and 7.1 > > > where the upgrade was impossible. > > > > I've never heard that before. I avoided 7.0, but I did upgrade 6.2 to 7.1 and > > if that's possible, I don't see why 7.0 to 7.1 would have presented any > > difficulty. > > Libraries and compiler were messed up badly and that caused all kinds of > problems at work. When you need to support many systems Redhat doesn't > seem to be the easiest. While personaly avoiding 7.0 I had to use it at > work and believe me it was not easy. Certainly there would have been difficulties transferring C++ binaries between RHL 7.x and (most) other systems because the GCC snapshot RH cleaned up and published as gcc 2.96 used a different name-mangling approach. I've been on most of the release RHL lists since Hurricane (5.0), maybe before. > > > > > Another reason is that in order to > > > quickly download necessary security updates, Redhat charges $60 per > > > system per year which is too much IMO when the alternative is free. I do > > > not mind paying something for the software but there are limits. > > > > I've not found a reason to pay for such a service. The updates are freely > > available for all. I don't get priority access, but I doubt that's very > > important to small users. Even if I did value it, $60 (even $US60) doesn't > > seem a lot to pay to get priority access for maintenance for something you > > can get for no charge. > > I don't mind paying for some services but they need to be reasonable. > $60 per system is not reasonable when the new box costs $80 or so. > Redhat seem to release some of their stuff half baked to generate > support calls. I don't believe that is true. RH would want fewer support calls, not more, from those on fixed-price contracts such as you mention. As Michael Malone (a local ISP) once said, "The ideal customer is one who pays their money and doesn't use our service." Nobody forces you to pay RH for service. Your first computer on the Red Hat Network (support scheme) is free even to cheapskates like me who downloaded it off the Internet. I've used most Red Hat Linux releases since 3.0.3, and paid nothing for any of them since 5.1. I still get security warnings for nothing more than the effort of subscribing to the list. I get all the updates I've ever heard of them, perhaps not so quickly as people with paid-up contracts though I've never heard they get them more quickly. I have 511Mbytes of updates to RHL 7.3 (including source) here right now, 37 (source) packages in all. -- Cheers John. Please, no off-list mail. You will fall foul of my spam treatment. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb