[Sussex] Access to RHEL updates without subscription

[Paul Tansom]

On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 08:39 +0100, Jon Fautley wrote:
> On Monday 30 May 2005 23:18, Paul Tansom wrote:
> > Not my machines unfortunately, if they were they'd be wiped and
> > installed with Debian in the blink of an eye ;) I hadn't thought about
> > ftp'ing the sources down.
> 
> Obviously, as per the license agreement, you'd need to remove all Red Hat 
> trademarks and branding from these packages before compiling and installing 
> them on your system.

You do? Surely all I am doing is downloading them and installing them on
my system. They are freely available from the Red Hat ftp site, so
presumably so long as I don't distribute them I can download and install
them on my Red Hat system - otherwise is there any value in having them
there at all? If you have to download, pull apart and rebuild before you
can use them then surely you should either not have them there (without
subscription requirement) or have the raw source code or RPMs without
the RH trademark stuff in (although that would make it way too easy for
the Red Hat alike distributions!).

> > I guess mainly because I assumed that up2date 
> > would grab anything it was able to get, but it is clearly not that
> > sophisticated (as in being able to work with a mixture of subscription
> > and freely available packages). 
> 
> The command line you're looking for to download the source packages is:
> 
> up2date --nox --src --download kernel-source
> 
> However, as up2date is the 'frontend' for the RHN, you won't be able to 
> download those packages without a valid subscription.

Yup, quite happy with the theory, its just the practise that's the
problem - well, without the RHN subscription anyway!

> Also - up2date plays very well with 3rd party package resources here, which 
> ones are you trying to use, and what exactly is the problem?

What I'm trying to do is get the network card working. This
unfortunately is a NVidia one on the motherboard (Shuttle), as is the
sound card. This means recompiling the driver each time you upgrade the
kernel (although I guess I could probably do a forced load). The first
drive installed cleanly since NVidia provided a pre-compiled version
with their installation, since then the kernel has been upgraded through
the RHN. Unfortunately this broke the networking and sound and as such
the system has been booted on the old kernel ever since. Now I'm looking
to compile the driver for use with the new kernel I am face with
problems accessing the source for the binary I already have. I guess
even the Red Hat modifications to the vanilla kernel are GPL'd, so I am
entitled to ask Red Hat for the source code, and in this case a manual
download of the SRPM is likely to do the trick nicely - I hope. It may
be as well to look at migrating away though otherwise the cost of a
three XP licenses with Windows Update will look like a cost saving over
the annual Red Hat Network subscription :( Of course part of this may be
the fact that I am in the middle here, but the customer doesn't want to
mess with the system themselves, so I am the first port of call for
support and paying Red Hat to tell me that their hardware isn't
supported every time I call them isn't value for money!

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/