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[Gareth Bowker]

(This is all assuming you don't want to pay $5/month for security
updates from RH - I'll save you from my opinions on Free vs. free right
now. I'd also recommend Debian, but only if you're not happy with what
you're getting from RH. If you're happy, stick with it.)

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 21:21, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> If you're keeping the Linux box, you'll want to move away from RH to a
> distro with a friendlier policy on free upgrades.  Debian or Gentoo are two
> that I'd recommend.

I don't think this matters particularly (at least not at the moment). On
my RH machine (which I'm typing this on) and my dev machine, I've
installed apt-rpm, which you can get from http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/
. I simply type:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

and all the latest security updates are installed on my machine. If RH
want to stop you from getting updates for free via up2date or whatever
it's called now, by all means let them. There are other tools you can
use that will let you get the updates just as easily (indeed, if you
don't want to type the commands at the command-line, just install a
frontend to apt - there are a few good ones available). You don't need
to learn the slight differences between RH / Debian / Mandrake /
$RANDOM_DISTRO - you can stick with what you know. Using apt, you only
need to learn apt-get rather than the plethora of differences/quirks
between different distros.

apt *should* also make it easy to move from one version of RH to another
e.g. 7.3 -> 8.0. It works fine under Debian (from where apt originates)
but I've not been brave enough to try it at work yet.

But as I said, if you're happy with RedHat, stick with it. If you're
happy to pay $5/month for updates, keep paying - after all, it's going
towards the staff who're producing those updates.

Gareth