[CLUE-Tech] Red Hat Ending Support (Long, but very pertinent and an enjoyable read - really, I wouldn't kid you....)

[Greg Knaddison]

Quoting David Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us>:

> 
> Nice summary, Dave.  How does Fedora handle security patches?  My 
> impression is that there's no RHN support for Fedora so you don't have 
> the same errata and easy up2date that RHE has.  But does the community 
> provide errata for Fedora or do you wait for the next FC release?
> 

I have used FC1 for a few months now and been on their announce email list for
maybe 1 month.  Fedora definitly includes RHN functionality and the announce
emails come to me about the same time that I see news stories about
vulnerabilities/patches
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list.  

I don't know if it uses the same up2date software, but you can just use yum. 
yum is very simple: <yum update> and the whole thing is updated and dependencies
resolved and happily installed.  Very similar to apt for those who know it.  If
you need a GUI they have something that gives a gui to the yum command line
which is super easy.

If you try to get all your updates from the Fedora server you will wait a long
time and partially downloaded packages will give you signature errors and you
will be sad.  If you just use a mirror (google up example yum.conf files) then
you'll get them faster.  For a free as in beer product, I'm happy to use mirrors
and BitTorrent to get/share the distribution.

Updates come frequently, there's no doubt about that.  I've heard from long time
RH users that they used to be real bleeding edge with their releases and that
spawned the RHEL version with more infrequent releases for companies.  FC has
apparently seen a return to the bleeding edge mentality.  That suits me
perfectly.  I believe that FC gets some updates faster than any RH systems as
another level of testing before releasing, but that's just personally belief. 
As an example: 2.6Kernel is supposed to be in FC this spring, but not in RHEL
until 2005.

Greg