Re: Stuck With Red Hat 7.3

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Sun, May 02, 2004 at 09:49:47AM -0500, david wrote:
> I have been following the discussions about the RH 9 EOL and upgrading to
> Fedora and have a question.  I am responsible for a commercial application
> that is only certified to run on RH 7.3 and I am not sure when they plan
> to certify the application on anything else.
> 
> What options do RH 7.3 users have available to keep the boxes upgraded
> and properly patched?

In order of my personal preference:

1) Just try the application on FC1.  It will probably work fine.

2) Try the application on something else current (RHEL3, WBL -
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/).  You could even probably still buy
RHAS 2.1, which was basically RH7.3.  Since all of the above are
2.4-based, they should all work just fine.

3) http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ (free)

4) http://transition.progeny.com/ (non-free)

5) Given that RHAS 2.1 was basically RH7.3 (or maybe that was 7.2),
you could probably start pulling the source rpms from the updates for
it and rebuilding them, but that would be a major pain.

To be honest, I'd be *extremely* surprised if the application didn't
just work on FC1.  At worst, some (broken) applications don't like to
run with exec-shield enabled, but it can easily be disabled by running
the app under "i386" from the setarch package.

If you do switch to FC1, just be aware that in 6 months you'll have to
start picking up updates from fedoralegacy.org.

For the record, the only recent version of Red Hat that I didn't
fairly quickly move all my systems to was 8.0.  It had some nasty bugs
in rpm.  It was also the first version where LANG was set to
en_US.UTF-8, which uncovered some bugs in the UTF-8 support in a lot
of applications.  Unfortunately, it was also the first version to
support LVM in the installer, so I did do several new installs with
it.

Other than that, I think there has been clear improvement in every
version of Red Hat/Fedora Core so far.  Now that SELinux is disabled
by default, Fedora Core 2 will probably mostly continue that, but
there are enough changes in it that I doubt I'll move many of my
servers to it.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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