[lug] Red Hat Professional Workstation

[Rob Nagler]

Nate Duehr writes:
> says... "time to move on."  And yes, I am still a paying RedHat Network 
> member.  Blindly thinking that paying $60 a year (originally $99) would 

I'm in a similar position.  I am looking at SUSE.  I've loaded it on
two boxes, and frankly I'm impressed and frustrated.  The install is
clean, but the DVD didn't install out of the box and there was no
readme.  I found something about passing kernel args, but that seems
amateurish.

There are lots of differences.  /etc/*/init.d structure is different.
/etc/sysconfig/network is way different.  SaX didn't work out of the
box on my LCD screen with dual monitors.  I had to fire it up with
SaX2 -l.  I've got a lot of boxes to manage, and it is quite
frustrating to deal with the capriciousness of it all.  Silly things
like /etc/sshd/ssh_config is not setup to forward X11 by default.  And
big thinks like postfix instead of sendmail.

I've also written sales at redhat.com.  I've got 20+ RHN subsciptions,
and I would have thought they would like to keep my business (maybe
they'll just charge my credit card forever hoping I don't notice ;-).
They haven't contacted me directly nor have they responded to my "What
do I choose?" email.  Very strange for a company switching to a
corporate model.

I'm still not certain that the move away from RH makes sense.  I just
don't know what to expect from SUSE.  It's different enough that I
have to treat it like Solaris.  That's a big issue for us, because
we've developed a tools/knowledge for managing our 30+ systems.
It's not very easy to simply switch our operations to a new OS.

My biggest beef is that none of the distros seems to have figured out
the upgrade/update thing.  I'm tired of having to bring down a system
to install a new upgrade for an hour or so, when an update could do
exactly the same thing.  If I don't keep up with updates, that's my
problem.  Forcing me to upgrade everything en masse every year or so
is plain stupid.  Subscriptions should mean that I don't have to deal
with needless discontinuities.

BTW, RH just raised $600m in a bond issue.  I haven't seen much news
about this, but it is on their home page.

Rob