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Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Are you thinking about removing Red Hat Linux from your servers and replacing it with something else? If so, you are not the only one. There seems to be an increase of current and ex-Red Hat users making discreet inquiries on the Debian and SUSE mailing lists, forum posts with less than flattering opinions about the recent changes at Red Hat, and even full articles explaining reasons behind contemplating such moves (see "Is There a Place for Debian in the Enterprise?" by NewsFactor and "Should I switch from Red Hat to Debian?" by Screaming-Penguin). Even the most devoted Red Hat users are unlikely to be immune to headlines such as "BREAKING NEWS: Red Hat To Drop Linux" by the usually calmer LinuxWorld.com. While things are rarely as bad as some sensationalist journalists make them look, it does help to analyze the complaints and list all the pros and cons before making that final decision.

The main reason for users' dissatisfaction is simple - Red Hat wants us to pay for its products. As businesses go, this is not particularly unusual position to take - except that the world of Linux has created different expectations. Since version 1.0 (released in 1995) until version 7.3 (May 2002), Red Hat Linux was not only completely free for all, the company even provided errata, security and bug fixes for years after release. Updating a running server with the latest security patches required as little as registering for a free account and running up2date every time a Red Hat security advisory showed up in your inbox. For many system administrators life couldn't be any more pleasant!

But about a year ago, things started to change. As Red Hat increased the sales pitch for their enterprise class products while at the same time limiting the life-span of the free edition to 12 months and making it harder for non-paying customers to take advantage of the up2date service, many system administrators in small and medium-size businesses began voicing their concerns. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) products, priced from $180 to $2,500 per system are excellent choices for large enterprises with matching IT budgets, but what about the rest of us?

Let's look at some of the often cited concerns of those who are considering a move away from Red Hat:

• Fear of change. Fedora is a major change, an evolution of the much trusted original Red Hat Linux. Any change of this magnitude is bound to create uncertainty and confusion.

• Value for money. This is probably the most often raised concern: why pay for RHEL? While most users are not opposed to rewarding Red Hat financially for all their great work, many find RHEL overpriced for their needs. Do I really need an $180 product to run a web, mail and file server?

• Fedora life span. Red Hat has made it clear that Fedora will have a fast development cycle and a short life span. It will be up to the community to continue supporting past Fedora releases with errata and security fixes.

• Fedora quality control. Indications are that Red Hat developers will spend fewer man hours on future Fedora releases than they used to on Red Hat Linux. Yes, the most critical features will still be developed by Red Hat, but some of the more mundane tasks will probably be handed over to the community. This is not to say that the Fedora community is not up to the task. But the new development model does create an aura of unaccountability - after all, it is "only" Fedora, not the "true" Red Hat (Enterprise) Linux.

Most of those who find the above concerns too serious to keep deploying Red Hat/Fedora on their servers will most likely be investigating offerings by SUSE or Debian. We'll leave SUSE out until we know what Novell's plans are with the German distribution maker and take a look at some pros and cons of migrating to Debian.

First, the advantages:

• Freedom. Debian is a non-commercial entity, so you won't find any restrictions on Debian downloads and usage. There are no forms to fill in just to get the latest security updates, and no newsletters promoting certification courses or offering specials on professional products and services. The security updates are available to all without restrictions and without having to wait until paying customers disconnect from the servers providing the update service.

• Stability. Debian's release cycle, at an average of about one stable release every two years, is slow by any standard. Yet, this conservative approach means that the releases are extremely well-tested and comparatively bug-free.

• Popularity. According to this report by Netcraft, "Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on Internet web sites, surpassed only by Red Hat, and leaving the likes of SUSE and Mandrake in its wake".

• Documentation and software. Debian has comprehensive, multi-lingual documentation, plenty of software and unmatched package installation and upgrade infrastructure.

Now for some warnings:

• Installation and configuration. A lot has been said about the archaic Debian installer, although the truth is that a skilled system administrator has little to fear. Still, if you are used to Anaconda, the new reality will not be pleasant. (This is about to change in the upcoming Debian Sarge release, which will have a new installer - still text-based, but with many new options, as well as hardware auto-detection.) System configuration is done either by editing text files or by following text-mode apt-config wizards.

• Printed manuals and books. While books on Red Hat are a dime a dozen in every bookstore, the publishing houses tend to stay away from books about Debian (or indeed about any other distribution). Books on Debian do exist, however, if you look for them.

• Mailing lists. The Debian mailing lists, especially the developer ones, tend to get rough from time to time. Try not to take offense when somebody expresses their disagreement too bluntly.

• Learning curve. Those of you who have invested time and money into Red Hat certification programs will have to forget the Red Hat-specific parts of the program and learn how to do things the Debian way. Of course, most of the gained knowledge is general enough to apply to any distribution.

Switching a large number of servers to a new Linux distribution is rarely a stress-free process. But if you feel that your current distribution no longer fulfills your needs, it is good to know that there are other choices. And that's what Linux is about.

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Distribution News

Red Hat / Fedora

The first release of the Fedora Core was made available on November 5, a couple of days later than planned. The release notes contain a great deal of information about the contents of this release and how to install it. See the download page to get a copy of the release. It you have trouble with the Red Hat FTP site, try a mirror site or use bittorrent.

The Red Hat Linux Migration Resource Center is online to help people evaluate Red Hat's offerings as Red Hat Linux reaches its end-of-life. Support for RHL 9 ends April 30, 2004, sooner for older versions. Register to download the whitepapers or just browse the links to learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. (Thanks to Xose Vazquez Perez)

People who working on Fedora projects might want to take a look at Warren's Package Naming Proposal. "The following is based upon current fedora.us package naming guidelines, quickly edited and dramatically simplified because fedora.redhat.com no longer needs many of fedora.us special considerations."

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OpenBSD 3.4 Released

OpenBSD 3.4 has been released. As one might expect, this release includes many new security features; these include better protection against buffer overflow attacks, randomized locations for shared libraries, some protection against trojan horses in build scripts, and much more. See the announcement (click below) for the details.

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Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for November 4, 2003 is out. This week see what's happening with nonfree.org; Debian faster than Gentoo? revisited; System Recovery with Knoppix; Improving KDE Maintainership; Amendment of the Social Contract; and much more.

Most people are probably aware that Debian developers have been voting on proposed amendments to the Debian constitution. It you would like more background, this post to debian-vote by Branden Robinson may help. The voting results are available, showing that of the options presented on the ballot, Option 1 was preferred by Debian developers.

Ben Armstrong attended an Open Source Education Foundation (OSEF) public meeting recently and reports on renewed ties between Debian Jr. and OSEF that should help both organizations accomplish many important and complementary goals.

Alex Perry reports on Debian events at Comdex in Las Vegas, Nevada. These include a Debian InstallFest on Thursday, November 20, 2003.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 44

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of November 3, 2003 is out. This week's edition notes that Embedded Gentoo is seeking developers.

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GNU-Darwin annual report at OSNews

The current annual report for the GNU-Darwin Distribution is now available at OSNews.com. "Recently, Apple's public source license was revised so that Darwin could be distributed as an FSF recognized free operating system, and we have modified Darwin in accordance with that goal, so that the GNU-Darwin developers now feel free to compete directly against "Linux" and other "open source" projects. In addition, GNU-Darwin continues to support the PowerPC platform and to help Apple users, who may be free software novices. Moreover, now that we have a free version of Darwin, our horizons are greatly expanded. Here we present our third yearly report."

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Creating a Complete Distribution on CD (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at the process of creating a Linux CD. "In creating a Linux distribution that can boot from a CD-ROM and doesn't need anything else, you are likely to encounter some challenges. The main problem is the root filesystem is read-only, but some files have to be created and/or modified. This stage concerns files in /dev, in /var and eventually in the user's home directory. The next challenge is to turn off everything you do not need, especially commands that try to create a file somewhere."

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National Background Data Adapts Astaro for IT Security

Astaro has announced that National Background Data, LLC is deploying Astaro Security Linux for their perimeter defense needs, including protection of its critical SQL servers that run the company's data warehouse.

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KRUD Linux

tummy.com, makers of Kevin's Redhat Uber Distribution, are offering support for their flavor of Red Hat Linux through 2004. Those with production servers that need more time to migrate might find relief here.

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Mandrake Linux

Mandrake has a couple of bug fixes available for 9.2:

• GConf; gnucash and possibly other applications, could crash.
• libbonobo; a bug could cause problems with various GNOME applications, and logging in properly, when the user's home directory was on a NFS-mounted share.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has another round of bug fixes and upgrades in slackware-current. Some of the upgrades listed include epiphany-1.0.4, galeon-1.3.10, qt-3.2.2, gaim-0.71, mozilla-1.4.1, swaret-1.3.4, and abiword-2.0.1. As usual, the change log has complete details.

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Minor distribution updates

Devil-Linux

Devil-Linux has released version 1.0 with Kernel 2.4.22 with FreeS/WAN and Netfilter patches applied, Kernel Security through GRSecurity, Almost all software compiled with the GCC stack smashing protector, and much more.

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Linux From Scratch 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of the Linux From Scratch distribution has been released. "This major milestone features a new method with strong emphasis on building a correct compilation environment and base libraries independent from the host system." The distribution's documentation - a major part of the appeal of LFS - has also seen significant upgrades.

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Mindi Linux

Mindi Linux has released stable v0.87. Find the change log and downloads here.

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ThinStation

ThinStation has released v1.0.2. Changes in this version: "Thinstation 1.0.2(Many Authors & Contributors) Release Date: 05/11/03 * Added fix for samba and defining a local host, From Mike * Added libstd fix for vncviewer package, From Paolo * changed build script to use rm -Rf, From Paolo * Fixed ts.bat causing cramfs wrong magic error in ts.bat from Romano Trampus [trampus@univ.trieste.it] * Added new line to thinstation.conf, From Paolo * Updated loadlin to 1.6c, Fix from Roberto Wagner..." Download here.

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Distribution reviews

Devil-Linux 1.0: The (hell)firewall (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at Devil-Linux 1.0, which was released October 31. "X-window is not part of Devil-Linux. The only way you can browse the Web through it is with Lynx or another text-based browser. But the lack of an X-based graphical desktop is what makes it able to run at a decent speed directly from a CD."

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Vector Linux 4.0 Review (OSNews)

OSNews has a review of Vector Linux 4.0. "Vector Linux is a distribution based on the oldest Linux distribution available today - Slackware. It comes in two flavours - a freely downloadable ISO 'lite' version (which I used for this review) and a Deluxe CD edition which can be ordered from www.vectorlinux.com. The deluxe edition includes extras such as Gnome and KDE, as well as a whole pile of extra software."

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