The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7 [LWN.net]

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:10 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (5 responses)

Because Red Hat won't spend money on producing those fixes. It's costs some money to keep machines with old Red Hat versions, compile and verify bugfixes for each of them. Also, Red Hat will hopefully get more sales of the higher priced distribution. More money for Red Hat means (hopefully) more money for Red Hat developers, including such giants as Alan Cox.

On the negative side, systems with old Red Hat become unsafe to use after the next hole is discovered. This can be alleviated by upgrading those systems to new distributions. Responsible sysadmins will do something, careless sysadmins are already a problem.

It is also possible that alternative providers of security patches for older systems will emerge, althought I don't think it would be a good business model right now.

They Might Be Giants

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:14 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (guest, #2322) [Link]

Alan's not that tall, really.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 18:18 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (3 responses)

It is also possible that alternative providers of security patches for older systems will emerge [snip]

It will be interesting to see if a community-based project emerges to fill the gap here. It's my gut feeling that most of the complaints are just noise coming from people who have already upgraded to a newer version, or maybe don't even use Red Hat in the first place, but we shall see. I guess this is a test to see if that "scratch an itch" thing (however that goes) is really true.

How many itching Red Hat Linux 6.2 users are really out there? :^)

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:26 UTC (Wed) by mtrudelm (guest, #4922) [Link] (1 responses)

I use RH linux 6.2 on my old laptop and up until now found it really easy to upgrade software. Ximian support 6.2, Mozilla is build against glibc 2.1 (C library for 6.2) and there is still many rpm's produce for this distribution. So my guess is that it's still widely used.

For me, there's not much choice for upgrade. CD drive is broke and hard disk is full... and there's all those recompiled module drivers...

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 20:04 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

You can try upgrading by apt-get from http://apt.freshrpms.net/

I recently upgraded my laptop from Red Hat 7.2 to 8.0 using apt-get. First apt-get upgraded packages for most simple cases, when no packages need to be removed or installed. Then I ran "apt-get install" on the remaining "held" packages and resolved the dependencies.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 17, 2003 20:38 UTC (Thu) by gswoods (subscriber, #37) [Link]

I have one system that runs RH 6.2 . What it actually has is a VA Linux
enhanced version of it, with special kernel drivers for the hardware
RAID device that the system uses. VA Linux, of course, is long gone in
terms of supporting this system. Now, newer Linux kernels *may* have
a driver for this particular device, but I don't know this for sure,
so I cannot simply pop in a Red Hat 7.3 or whatever disc and do the
usual upgrade, or even another distro like Debian. Combine that with the fact that this is a dual-processor system with many production users, and you can then see why it is still running 6.2 . Stability is by far the
most important thing, so it doesn't get upgraded until there is really
no alternative. In order to upgrade, I will have to do a considerable
amount of research, including re-familiarizing myself with the RAID
controller that I haven't looked at in years and finding out if there
is even still a driver for it out there.

This is said only so that I can provide an example of something other than
"lazy sysadmin" as a reason for continuing to run Red Hat 6.2. All this said, I do not blame Red Hat for end-of-lifing it. You cannot support old
software forever. And I may well continue to run 6.2 long after updates
for it stop coming out. I protect the system with ipchains so that it
is not directly accessible from the Internet. I realize that I will have
to take special security measures if I want to run no-longer-supported
software. And I will eventually have to upgrade, it's just hard to find a block of time when 1) I have the extra time needed for this upgrade; and 2) The production users on the system aren't balls-to-the-wall trying to finish some data analysis before the next big conference. Shit happens.

Upgrade options

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:14 UTC (Wed) by wstearns (subscriber, #4102) [Link]

Redhat has decided not to put more time into producing updates for these systems. If someone else - yourself perhaps? - decides to take on this role, you certainly can, and you'd be providing a valuable service to all the redhat 6.2 and 7.0 users.
Users are left with a number of viable alternatives: upgrade to a newer distribution (at no monetary cost, but some time involved), provide their own upgrades (either seperately or as a group), or hire someone or some company to provide those upgrades.

The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:17 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

First, I am betting that the numbers of 6.2 machines is less than 10% of the install base (if they follow what 5.2 numbers where this time in the life-cycle).

Second, very very very few of those people are paying Red Hat to spend engineering time on 6.2 or 7. Not enough to cover the cost of an engineer.

So it is basic economics at work. Not enough people pay, no one gets updates because to do the updates would not break at least even or the mythical 10%.

The costs involved would be:
Keeping a build machine active/working with 6.2
Keeping 4 QA machines active/working with 6.2
[subtract these 5 machines from room available for 7.1/7.2/7.3/8.0/9/2.1
etc machines.]

Keeping an engineer and 1-2 QA people concentrating on 6.2 versus newer stuff. The reason you keep them on legacy.. is that you quickly forget all the quirks of the old system that were either fixed, dropped, or re-invented in a later version.

There are the additional overhead costs for this.. and Red Hat is seeing most of the people download the code for free... so its all negative revenue.

So people using Linux are going to learn the hard lesson of Free Software. The initial costs are much lower, but if you want maintenance.. you will have to pay for it because the companies are not getting the 80% premiums that closed source software companies get to do the maintenance for free.

By the way, there are private consultant companies like owlriver.com that you can always pay for maintenance of 6.2 later on.. but you aren't going to get it for free.