Progeny offers Red Hat Linux 7.x support [LWN.net]

Progeny has announced the availability of support services for Red Hat Linux 7.2 and 7.3 (but, apparently, not for versions 8 or 9). For $5/month per machine, customers will get ongoing security updates after Red Hat ceases to produce them. Over the longer term, the program will help Red Hat Linux users transition to another (unspecified) distribution.

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Progeny offers Red Hat Linux 7.x support

Posted Dec 3, 2003 20:32 UTC (Wed) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] (2 responses)

What I'd like to see, in terms of continued support and migration, is something like an enhanced version of apt-rpm that lets RedHat users slowly (or quickly) upgrade/migrate to one of the Debian releases, or perhaps to another distro. I realize this would be a royal pain, since RedHat back-patches are likely to differ from other distros' patches, but for a release that's become stale this should at least be possible. It might require such grotesqueries as mypackage-0.1-redhat7-migratory.deb for intermediate steps. Updating everything to an official major release (ie, no vendor back-patches) before distro migration would probably be the best first step.

Does anyone know if something like this has been tried, or if it's been done and I just missed it? I've got two RedHat 7.3 machines, and the mirror I was using has already stopped carrying pre-8, so distro migration's been on my mind of late.

Progeny offers Red Hat Linux 7.x support

Posted Dec 3, 2003 21:08 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think this is practical, even if it is technically possible. There are too many differences between Debian and Red Hat base systems to do a gradual upgrade, and the cost of creating all the necessary "transition" packages would be HUGE. Then there are the bugs...

As long as /home and /usr/local are preserved, migrating to a different distro isn't that big of a deal anyway, unless you have a lot of configuration changes and/or systems to upgrade.

Red Hat to Debian migration

Posted Dec 5, 2003 6:09 UTC (Fri) by mceesay (guest, #2806) [Link]

If you have a look at what is happening over at http://platform.progeny.com, reading between the lines it looks like an effort to increase the compatibility of Debian and Red Hat, and in the mid-term ease migration from Red Hat to Debian.

There will may never be a fully automated migration solution provided, but I'm sure that Progeny would be happy to provide migration services on a consultancy basis.