End of life for FC1?

[Phil Schaffner]

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 10:30 -0400, dante at virtualblueness.net wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > 
> > Considering all of the problems that FC 2 has been having, I wonder if 
> > Redhat would consider changing the published schedule so that a version of 
> > FC wouldn't EOL until the second-following version was released.  IOW, FC 
> > 1 shouldn't EOL until FC 3 is released, and FC 2 shouldn't EOL until FC 4 
> > is released.  That might give folks more peace of mind, that they aren't 
> > forced to upgrade to a buggy release like FC 2.

The whole reason for the change in Red Hat business model was that they
could not make money supporting too many OS versions, not to mention end
users downloading the products for free.  Fedora make business sense for
them only as a means to test technologies that will end up in the
enterprise products.  If Red Hat fails as a company, we all lose.   As
Jeff and others pointed out - Fedora Legacy should be supported if you
want/need legacy support.

> > 
> > Ben
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> Ben,
> 
> I couldn't agree with you more.  I like the progressive nature of the FC 
> project, but there are different levels of testing/experimentation.  So, 
> while on the one hand I would like my students to play around with the 
> new features of FC2, even if they are rough and not production level, on 
> the other hand I cannot afford to do so if it means unstable machines.  A 
> good balance between "progressive" and "peace of mind" will increase the 
> number of people willing to use and therefore test the new releases.

Agree that FC2 is a bit rough-around-the-edges, but then it was never
meant for a production environment, although is is being used in such by
some adventurous souls.

> As it stands, I can't afford to upgrade to FC2 because of its buggy 
> nature.  This in turn means that my students will not use and therefore 
> not test FC2, which deminishes the FC community.  I may have to switch to 
> some other distro for our linux lab.

I'd think in a lab you would have a fairly homogeneous environment and a
quick way of reinstalling (i.e. kickstart) if machines get clobbered by
students.  FC2 seems pretty stable once it is properly installed/
configured on non-bleeding-edge stable hardware.  Have you tried
installing on test machine[s] to see how it does in your environment?
Might be OK.

If stability is really important to you, RHEL educational pricing is
pretty good; or consider one of the RHEL rebuilds/derivatives like WBEL
(http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/), cAos/CentOS (http://caosity.org/), or
Tao Linux (http://taolinux.org/).

Phil