Downgrading from RHEL

[Tom Diehl]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Andre Costa wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:12:56 -0500
> Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 14:36, Andre Costa wrote:
> > >snip<
> > > 
> > > Thks, Tom, it is indeed a lot of interesting material. I downloaded
> > > it and will analyze it carefully.
> > 
> > While you're at it, perhaps you might check out WBEL 3.0, Tao Linux
> > 1.0, and CentOS-3 respectively at:
> > 
> > http://whiteboxlinux.org/
> > http://www.taolinux.org/
> > http://www.centos.org/
> 
> Thks Phil, I knew about them. Even though they all seem terrific, they
> all share the same problem AFAICS: if RH ever decides to drop the public
> RHEL SRPMs, these distros automatically cease to be updated, right?

I did not see the first message in this thread but I will assume it 
goes something like RHEL is too expensive, I need something cheaper.
So I will throw out one comment in hopes of giving one more viable solution.
You can always go get a copy or copies of RHPW. Now RHPW only includes
installation support and does not include the server packages but what it
does include is a 1 year subscription to RHN for the packages that are 
included in RHPW. This gets you most of the updates you are going to need
and legally to boot. For the pieces that happen to be missing, but you might
need, you can either build them from the src.rpms and maintain them yourself
or you can get them from Whitebox, Tao, cAos, etc. Given that a boxed set is
available in places like Staples for ~$50.00 USD or directly from Red Hat for
something like $80.00 I think it is a pretty good deal. Oh and since there
is no support from Red Hat beyond the initial installation support (which I
do not need) I do not have to worry about voiding my support agreement. The
only real downside I can see is that if I run into a bug that is critical to
me or my customers that Red Hat does not fix but would fix if I had a support
contract then I might have a problem. 

Just my $.02.

Tom