printer suddenly disappeared

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 15:21 -0400, Buz Davis wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> ....
> 
> > 
> > We also have to ask...why are you still running RH9?  It's over four
> > years old now, it's got major security issues, it's an ancient 2.2
> > kernel, its memory management is atrocious, it's not supported anymore
> > by anyone, etc., etc.  You really should make the leap to something
> > modern: RHEL, Fedora or CentOS (even SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian or some other
> > derivative).
> > 
> 
> Rick,
> 
> Thanks for the info on your /etc/hosts files and also on how to trouble 
> shoot the printer problem.  To answer your question about my using RH9
> I don't have anything to burn CDs with, and 9 is the last release of 
> Redhat that was available on CDs (as far as I know).

Well, Fedora is available on CD as is CentOS (the free version of Red
Hat Enterprise).  Virtually all major distros are available on CD, but
you may have to hunt for them.  Here's some links:

For Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/LocalVendors
For CentOS: http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=24

>                                                      Also, I'm not sure 
> my hardware is capable of running later editions.  (As a matter of fact 
> on a couple of machines with more limited memory than my desktop I am 
> running RH6.2)

Ah, yes, that can be an issue.  Fedora, RHEL and CentOS on 2.6 kernels
do suck up some serious RAM, but it depends on what run level you're
at.  If you don't run in GUI mode, 256MB should work for most of them.

As far as hardware is concerned, FC7 doesn't have a build for anything
less than a i686, so if you're running 386, 486 or 586, you may have
problems.  FC6 and earlier, RHEL and CentOS shouldn't have such issues.

The hardware support for other things is much better than in RH9, so
I wouldn't worry too much about that.  Of course, the only way to know
for sure is to try.

> I don't want to move to some other vendor because, to be frank, I have 
> come to regard the quality of advice I get from this list very highly
> and don't want to leave you guys!

That's awful nice of you, Buz!  To be honest, most of the other major
distros (Ubuntu, SuSE, etc.) have pretty active user communities and are
of great help.

Remember, on this list we're just users like yourself.  A Red Hattie
does check in on occasion, but this is virtually all user-generated.
For example, I work for VitalStream/Internap.  I'm a RH user from way,
way back, but I have no "official" standing with RH (well, I am an
assistant sysop on this list, but that's it).  Red Hat provides the list
server, we (you, me and the other subscribers) generate what goes on it.

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-          When all else fails, try reading the instructions.        -
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