Dunce Cap Enterprise Linux
21 January 2009Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, and appears to be celebrating that release with, well, server dysfunction. The mailing lists are buzzing with anger over the slowness of the automatic up-dating routines. This morning, I spent several hours on a high-speed connection trying to down-load a disc image (and finally gave up). A few days ago I was being denied access to any downloads as if I had no active subscription. Their bugzilla tells me that my password has expired, but the link that they sent me to up-date it results in some sort of proxy error.
Barring some remarkable act of contrition on the part of Red Hat, I won't be buying any more subscriptions from them. I'll switch to something such as CentOS.
Sounds like a good opportunity to try out a .deb-based system. Why not give Ubuntu a whirl and see how you like it? It's astounding how many things Just Work; and you know, it's still Linux, so the things that don't work remain the same sort of pain in the ass to fix. Also, the thought of RPM dependency hell, eeeek, who has patience for that any more?
That may well be true. But I'm reasonably comfortable with Red Hat except for the recurring problem of their servers choking, and I've spent little time in RPM H_ll. (My biggest problem with RPM H_ll is that I've never perfectly understood a path by which I've left, so I don't feel comfortable telling others how to get out. I'm a lousy Orpheus.) I guess that I'd be more likely to migrate soon if I had some other system on which I could run Ubuntu experimentally while I continued to use a Fedora-core Linux.