Quoting Jason Clinton <clintonj@umkc.edu>:

> I don't know what 'outdated' is but I was using 7.0 after 7.1 came
> out. 
> Has RedHat adopted a policy of forcing you to upgrade to their latest

Like any .0 release, 7.0 had bugs.  No, RedHat didn't do any such 
thing.  Lots of the FREE mirrors, however, don't have the space to have 
more than one version up at the time.  

I can, however, still find pretty complete RedHat libraries at 
rpmfind.net, among other places.  RedHat's own severs can get pretty 
swamped.

No, you still don't have to buy RedHat, but if you want support you do 
have to pay for it.  That's how they get the money to pay the salaries 
of the developers and support people.  Duh.  If you do purchase it, 
it's pretty clear what level of support you're getting.

> They included the tools in the distro and didn't include
> documentation 
> in the standard manuals on how to utilize the up2date command tool 
> properly. 

Well, up2ate gives a pretty good summary, as does man up2date.  Not 
sure just what you want.  See above about buying support.

I had a hard time with RedHat when I was a newbie too.  The thing I 
still have trouble with is that it's nearly impossible to find 
documentation on how they've customised a given package - say Apache - 
so that it's different from the standard Apache distribution (php 
support is built in and enabled, etc.).

What you're complaining about though, is the Linux learning curve, not 
a given distribution.  It's what's called a steep curve - until you've 
learned a broad range of different subjects, you can't go very far with 
it.  Macs, on the other hand, give you the impression that you don't 
need to know much to get started (studies show that Windows is just as 
quick to learn well enough to do real work, but it lets you know you 
have to learn things).

> BUT the GUI. No where did it say in any error message, "BTW: You may
> have better luck with the obscure, hidden version of our update
> software

So you want them to anticipate your particular problem, and write an 
error message for it.  Sounds like you want Microsoft.

> > RedHat's up2date, on the other hand, works like a charm - PROVIDED
> > THEPACKAGE AND VERSION YOU WANT ARE AVAILABLE ON REDHAT'S SITE.
 
> Never acceptable. You're at the mercy of a single distributor for
> your entire system. 

Oh bull$4l7.  You have the option of relying on them and their system 
if you're NEW and CLUELESS.  All the source is available, you can very 
well use any distribution of packages, RPM or source (or SRPM).  You 
just have to know what you're doing.

Having been through the newbie experience on RedHat, how do you know 
that the newbie experience with Debian or SuSE is any better?  I've 
heard it's a friggen nightmare - but that was back aroudn v.1.x too.

Gentoo sounds great - but frankly my two critical systems don't have 
the space for both the source and the software, let alone the CPU time 
to do the compiles.  I've never had the luxury of being able to wait 
two or three days for a system to install, which situation has been 
described here.

There's no reason to bash RedHat.  It's a great distribution, it works 
great for me and millions of others.  Pretending some similarities to 
Microsoft shows that what you know of Microsoft is probably about as 
deep, taken from Microsoft bashing rants and not from people who've 
worked with MS products for a living.  MS is far more open and 
deliberate about controling the market, RedHat doesn't have any 
potential to do so.  That's what Open Source is about.

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