fc6 nearing eol but f7 not useable yet (rant or feedback?)

[Les Mikesell]

Strong wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:47:13 -0500 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> If you don't want stuff newer than FC6, why not install Centos5?  It
>> is very much like (as in almost identical) to FC6 and will be for a
>> very very long time.
> 
> Can we get there the same repos - the packages we have in Fedora:
> audacity, mplayer, avidemux, wine, qemu, k3b, k9copy, fglrx-drivers and
> so on?

You should use a repository built for RHEL5 instead of FC6, but all the 
same things should be available (and maintained by people who expect to 
keep doing it for years..).  If you can't find something you can 
generally take the fc6 src rpm and do a 'rpmbuild --rebuild' to get 
recompiled binaries that will work.

> Why do they say, they create their distro from the publicly available
> src.rpms - who makes them?

Red Hat doesn't let anyone else use their trademarked name or artwork 
but they make all the src rpms available.  The Centos project follows 
the requirements, replacing only what is necessary so they maintain bug 
for bug compatibility and pass on matching updates in a very timely 
manner.  They also have some improvements in the optional centosplus 
repositrory (kernel with firewire, xfs, and the other things enabled in 
fedora but not RHEL, some newer apps, etc.).

The only advantage to using fedora instead of this is that you get newer 
  (and less tested...) apps.  But, if you want to keep using the ones 
that you helped test earlier, this is essentially fedora as it was at 
the time the RHEL5 cut was made plus backported fixes to those 
application versions.  And unlike fedora you can generally count on not 
having any surprises from the updates.


-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com