Category: Linux

fedora 39 vs rhel 9.3 — rhel, part 1

whbeebe1 Comment

I wrote earlier how it was my eventual intent to switch from Linux Mint 21.2 to RHEL 9.2. Before I even had time to plan such a move, The Fedora Project released Fedora 39 two days after I’d downloaded the RHEL 9.2 DVD ISO at 9 GiB. The Fedora 39 ISO, by comparison, weighs in at a svelte 2 GiB. With both ISOs on my little Linux Mint system I’d thought I’d create a QEMU virtual machine of both and give them both a tryout. First up is RHEL.

RHEL 9.2 right after installation with a successful registration with the Red Hat mothership.

Since Red Hat has torpedoed the RHEL source code hangers-on, downloading and installing a RHEL clone anonymously has become impossible, assuming you want an up-to-date matching bug-for-bug release that can accept bug fixes and updates over time. Since I’m looking for what will become my future daily driver Linux distribution, I have no problems with either registering with Red Hat for a free developer account or registering the RHEL instance once it’s up and running. That developer account allows me to download for free an up-to-date Red Hat desktop DVD ISO for general personal use, not for resale. I’m sure I could download the server version for free, but that’s not what I’m looking to do.

After updates, we’re now on RHEL 9.3

Once my installed and running Red Hat workstation instance was registered, I was able to update to all the latest RHEL 9.2 patches, as well as install the EPEL repository references and then install a few EPEL packages such as neofetch (see above). That’s when I found out that my starting 9.2 instance had been updated to 9.3 (Plow).

Setting everything set up has been without any drama. If you’ve been working with any Linux distributions over the last two years, then you won’t be surprised at the pure Gnome desktop. Red Hat comes with the added assurance that the critical bugs will get fixed, in spite of what some critics may say.

I now see eye-to-eye with Red Hat’s attitude that groups like the original CentOS (before Red Hat bought it) as well as follow-on Rocky and Alma Linux are free-loaders, and the people who used those re-builds of Red Hat source to underpin their businesses are also free-loaders. If you’re building a business on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux then you need to price in the cost of RHEL and pay for a copy of RHEL. Open source means free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. No-where is it written that open software must always be free to use, only free to study and extend as necessary.

Or to borrow the words of the late science fiction author Harlan Ellison, “pay the writer.”

Links

How to install EPEL on RHEL and CentOS Stream — https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/install-epel-linux

Harlan Ellison’s Wonderful Rant on Why Writers Should Always Get Paid — https://www.openculture.com/2015/11/harlan-ellisons-wonderful-rant-on-why-writers-should-always-get-paid.html

an orderly migration to rhel

whbeebe

I’ve been sitting on the sidelines and watching the Red Hat/CentOS source drama play out. I wrote just once on the subject when the story first broke. Back then I opined how I couldn’t trust Big Linux (meaning Red Hat and Ubuntu) and would thus stick to Debian. But as they say, time wounds all heals.

I’ve create a Red Hat developer account for myself ( https://developers.redhat.com/ ) and downloaded my free (as in beer) RHEL 9.2 ISO for eventual installation later. I’ve done this primarily because of the (lack of) security in the repository chains that open source depends upon. A bit of cursory investigation shows that Red Hat may be big and corporate but I’ve come to believe they’re more trustworthy when it comes to the quality of the Linux product they deliver as well as support. That support costs, but it’s the kind of corporate support that corporate users demand.

To give you an idea as to what corporations are transitioning away from CentOS to RHEL, there’s the example of Salesforce, who’ve announced they’re migrating some 200,000 server-class machines from CentOS 7 to RHEL 9 (see link below). And that’s just one example. If you can believe the statistics, more than 90% of the Fortune 500 that use Linux use RHEL. I have no idea what the other 10% use, but it might just be Ubuntu primarily.

I have downloaded the RHEL Desktop 9.2 ISO, and I will spin up a small VM under Virtual Machine Manager and begin the process of determining how to migrate from Linux Mint to RHEL. I want to, in particular, determine if I can continue my Espressif/Arduino/Micropython development with external boards. Espressif has stated on their Github page that they support Ubuntu/Debian and CentOS 7/8. I’m assuming that this hasn’t been updated in a while due to the versions of CentOS the documentation calls out, but since CentOS was supposed to be bug-for-bug, feature-for-feature exact, then I see no reason why the Espressif tool chain won’t work on RHEL 9.x.

Once this is done my daily driver system will be Red Hat. I’ll only use other distributions if that’s what is supplied with hardware, such as, for example, Raspbian (Debian) for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, or Ubuntu for the nVidia development boards.

Links

moving away from red hat to debian

Automation at Scale: Migrating 200,000 Machines from CentOS 7 to RHEL 9 — https://engineering.salesforce.com/automation-at-scale-migrating-200000-machines-from-centos-7-to-rhel-9/

Espressif Standard Toolchain Setup for Linux and macOS — https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/get-started/linux-macos-setup.html