I would have to agree with you - when we first started using a linux system, Red Hat was not as much of a commercial company as they seem to be now if you know what I mean. It was bad enough when to get free updates you had to fill in surveys - I was just about to pay for a years subscription when I found out about them cutting support so I am a bit annoyed now.

From what people have said I think I'm going to have to do an evaluation of Suse and Debian and see what works best with what this system does.

Thanks for your help! Alex Brett alex.brett@brettcomputers.co.uk On 4 Nov 2003 at 10:10, ICT Support Officer wrote:

Basically, I am not in favour of Redhat distribution as I see it as Microsoft of Linux world. They seem to have some kind of monopoly. I wrote to them few months ago to see whether they had any kind of committment to education like Sun microsystems have with their Staroffice (which is free to education). They did not even bother to reply even though I repeated my query several times. I don't wish to go on about them but in my experience with all major Linux distributions I found SUSE to be the best in terms of cost, support and comittment to education. I do use Mandrake as well on one of my servers but Mandrake appear to be a problematic at times.

Suse does have live update facility but never checked whether it has automatic update facility, as I prefer to do updates manually myself.

regards

Mustafa Gural Canon Palmer Catholic School

----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex Brett" To: Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 7:54 PM Subject: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Automatic Updates

...

I have been using Red Hat Linux (8.0) on a server in a prep school and had been using the Red Hat Network to keep it up to date security wise etc.

Now I find out that Red Hat are discontinuing support and updates for the basic Red Hat Linux (8.0 end of December and 9.0 end of April) I am having to look for another distribution :(

Basically, does anybody have any experience with SUSE/Mandrake/Debian/any other suitable distro of automating updates - I guess I could write a script to download them from an ftp and run them etc etc - I was just wondering if anybody knows if any other distro has updates integrated.

This is important because I am not at this school much so if it isn't done unattended automatically then most of the time it won't get done (as the machine is currently just providing the firewall and web services so is basically left to run) which is obviously quite a security risk :| .

Thanks in advance, Alex Brett alex.brett@brettcomputers.co.uk

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