“Red Hat Professional Workstation was designed to allow former users of the company’s consumer product line to continue to use a supported platform without having to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to its predecessors in key areas, and is considerably more expensive in some usage scenarios. Home users should look to the Fedora Project if they wish to continue using Red Hat technology, or consider migrating to another Linux distribution. Small businesses should analyse their current expenditure and consider migrating to another vendor.” Read the rest of the article at NewsForge.
Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Why are they talking about home users ? Just what part of “Red Hat Professional Workstation” don’t they understand ?
I wish them luck, though I think they may as well just concentrate on Enterprise alone. I’m thinking this is where Novell/SuSE/Ximian pick up the ball…for *all* types of Linux use.
one distro for everything is sort of the windows approach, there both pluses and minuses to it. imho, one OS _cant_ fit all, i like the move by redhat to focus on particular aspects for different markets, i think it shows quite a bit of insight into the differences between selling an open OS as opposed to a closed one.
Are you certain of that. Last I checked, Novell was not into the home market at all. What makes you this will change. I really doubt that they are going to concentrate on home users much either. The market is not there, and is still to much small to justify the trouble. There are certain things the home market wants, which are not really available to them right now. Such as easy to install apps. Something like install shield type installations. Games are not there. Users will not understand why they cannot play their EA games.
Redhat knows this, and know that they cannot compete with Microsoft in this arena. But in business area, its no holds barred. They can and do compete. Marketing to geeks is fine and dandy, but these people ususally rush off to the next cool thing. Think Gentoo. Next someone comes up with something else they run off to it. They need a stable market, and business is like that. Not geeks.
[quote]one distro for everything is sort of the windows approach, there both pluses and minuses to it.[/quote]
It’s not that I think they’ll be trying to do a one size fits all thing. They couldn’t if they wanted to anyway. I just think they’ll be good at packaging up all the choices of Open Source better than others.
Listen, I pretty much think the same way…Linux hasn’t cracked that market yet (it’s barely stepped in), but it’s certainly not as fatal as you make it sound. It’s not like Install Shield is the pinnacle of computing achievement. Things do improve and change, and certainly nothing lasts forever.
This article is a complete flame. He treats the workstation alternative as a replacement for RHL and guess what, it isnt!
It is supposed to be for workstations. Now tell of a real workstation that hsould have bind, openldap, and dhcp on it?
He makes claims on how this is all a clever and delicate marketing ploy by redhat to force its customers to pay.
He then moves on to mention Fedora as a redhat-based product. He dosnt mention that fedora is the official redhat solution for home users.
He fails to mention the numerous hardware and software certifications, and many other things which are written in simple black and white on the redhat webpage.
So he is right, if you dont care about license agreement, ISV’s, official phone support, official ‘dependable’ upgrades, then this product isn’t for you. Dosnt take a genius to figure it out, and even redhat would of told him that! RH Professional Workstation is for companies who want the above (meaning they can’t use fedora, debian, etc…).
When will people get it? Fedora is the replacement for RHL, except you dont have to pay, and there are no license agreements…
I was almost taking them seriously until I saw quotes from non other than Rob Enderle.
The article seems to have a specific goal — FUD against RedHat.
This page from RH clearly shows the difference between their Enterprise products: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/comparison/
Why should redhat provide packages they are not going to support on a WS product just to match the feature set of the ES product? You are paying for services. If you really must run all those servers and don’t need support for them, then you can compile from source or from Fedora or RedHat 9 packages. You can’t eat your cake and have it.
If you really must advice customers to avoid RH better give a comparison with the other alternatives so that it is clear what you get for your money.
This is just a half-a**ed attempt at discrediting RH by Rob E. and friends. It’s shamefull that Newsforge took the bait.
I actually *bought* and use RedHat Professional Workstation. I think it lives up to it’s name overall. As a professional business workstation, it fits just about perfectly.
The main reason I bought it? The company I work for runs Oracle, if I need to do development work at home there’s only one financially viable certified option and that’s RedHat Professional Workstation.
As far as “moving to another vendor”. When it comes to enterprise class software, you basically only have two options: SUSE and RedHat, and RedHat is actually cheaper for smaller businesses. We know, we’ve priced both of them.
Additionally, I don’t know why he claims you don’t get ISO access if you buy RedHat Professional Workstation. I have it. I can download ISOs of all previous versions of standard RedHat Linux, plus the RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation Edition and Developer Suite.
Last, he also fails to mention that if RedHat releases a new version during the year I get the upgrade for free. So, when RHEL 4 comes out (or whatever it is) I can download the ISOs for free. Now, that’s what I call a deal!
And if you buy Professional Workstation from staples.com you can get it for $49.95
So far the only complaint I have about it is no out of the box support for a Radeon 9800. But it’s not on their certified hardware list, and it’s not exactly workstation hardware, unless you’re running Maya, etc. in which case you’re going to use ATi’s crappy drivers anyway 8)
Other than that, it’s very stable, has fairly up to date packages and contains all the professional level software I need for coding and development.
Oh, before I forget. It is *definitely NOT* for a home user, unless you’re also a Kernel hacker / software developer, etc. Of course Red Hat doesn’t market it that way so I don’t know why people complain…
I would recommend Xandros Desktop 2.0 instead for a home user. I’ve tried it personally and it’s ok for a home / probably small business user. But in my opinion stinks for a developer.
I think this guy’s talking about RHPW from the perspective of the old RH9. Thus the title.
I broke teeth with RH8 before I knew any better… Red hat ain’t bad but it just doesn’t “feel” stable… I tried SuSE, much more stable and a smidge faster.. Now I’ve grown in my linux experiance and I’ve settled with slack… It’s free, it works, and it runs… Now installing software… Well It may or may not take an hour after resolving any lib dependencies… ;-P
Assuming you did buy the thing and used it as a desktop OS, where would you get the RPMs they don’t provide? Would the current Fedora repositories be compatible?
Take a look at http://www.whitebox.org/“>WhiteBox . It is compiled from the RHEL 3 source and is updated when RedHat release RHEL updates. If you can do your own support, this is the distro for you!
The URL is:
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org
heh
If your company doesn’t need “paid support” (and I reckon only the larger companies do myself), then Fedora Core 1 (and, in few months, Fedora Core 2) are actually perfectly adequate for small businesses. With the Fedora Legacy project, security updates will continue for FC1 for some time after FC2 comes out.
Also, Red Hat 7-9 are still “viable” in that you can download them for free, use them free and then, say, subscribe to Progeny’s update service at http://www.progeny.com/ for $60 a year.
To suggest that “small businesses…[should] consider migrating to another vendor” without mentioning either Fedora Legacy or the Progeny service as possible alternatives means that it’s very hard to take this article seriously at all.
@bxb32001:
Assuming you did buy the thing and used it as a desktop OS, where would you get the RPMs they don’t provide? Would the current Fedora repositories be compatible?
Any of the ones I’ve needed so far I’ve gotten from rpmseek or from yarrow.freshrpms.net, where I download the src.rpm, and do a rbmbuild –rebuild, and then install the resulting binary RPMs it spits out into /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/. I’ve done that so far for a few XMMS plugins and some obscure libraries I use. Other than that everything else I’ve needed is already there.
cuz its easy. I’ve been dealing with Linux for years. I used to only run Slackware and compile everything. The first thing I would do after installing the OS was compile a new kernel and probably update X and parts of GNOME. Now I just install redhat and use Synaptic to update whatever software has updates available. The software has improved to the point where I don’t need to update the system all the time and when I choose to upgrade its a free update that takes less than an hour in most cases. No more kernel compiles.
I’m running RedHat 9 on most of my systems waiting for Fedora or whatever comes out next to fix all the bugs I want fixed ( most of them have already been fixed ) before I upgrade again.
I don’t need the latest and greatest, even though Fedora Core 1 is great, I can wait a couple releases and still feel comfortable that I’m not wasting much time or money. One day the software will be feature complete and relatively bugfree. When that day arrives I will update ALL of my systems, until then even 2.4.18 is good enough.