Some Linux distributions have longer lives than others.
After two years of supported life, Novell is discontinuing support for SUSE
Linux 9.2, effective yesterday. Its closest competitor, Red Hat’s Fedora Core
3, which was released at roughly the same time as SUSE Linux 9.2, remains
supported.
“With today’s release of “pam_ldap” we discontinue the security support for
SUSE Linux 9.2,” SUSE developer Marcus Meissner wrote in a mailing list
posting.
“It [SUSE Linux 9.2] was the first release featuring Delta RPMs,
making downloads of patches even smaller than with the Patch RPMs we used
before.”
SUSE
Linux 9.2 was announced in October 2004 with availability beginning
in November 2004. It was one of the last distributions from
Novell before shifting to the OpenSUSE community-driven effort in 2005.
SUSE Linux and its OpenSUSE-based successors are not enterprise releases and
have generally followed a six-month release cycle. Novell’s enterprise
releases have an 18-month release cycle and are accompanied by at least
five years of support.
The current OpenSUSE release is version 10.1, with 10.2 in active development.
The next SUSE Linux release to hit its end of life support will be SUSE Linux 9.3, which
will “die” in April, also after a life of two years.
Red Hat’s Fedora Core releases, in contrast, seem to have a longer supported
life span than Novell’s SUSE Linux releases, though Fedora’s longevity has
more to do with community support rather than explicit Red Hat support. The
main Fedora Project support for Fedora Core release is typically about a
year.
Fedora Core 3 is currently being supported by the Fedora Legacy project,
which provides community support for those distributions that the main
Fedora Project no longer maintains.
The Fedora Project will typically
maintain the current version (now Fedora Core
6) and its immediate predecessor (Fedora Core
5). Previous versions revert to Fedora Legacy for support.
The Fedora Legacy effort has been active for nearly three years, providing
support for older Fedora versions, as well as legacy Red Hat Linux
distributions. When Red Hat discontinued support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2,
7.3 and 8 in 2004, Fedora
Legacy stepped in to support them.
Fedora Legacy still supports Red Hat
Linux 7.3, which was released back in 2002, though not for much longer.
The Fedora Legacy project stopped accepting bugs for Red Hat Linux 7.3 in
October of this year and will attempt to resolve all existing bugs by
December 31.
“What hasn’t been completed by then will not be completed by the Fedora
Legacy Project,” The Fedora Legacy Web site states. “This will be the
complete end of Fedora Legacy’s support of the Red Hat Linux line of
distributions.
“We will continue focusing our efforts on the Fedora Core
line and improving our integration with the Fedora Project in whole.”
