[SLUG] RedHat up2date / Debian apt

[steven]

Afternoon All

With the release of RedHat 8.0 I feel the need to switch back to RedHat from Debian.  RedHat 8.0 is pretty much what I have been looking for since I first got interested in Linux (My first distribution was RedHat 4.something).

/rant on

I have paid for one of the boxed sets for each of the major RedHat releases and probably a few point releases as well.  I see this as my contribution to their development.  This is obviously not enough for RedHat and they have leapt upon what they see as their income stream and charge for keeping your system up to date.  I don't think even Microsoft have successfully managed this yet.  Perhaps it is the fact that RedHat get this income stream from charging for keeping your system up to date that they can afford the resouces to produce such a product.   (Perhaps the style of Debian development means they are too much like a large committee to ever force through a consistent user interface.)

RedHat Network (RHN) seems to work well.  I used it for a 7.2 box (Back then you got 12 months membership of RHN)  Now with 8.0 you only get 60 days trial.  However, it annoys me to be forced into paying for RHN for each machine.  I know you can still download updated RPM's manually but I don't want to do this.

I just want to have my cake and eat it too.  I want to a user interface similar enough to Windows that my users can understand it.  I want a user interface consistent between the different programs on the system.  I want all our systems configured in a similar fashion so I don't have to remember 20 different ways of fixing the same problem on 20 different machines.  Although it is not as necessary I want to be able to use the same distribution for servers as desktops for the same reason.  I want easy security updates.  (This means I want apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade).  I want a simple and automatic way of downloading all updates on a central machine in our network and having them automatically picked up from there by other computers.  I want lots of other things too but I shouldn't mention them here.

/rant off

I have spent some time this morning googling for ways to set up updates that don't rely on a RHN subscription (although at the moment I seem to have 2 current subscriptions).  I have found something called frpms that claims to be a cut down version of up2date.  I believe it is possible to configure up2date to collect updates from another source but can't find details about this.  man up2date shows a -p option which talks about up2date using a profile stored on RHN to decide what to do.  There are also the --solvedeps and --whatprovides flags.  These seem to imply that RedHat has sorted out the deficiencies of RPM by storing dependencies on the RHN server rather than in the package.  This of course further serves to tie you to RHN.

Have I got all this wrong?  Could anyone provide some simple instructions or a pointer to simple instructions about how I could set up up2date to work as I wish?

Regards to all
Steven