From: Randall Parker 

Rich Gauszka wrote:
>>
>> So how do other free distros compare to Fedora on this score? Does Ubuntu
>> or Kbuntu do a better job of this? How about Debian?
>
> just a few

But you have to pay for those updates, right?

>
> Red Hat Enterprise has a support policy like that
>
> http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
>
> Phase 3: Maintenance
> Start Date: General Availability
> End Date: 4 Years from end of Deployment (7 years from General Availability)
> Description: During the Maintenance phase, only Security errata and select
> mission critical bug fixes will be released for the Enterprise products.

That's a long time.

> Madriva's appears somewhat short
> http://www.mandriva.com/security/productlifetime

Mandriva will provide 12 months of "desktop" updates for
distributions, and 18 months of "base" updates for distributions.
This means that applications such as window managers, desktop environments,
browsers, etc. will have a 12 month package update life, while applications
such as the kernel, Apache, and other "base" components will have
a package update life of 18 months.

That strikes me as pretty similar to Ubuntu and Fedora Core. Fedora is
dropping FC 4 support probably about 18 months after release (not sure
exactly when it came out). If they only support the latest 2 releases and
release every 6 or 7 months then that's close to 18 months. But who knows
when they'll drop FC 5 support.

>
> Ubuntu's are listed in their wiki
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/
>   a.. EdgyEft - Version 6.10. Released October 26, 2006. Supported until
> April 2008.

18 months.

So 6.10 was released after 6.06 but loses support sooner!

>
>   b.. DapperDrake - Version 6.06. Released June 1, 2006. Supported until
> June 1, 2009.

24 months.

Some people do not have problems running the Fedora Core update install and
so move up to new versions without losing their data and without the
hassles of selective restore from backup.

I guess I'll stick with Fedora Core and put FC 6 on a box I'm about to
install Linux on.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5