[NCLUG] Red Hat Professional Workstation

[BOF]

There has been much confusion over what Red Hat has been doing in 
regards to its split into the Fedora and Enterprise lines.

While Fedora is intended for the home user and Enterprise (RHEL) for the 
business, there is additionally a little advertised version yet 
available via retail channels as a boxed set, called RH Professional 
Workstation. Information on it is at

    http://www.redhat.com/software/workstation/

and also

    http://www.in.redhat.com/software/workstation/

It includes a year of support from RH via RH network (normally a $60 
cost by itself). It's locally available from SoftPro for $100, and I 
believe that I also saw it in Best Buy; on the net at buy.com, it sells 
for $82 (see 
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=20359120&loc=105&sp=1)

One of the RH mailing lists users, Ed Wilts, who signs himself as Member 
#1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program, posted a message about it in 
late October, which I enclose below. He wrote:

    I received my order from BUY.COM today. Here's what you get in the
    box: 9 CDs in total:
    - 4 CDs labeled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the x86
    architecture" - these are the installation CDs - i.e. binary rpms
    - 3 CDs with the source rpms
    - 1 CD with the documentation (see below)
    - 1 CD with the "extras" BEA Jrockit IBM Java JRE and SDK these have
    commercial licenses according to rpm
    - 1 Red Hat Service Activation Card - You need the number from the
    Activation Card to get your up2date support.
    - A $250 off coupon on any Red Hat training course.
    - The Installation Guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    The box says that 4 additional manuals are on CD. It's actually a
    lot better than that. Besides the installation guide (which is on CD
    as well as on paper), you get:
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Reference Guide
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Guide
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Introduction to System Administration
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Tools Guide
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Using cpp, the C Preprocessor
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Debugging with gdb
    * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Using ld, the GNU Linker
    These documents are all available online.

    The full package list is at http://www.ewilts.org/rhpw-rpms

    So...to answer the question about how this compares to RHEL WS, I
    believe the answer is simply this: it *IS* RHEL WS - the
    documentation, the CDs, everything says it is RHEL WS. The only
    difference is the level of support you get.

This might be a viable alternative for those who want to continue to use 
RH instead of Fedora and get RH support but do not want to pay for the 
full-blown RHEL versions, such as RHEL Workstation for $179 or more.

BOF