05 December 2011, 11:35

End of life approaching for RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux 4

Red Hat logo Red Hat recently released a reminder that the series 4 versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will reach their regular end of life at the end of February 2012. Regular subscribers to this Linux distribution, which will then be seven years old, will no longer receive any updates after this time. The distributor has therefore advised users to switch to version families 5 or 6; the latter will be maintained by Red Hat until the end of November 2017. RHEL 4 will continue to be supported for a further three years within Red Hat's Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) scheme.

The projects developing the free CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL) RHEL clones recently announced that the RHEL4-based series 4 of their Linux distributions will also reach their end of life in three months. The CentOS project also pointed out that Red Hat doesn't publicly release the source code of ELS updates. During the regular term of support, it does make the source code available, which allows clone developers to produce updates with relative ease, as the main effort with most packages is in recompiling Red Hat's source RPMs and in quality assurance.

(djwm)

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