This past Thursday, the Charlotte LUG had a guy from Red Hat talk to us. (It's under a 3 hour drive to Durham).

It looks like Red Hat has been paying attention to folks like Karsten who talk about Debian and "apt-get". With release 8.0 of Red Hat they will have a similar function. RPMs also will be more sane in their dependency handling and more like .debs are used. You heard it here first!

Also, something I never knew, is that the Red Hat Network (RHN) is free for the first machine that you register, even if you downloaded the CD ISO images and paid nothing to Red Hat. RHN is used to get bug fixes. RHN maintains an Oracle database of your system's RPMs. Also they plan to have a proxy RHN service where the RPMs are on a local server but the RHN database is still at Red Hat. This is of use to an Enterprise network of RH Linux machines and reduces internet traffic. Finally, the entire RHN including the Oracle database will be a product for sale.