RHEL 6 and Trial Subscription: Keeping It Alive

This is just a side note on my series RHEL 6 for the Clueless.

I obtained my copy of RHEL 6 using the free trial offer from Red Hat. For a month, you could continue getting Yum updates for free. At the end of that period, Yum complains you have no access to the Red Hat Network (RHN) repository. I know, because mine ran out before I could allocate the money for the fee. I live on a tight budget and I hope to afford it soon.

It is possible to keep it alive without support. As part of Red Hat’s commitment to the Open Source principle, they continue to allow open access to their SRPMs. That’s the easiest way for them to fulfill their obligations to the GPL copyright system. Thus, I can download and build updates using the RPMbuild dependency chase outlined in my previous post. The only thing left is keeping track of the relevant update notices. You can subscribe for email notices, but I simply check the archives daily by clicking on the thread link for the latest month and year.

For example, a few days ago there was a notice of a kernel update. I downloaded the SRPM and started to build it. However, I noticed in the SPEC file the build would not create the necessary kernel-firmware package unless you edited the file to turn on that build feature. I’m not an RPM hacker, and I just barely understand the file format for SPEC. But I understand it just enough to make it work for me.

If you open that file in an editor, you can scan down until you see list of features with three columns of code about how the features are handled (the lines are not so tightly wrapped as you see here on my WordPress blog when you view the file itself):

# What parts do we want to build? We must build at least one kernel.
# These are the kernels that are built IF the architecture allows it.
# All should default to 1 (enabled) and be flipped to 0 (disabled)
# by later arch-specific checks.

What I did was change the line about firmware to read like this:

# kernel-firmware
%define with_firmware %{?_with_firmware: 0} %{?!_with_firmware: 1}

Frankly I didn’t really know if that would fix it, but when I ran the rpmbuild command, it did produce the firmware file, which I knew from experience would be missing by default if I didn’t do something. I’m sure I’ll stumble across other surprises as I try to keep up with my home-built updates, and I’ll share them if it seems pertinent. I’d much rather pay for the RHN membership, but I can’t promise it will happen. This does not happen with CentOS or Scientific Linux.