Life Cycle Info For Mainstream GNU Linux Distributions

GNU/Linux is a open source operating system, it consists of Linux kernel and a piece of programs. It has many distributions, RHEL/CentOS、 Debian/Ubuntu、SUSE/OpenSUSE are mainstream distributions. In order to extract the product support life cycle info, I wrote a Shell script to extract relevant info from their official site.

GNU/Linux has 3 major mainstream distributions: RHEL、Debian、SUSE。RHEL、SUSE are maintenanceed by commercial corporation, Debian is maintenanceed by community, but Ubuntu (the derivative of Debian) is maintenanceed by commercial corporation.

Official Documents

RedHat

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Release Dates

CentOS

• Release Notes for supported CentOS distributions

Debian

• Debian Long Term Support
• DebianReleases

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu release end of life
• Releases
• The ubuntu-announce Archives

SUSE

• Product Support Lifecycle

OpenSUSE

• Lifetime
• openSUSE Release Notes
• Mailinglist Archive

Shell Script

Shell script is hosted on GitLab, but it just supports to extract info of RHEL/CentOS、 Debian/Ubuntu.

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download_method='curl -fsL' # wget -qO-

# if need help, specify '-h'
$download_method https://gitlab.com/MaxdSre/axd-ShellScript/raw/master/assets/gnulinux/gnuLinuxLifeCycleInfo.sh | bash -s --

Note：CentOS doesn’t provide release version page, I looped the page The CentOS-announce Archives to extract needed info. In order to increase the operation speed, I use command parallel to operate parallelly.

Terminology

Terminology & Acronym

Life Cycle

RedHat

CentOS

Debian

Ubuntu

SUSE

The release info about SUSE is dynamicly generated by javascript. I have not ability to extract them. Official release page is Product Support Lifecycle, you may also reference Wikipedia.

OpenSUSE

Shell script doesn’t add this distribution as its chaotic naming rule. Official release page is Lifetime , you may also reference Wikipedia.

EOL Status

If you wanna know if a specific release version is end of life (EOL), just specifing flag -a in the script. IsEOL, the last column of table stands for eol status. (0 means in maintenance, 1 means out of maintenance).

My system info check script gnuLinuxMachineInfoDetection.sh uses these data to determine if the distro release version is out of maintenance.

The following is the data about EOL until Aug 09, 2019.

Ubuntu Release EOL

Ubuntu has listed release date and EOL date of its release version (include unreleased) in official page Ubuntu release end of life. But the data has been hidden using HTML class class="u-hide--medium u-hide--large", it just be shown on mobile device.

Ubuntu Server and desktop release end of life

Extracting command

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wget -qO- https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life | sed -r -n '/id="server-desktop-eol"/,/<\/tbody>/{/<tbody>/,${[email protected]^[[:space:]]*@@g;[email protected]<\/tr>@[email protected];p}}' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;[email protected]\[email protected]@g;[email protected]@\[email protected];' | sed -r -n '[email protected]<\/td>@|@g;[email protected]<[^>]*>@@g;[email protected]\|[email protected]@g;[email protected]&nbsp;@@g;/^$/d;p' | awk -F\| 'BEGIN{OFS="|"; print "Release|Release Data|End of Life\n---|---|---"}{print}'

Results

Kernel release end of life

Extracting command

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wget -qO- https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life | sed -r -n '/id="kernel-eol"/,/<\/tbody>/{/<tbody>/,${[email protected]^[[:space:]]*@@g;[email protected]<\/tr>@[email protected];p}}' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;[email protected]\[email protected]@g;[email protected]@\[email protected];' | sed -r -n '[email protected]<\/td>@|@g;[email protected]<[^>]*>@@g;[email protected]\|[email protected]@g;/^$/d;[email protected]&nbsp;@@g;p' | awk -F\| 'BEGIN{OFS="|"; print "Release|Release Data|End of Life|Extended customer support\n---|---|---|---"}{print}'

Results

Ubuntu OpenStack release end of life

Extracting command

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wget -qO- https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life | sed -r -n '/id="openstack-eol"/,/<\/tbody>/{/<tbody>/,${[email protected]^[[:space:]]*@@g;[email protected]<\/tr>@[email protected];p}}' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;[email protected]\[email protected]@g;[email protected]@\[email protected];' | sed -r -n '[email protected]<\/td>@|@g;[email protected]<[^>]*>@@g;[email protected]\|[email protected]@g;/^$/d;[email protected]&nbsp;@@g;p' | awk -F\| 'BEGIN{OFS="|"; print "Release|Release Data|End of Life|Extended customer support\n---|---|---|---"}{print}'

Results

References

• linuxlifecycle.com

Change Log

• 2017.02.13 13:40 Mon Asia/Shanghai
  • first draft
• 2017.04.26 00:45 Wed America/Boston
  • add RHEL 6.9、CentOS 6.9
• 2018.04.17 14:48 Tue America/Boston
  • review, updaet, migrate to new blog
• 2018.04.18 10:14 Wed America/Boston
  • add Ubuntu release end of life
• 2018.05.10 07:08 Thu America/Boston
  • add CentOS 7.5.1804
• 2018.07.11 11:11 Wed America/Boston
  • update release info
• 2018.09.14 11:06 Fri Asia/Shanghai
  • update release info
• 2018.11.29 10:00 Thu America/Boston
  • update release info
• 2019.03.27 17:40 Wed America/Boston
  • update release info
• 2019.05.02 11:05 Thu America/Boston
  • update release info
• 2019.05.12 11:09 Sun America/Boston
  • update release info for RHEL 8
• 2019.08.09 07:31 Fri America/Boston
  • update release info for RHEL 7.7, Ubuntu 18.04.3