What's Coming In Red Hat 7.0

An anonymous reader writes: "MaximumLinux.com has a story about Red Hat 7.0 which is coming out on Tuesday. Apparently it will ship with 2 installation CDs, XFree4 is set to default and the USB support is s'pose to kickass." I've finally seen USB work properly under Linux and its sweet. The sad part is that the only USB device I have is a mouse ... with a PS/2 adapter.

Comments

Finally, a reason to upgrade?

[Platinum Dragon]

For the record, I'm still using the same Red Hat 6.0 install from a year ago. It's been pretty heavily modified by now, though. I think it's about time to upgrade.

I quickly parsed the story, mostly looking to see if RedHat said anything about the infamous default installs. Lo and behold, there are claims that the default installs will be "more secure for cable and ADSL users" - does this mean no more apache, login, shell, nfs, etc. by default?

On the one hand, "It's about time a major distributor got around to thinking about security."

On the other hand, it just goes to prove that enough people demanding something will make it happen - how often do people complain about the wide-open default installs from most major Linux distros nowadays?

Re: USB support. I was kinda forced to try out USB support under Linux when my new Epson couldn't print using my parallel-port scanner's pass-through - the scanner's fault, I think. All it took was a quick kernel recompile, a quick skim of a howto, and that was it. Works like a dream.

As long as a rash of exploits don't appear in the two weeks after 7.0's release, it sounds like this version will be worth upgrading to. Of course, if you already have Mandrake 7.0 installed, then why bother - same stuff, looks like.

My main reason for even considering an upgrade is the fact that Red Hat, and other distributors, seem to be moving toward using a new glibc in compiling their brand-spanking-new packages. Go ahead, try a rawhide package. There's a good chance it won't install, giving you a dependency error requesting...glibc2.2? News to me, but if I want to keep up, I'll have to upgrade. For free, of course:)
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2.4 upgradability

[MSG]

Don't underestimate the importance of easy upgrading to 2.4. This will be one of the killer features in 7.0. (as an aside, I installed a 2.4pre kernel in my mother's machine and it works great )

According to AMD, during the next year the ISA bus will no longer be available on most motherboards. That means that a lot of new systems are going to be sold with NO ISA slots, NO PS/2 ports, NO serial ports and NO parallel ports. Removing the old ISA controllers will mean more available area on the motherboard for high speed controllers or smaller, faster, and less expensive motherboards, depending on your market.

Internal expansion will be available with PCI, i810 bus from Intel, or LDT from AMD (LDT bus can be 2,4,8,16, or 32 bits wide and features 1.6GB bandwidth). External devices will use either IEEE 1394 or USB. I'm guessing that support for these buses will be (or has been) back ported to the 2.2 Linux kernel, but will be better supported in the 2.4 kernel.

Re:Red Hat Bloatware?

[Azog]

You know how many Microsoft CD's it would take to come close to having as much content as those two Red Hat CD's?

1. Windows 2000 CD for the OS
2. Microsoft Office 2000 for the user apps
3. Microsoft Back Office for the server apps
4. Dev Studio 6 for the compiler
5. MSDN for the documentation
6. Third-party software for shells, scripting, and other essentials.

That's at least 6 CDs, and thousands of dollars. Install it all on one computer, and it will take up many gigabytes. Good luck getting it all running at the same time, and stable.

But Red Hat has all that and more (Beowulf, more development tools, etc), for 30 bucks, on just two CDs. It probably installs into about 1.5 GB (based on my experience with Mandrake 7.1, which also comes on two CD's.)

So who's bloated?


Torrey Hoffman (Azog)