Red Hat 7.2 Released

Spirit writes "Red Hat has anounced the release of Version 7.2 distribution with Gnome 1.4 and Nautilus, default ext3 fliesystem and according to ZDnet migration from LILO to GRUB" Updated by HeUnique:There are some issues to note before upgrading: The kernel that comes with the RH 7.2 is heavily patched 2.4.7 and has been tested quite heavily on fully loaded Linux boxes - so the recommendation is to use it

If you're upgrading from the previous Red Hat 7.1 and you're using Ximian GNOME, then you might want to erase all Ximian GNOME RPMS (use the command: rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i ximian` --nodeps to erase the RPMS). Red Hat's GNOME RPMS has been more tested then Ximian's one and there is a conflict between them. You cannot use Red-Carpet on Redhat 7.2 as it will fail with the RPM libraries.

These are the most critical notes about Redhat 7.2. You might want to read the README & the Release-notes which appears on the 1st ISO image.

Oh, and if you already installed it - then have some fun with the new un-official RPMS from Enigma's section of FreshRPMS

Comments

LILO vs. GRUB

[Gleep]

RedHat 7.2 gives you the option of choosing between the two ( and choice is great) but i fear what i'm unfamiliar with so i stuck with LILO, but i jumped all over ext3fs (which was also a choice)

I am stoked!

[Anton Anatopopov]

We can tick off another feature that the 'linux is not ready' brigade use against us. Journalling file system means Linux is now more than ready for the enterprise.

Linux just seems to be going from strength to strenght while Micro$oft struggle to persuade their (l)users to upgrade to yet another version.

It just goes to show the power of the Open Source 'bazaar' development model.

I am a bit concerned about this GRUB thing, does it replace LILO ? I've only just got the hang of lilo after all these years. I hope all my enrgy has not gone to waste.

Anyone know if this version will have support for the new higher speed USB that is coming out soon ?

Re:I am stoked!

[VFVTHUNTER]

I did actually have a good idea (hard to tell from my posts, but I do have them - its a zero sum game...have some really stupid thoughts, youre bound to have some good ones to even you out...).

It goes like this. (I have no idea how GRUB works, so I'm guessing here). Let's say RH switches over to GRUB completely, and now there's no /etc/lilo.conf on the system. Someone like myself (this is what happened with xinetd) is going to sit down to admin one of these boxes one day, and assuming lilo.conf is there, type vi lilo.conf. As it stands now, when he/she does this on a GRUB only system, the response to discovering there is no lilo.conf might range from curious to semi-non-linear.
But what if, instead of no file existing, a text file (/etc/lilo.conf) existed that explained why its not there, what has replaced it, and how to do everything with the replacement that could be done with its predecessor? This I think would actually be really cool, and it would still be there even if no help documentation was included during the initial install. You could even put some sort of shebang-style string at the beginning of every one of these "evolution" files, so that people who want to get rid of them can issue a simple grep or find command to search and destroy them.

been in stores for a while

[banky]

This has been at my local CompUSA (Fairfax, VA) for over a week. Anyone have any ideas as to why?

Question about the ISO files

[phutureboy]

Does anyone know what is on disc 2? Do I really need to download that?

Re:Question about the ISO files

[Mr.Phil]

If it's much like 7.1, disc 2 will contain alot of server daemons and the like.

What about ReiserFS?

[bilenkey]

Im surpised: ext3 as a default fs!? Is there an option to use ReiserFS instead of ext3? I've converted all but / and /boot to reiserfs more than a year ago and never had any problems with it. I think that ext3 has not been tested by public as much as reiserfs.

Re:What about ReiserFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat has paid developers working on Ext3 so they're probably going to push that as much as humanly possible (return on investment, that sort of thing). As for everyone else in LinuxLand moving to ReiserFS, well... Red Hat thinks they own Linux, so they do what they want and wait for the industry to follow it. Methinks they may not be met with joy on the Ext3 front, though. It's too much of a hack for my taste. ReiserFS has much more traction at this point, so my money will go with ReiserFS.

Re:step softly

[s.a.m]

It has been my experience with RH that the .2 releases are the most stable and contains less bugs than the .0 or .1 releases. I've run servers with the 6.2 and the 7.0 release and the 6.2 always provides more stability than the 7.0

Of course I never jump on the bandwagon as soon as something is released. I always wait around for ppl to say something and hear complaints.
The only exception to this is Debian, apt-get upgrade using Sid and haven't had a problem yet ^__^

Re:Without Fail...

[Publicus]

Switch if you want to - but your reasoning doesn't make any sense. RH 7.1 came out in April. That's 6 months ago.

But I wouldn't abandon 7.1 just yet. Let folks mess with 7.2 and find out what they have to say. Besides, RH isn't worth anything until it's supported by Ximian, therefore, 7.1 is the way to go!

don't understand the need for constant upgrading

[kurokaze]

I'm still running 6.2 w/ any patches that
concern me.

I don't particularly see any need to upgrade
to 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2 for that matter.

What's the big deal?

Re:Still no djbdns

[bero-rh]

It's a pity they still use Bind instead of djbdns [cr.yp.to], which is a lot safer.

If you want us to ship djbdns, convince its author to put it under an Open Source license.

The current license is not acceptable.

I'm also surprised about KDE 2.2, since KDE 2.2.1 has been out for quite a while now

KDE is actually pseudo-2.2.1: We took 2.2, and merged all fixes from the stable CVS branch (and a couple of other patches).

Couldn't update to the official 2.2.1 because of the freeze - but the 2.2-* packages in 7.2 have all the fixes from 2.2.1 up to the day before it was released.

The same goes for the kernel version (2.4.7)

Which is actually 2.4.7 plus a lot of bugfixes from later versions, plus ext3, plus new drivers, and more.
Making sure the kernel is highly stable even under extreme load (and longer uptimes) takes time.

Re:Red Hat is not synonymous with Linux.

[bero-rh]

oddball decisions like the ones we're seeing in 7.2

Such as?

LILO has been replaced with GRUB. Why?

Because it has a load of advantages we consider more important than staying with what we've shipped forever.

• grub knows your filesystem. This means you can boot kernels you haven't listed in its config file (great for recovery, for example).
• You don't need to reinstall grub every time you've modified its config file. Among other things, that means kernel updates can now add themselves to the boot loader. One of the big problems support was faced with in earlier (LILO based) releases was the number of people updating their kernel and forgetting to adapt /etc/lilo.conf and/or run /sbin/lilo.
• It looks nicer (no more blocky 320x200 graphic at bootup)
• It has better support for booting other OSes

Sometimes switching one working part with another for only minimal gains is NOT a good idea

You are right about this - and since lilo->grub is not minimal, it doesn't apply to this particular thing.

ipsec, freeS/WAN and RedHat

[Kruemelmo]

I understand RedHat cannot integrate ipsec / FreeS/WAN into the Linux distribution because of US export restrictions.

Is there an "official" way to upgrade RH 7.2 to a kernel version with ipsec support (i.e. frees/wan) for European folks? The absence of this feature in RH becomes a more and more serious concern for my company.

Of course we know how to patch and compile a kernel. Maintenance must still be easy, though. Installing a custom kernel on several customer servers also means that we cannot use Redhat's update kernel RPMs but must maintain our own ones, so kernel (and possibly other packages) updates get complicated. It will not possible to respond on security issues as quickly as when using RH kernel RPMs.

It would be a great benefit for European customers if RedHat could at least draw the "official" procedure how to make this RH Linux version ipsec capable and then maintain this procedure as new kernel RPM packages or RedHat Linux versions appear.

Re:ipsec, freeS/WAN and RedHat

[Kruemelmo]

So I looked at cipe of which I was unaware so far. It seems to be a light weight tool to easily set up secure ip tunneling. This might already help us indeed, and we will take a closer look. It seems to implement a proprietary protocol and does not confirm to any standard except for its own. It may be sufficient to set up a secure ip tunnel between two Linux (or Unix) computers.

On the other hand, ipsec is a well defined standard defined in several RFC documents. FreeS/Wan is an implementation of it which also allows to communicatie with other systems implementing ipsec (routers).

FreeS/WAN is developed by non-US redidents only and they don't accept even single line patches from US citisens... So at least they think that there still are legal problems - dunno. Anyway, cipe seems to be the small solution where ipsec is the right one (and FreeS/WAN then tries to implement the right one; I don't know with how much success).

AFAIK it would be great if you'd schedule a reconsideration of it for some upcoming release of RedHat Linux.

Thanks!

Re:Is RH including proprietary sw these days?

[bero-rh]

Is any of this proprietary, or has RH managed to stay comeletely OS?

With the sole exception of Netscape (which will disappear later), it's 100% OS.
And Netscape will disappear with the next release - we're already including Konqueror, Mozilla and Galeon as free (and better) alternatives right now.

Also, what RH specific changes are in this gcc?

It's a stabilized fork of a CVS version. See http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html for a further explanation.

Why isn't gcc-3.01 being distributed? Does it have major issues?

It's included as a preview package, but it's not ready for a standard compiler.
It breaks binary compatibility with the compiler used in prior 7.x releases (which is something we don't do in minor releases), and its C++ part is quite broken ATM (try running a version of KDE that was compiled with gcc 3.0.1 and you'll see what I mean - it crashes at startup).

Re:uh oh

[opkool]

The "gcc/RH7.0 Fiasco" was actually a Kernel problem, as Linus himself pointed out.

Sorry I cannot find now the URL. But this was explained at the local LUG on a Kernel Talk. And I come to respect those folks. They usually know what they are talking about.

So there it goes another piece of FUD against the Linux comunity...

Does someone has the link to Linus interview about this?

Re:ext3, ok but what about reiserfs?

[bero-rh]

Will Redhat 7.2 support reiserfs?

Support is compiled into the kernel and the required userland tools are included.

It's not supported by the installer (but existing reiserfs partitions will be mounted) because the kernel team says it's still not 100% ready.

It will be very hard to devfs and reiserfs to succeed if RH makes it difficult

There are currently a number of known security problems with devfs, so making that easy is not a good idea just yet.

Your mom needs RH7.2

[dybdahl]

I upgraded my mom from Windows NT4 to RH7.1, and after the usual "why does it look different" she seems quite happy about being able to doubleclick everything in her mail inbox... and how many 62 year old women that invite to coffee talk with the neighbors tell about upgrading to Red Hat 7.2? Mine does!!!

RH 7.2 solves a real issue - sometimes (once a month) her harddisk stops working. A hardware error. ext3 makes it possible to start up again without runnin fsck manually. ext3 is the biggest stability improvement for the average end-user.

Lars.

Re:Comments on ISO files and cheap cd sets

[bero-rh]

I bought Redhat's 'Garage Edition' of RH 7.1

This is a Europe-only product.
It'll be hard to find it in any other place.

Re:Stress test time for the ftp servers.

[MattBurke]

50K/sec - not bad!

It's times like this when mirror.ac.uk crawls to 30Kbytes/sec (usually 8Mbytes/sec on this line) and sunsite hasn't even got it yet, that you've got to wonder if someone should perhaps organise a decent mirroring system

Perhaps a system whereby sysadmins can register to be a mirror site. They'd get their server's IP included in the forward DNS for (say) redhat.mirror.ac.uk, and they'd get a privalidged login to the main mirror.ac.uk servers which give access to files, say 24hrs before their public release.

It would have advantages of:
1. saving mirror.ac.uk from getting quite so crippled
2. saving lots of inter-provider bandwidth
3. SPEED!!!
4. Sysadmins get to mirror as much or as little as they want/can (eg. redhat mirrors need only mirror /sites/ftp.redhat.com/ or even just parts of the individual section)
5. Sysadmins get their distros first as a reward