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

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.