Red Hat 7.3 Coming Along

EyesWideOpen writes "I just read a review of a beta version of Red Hat 7.3 (code named Skipjack) over at Linux Journal. It's not the most complete review (being a little KDE heavy and GNOME shy, as well as focusing mainly on the install and desktop components) but it's a decent read. From the article: '...if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software...'. If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site."

Comments

Downloading....

[Totonic]

"If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site.".....in a couple of days when you can finally login.

Re:Downloading....

[popoutman]

Personally I love the mirror site http://mirror.ac.uk/
From where I connect to net (college connection to heanet to janet) this one just rocks for availability of mirrors, and speed of updates to the site. It should be the fastest site for anyone in Ireland or the UK.

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.redhat.com/pub/r edhat/linux/beta/skipjack/en/

Re:Downloading....

[popoutman]

sorry.. seems that the guys running mirror.ac.uk are a bit behind in the rsync schedule.. (still on 7.2.92).
Here is a resonably close mirror that has 7.2.93 on it.

Re:Downloading....

[ginxd]

AMEN: absolutely... one of the best mirrors around!

full text

[trollercoaster]

Red Hat 7.3 beta: A Product Review
Date: Monday, April 15, 2002
Topic: Product Reviews

New beta distribution includes many of the recent releases from KDE, XFree86, Mozilla and other projects, making it easy, stable and powerful on your desktop.

The Linux community has remained active, developing improved software, and the desktop environment also continues to improve. Both the KDE and GNOME projects have added functionality, improved performance and made the desktop environment more fun and usable. The XFree86 project has continued to improve hardware support. The overall appearance, quality and selection of fonts continues to improve.

Red Hat has been working to incorporate many of these improvements into their next release of software. While Red Hat is probably best known for their Linux server systems, their desktop systems have undergone considerable improvement. Their latest development effort, code named "Skipjack", incorporates a number of these improvements.

My personal interest in Skipjack arose mainly because this release includes a test version of KDE 2.99, which is really KDE 3.0 Release Candidate 3. I was so excited about this release because there have been claims of great performance improvements. In fact, the final version of KDE 3.0 was announced on April 3.

So, how well does Skipjack, Red Hat 7.3 Beta Release 2, meet my expectations? Very well, indeed.

I installed Red Hat 7.2 on my Dell Dimension 4100 desktop computer a few weeks ago. Then I ordered a copy of Skipjack from Tech Broker. The unsupported download release came in a five CD package. Tech Broker CDs usually cost $4 per CD, so ordering Red Hat's Skipjack test release from Tech Broker cost $20. (You can download Skipjack during the testing period from ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/skipjack.) I decided to install Skipjack as an update to the 7.2 distribution to see how well that would work.

I was very impressed with the results. It took between 30 and 40 minutes to complete the installation. Most of that time was spent detecting the existing software and determining which packages needed to be upgraded. On my system, I used the Workstation configuration (Red Hat installations provide a choice of Workstation, Server or Custom package selections). In addition to the Workstation packaging category, I also selected the option to modify the selection group and install any other software that I'm interested in. (I tend to install extra text editors, web browsers, and e-mail programs; these are the tools that interest me most).

The installation was flawless. Every menu was clear and concise. Every screen provided an explanation of the choices to make, so it is not even necessary to read a manual in order to install the software (if you are at least somewhat familiar with software installations). The appearance of the Red Hat software installation program is familiar; if anything, the graphics, explanations on each screen and mechanics of performing the installation are more streamlined than ever.

For those who have not installed or upgraded Red Hat software in a while, GRUB is now the default boot loader, though LILO remains available. The default GRUB boot loader now offers optional password security. If the system you're using is located in a public place where you have a need to secure the system loading process, this is a much-needed improvement (though it does not address the issue of physical system security, nor does it prevent someone from booting the system from a floppy disk). Still, this touch is a good idea, and it's not found on many other Linux distributions.

What about the desktop? I mentioned that I was interested in trying out KDE. How well does it work? It is incredible! I'd heard that there might be as much as a 40% improvement in the overall memory usage and performance of KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2.2. While I did not confirm those numbers, I can attest that the Skipjack implementation of KDE is both solid and fast.

The Konqueror file manager and web browser and the KMail e-mail application are two core KDE applications, and like the KDE infrastructure, they have undergone appearance, functionality and performance improvements. Konqueror has much improved JavaScript support, major improvements in DHTML capability and fast loading times, to the point that Konqueror is worth considering as my main web browser.

KMail is KDE's full-featured and user-friendly e-mail client and supports both the popular IMAP and POP3 mail standards. Users can have multiple accounts and multiple identities. (Previous versions allowed multiple accounts to a limited degree, allowing you to read from multiple POP3 and IMAP4 servers but not allowing you to send to multiple SMTP destinations). Its address book is based on the vCard address book standard and is shared with the rest of KDE.

I don't personally use all of the KDE applications and tools, but it bears mentioning that the Personal Information Management (PIM) tools provided in KDE have also undergone considerable improvement. The list of PIM components in the Skipjack implementation of KDE 3.0 include:

* KMail, the e-mail client
* KAddressBook, an address book viewer/frontend for the K Desktop Environment
* KOrganizer, the calendar and scheduling program for the K Desktop Environment
* KPilot, a replacement for the Palm Desktop software from Palm Inc, which makes your Palm/Palm Pilot/Visor computer capable of exchanging information with your Linux-powered computer
* Kandy, a tool to provide synchronization of phonebook, organizer and other data on your mobile phone with the data stored on the desktop
* KArm, a tool that tracks time spent on various tasks. It is useful for tracking hours to be billed to different clients or to find out what percentage of your day is spent playing Doom or reading Slashdot.
* KNotes, a small tool to scribble down some notes
* KAlarm, a quick way of setting up personal alarm/reminder messages. The messages pop up on the screen at the time you specify.

In addition to the core desktop functionality and PIM capabilities outlined above, KDE also has a growing office suite called KOffice.

The following parts of the KOffice suite are being developed:

* KWord, a frame-based word processor capable of professional standard documents
* KSpread, a powerful spreadsheet application
* KPresenter, a full-featured presentation program
* Kivio, a Visio-style flowcharting application
* Kontour,a vector drawing application
* Krita, a raster-based image manipulation program like The GIMP or Adobe Photoshop
* Kugar, a tool for generating business quality reports
* KChart, an integrated graph and chart drawing tool

I don't use the KOffice suite often, but I can tell you that KWord is quite capable of reading basic Word documents. Advanced features, such as embedding Active X controls, cannot be handled by the KOffice tools, but in fairness, few if any competing office suites can accurately render all of the features found in Microsoft's latest arsenal of office applications. IF you're looking for a functional office suite that is bundled with a system, however, this suite is worth a look.

So far, I've mentioned that Skipjack installs effortlessly, contains a new boot loader that works well and has security improvements, incorporates most of what will be found in the final KDE 3.0 desktop and runs well. What about the other features?

Another thing I use my system for frequently is web browsing. Red Hat delivers here, too. As part of the available software, Red Hat includes not only the browsers that are integral components of the desktop managers, it also includes recent releases of the Netscape and Mozilla suites. You can choose between the "old style" version 4 Netscape browser, Netscape Communicator 4.79 and the most current release of the Mozilla browser, 0.99. Both browsers have web browser and e-mail client components.

Speaking of browsers, I have to mention the Galeon Web browser, which is included in the Skipjack release as part of the GNOME desktop environment. While Galeon requires both Mozilla and GNOME libraries in order to function, other than the obvious disk overhead, Galeon is a very effective and efficient web browser. Skipjack comes with the newest and best version of Galeon I've seen yet, version 1.2.0. Galeon is arguably one of the leading standards compliant web browsers currently available. So Skipjack gets my nod for including a very up-to-date and usable version of Galeon.

What about GNOME, the default desktop environment included in Red Hat distributions? The Skipjack release, as far as I can tell, does not incorporate any upcoming test releases of GNOME software. The good news, however, is that the Nautilus File Manager, which is a core component of the overall GNOME, seems more stable than I've seen in the past. Perhaps this is because the image rendering engine used with Nautilus is the Gecko engine that's part of the latest release of Mozilla. Since Mozilla 0.99 comes with the Skipjack release, Nautilus benefits from recent, significant improvements in Mozilla's functionality and reliability.

I have not touched on any of the server features found in Red Hat; that is beyond the scope of this review. During the installation, however, I did notice that Red Hat has continued to work on integrity, security and stability issues, and it really shows. Whether Red Hat decides to produce this software as an incremental update to it's existing release and calls the next release 7.3, or if they decide to create a new major release, from my perspective as a desktop user this is without question their best release ever. Even in beta form, it is solid.

I wrote this article using the Gvim text editor. I wrote the first part of the article while running the desktop using KDE, and I wrote the second part using GNOME. I tried out Konqueror, Konsole, KWord, Vim/Gvim, Netscape, Mozilla, Galeon, Nautilus, GNU Emacs, XEmacs, NEdit and GNOME Terminal, and I experimented with the GRUB boot loader. During my testing (while admittedly not exhaustive but representative of the kinds of daily tasks I perform) I did not encounter a single application or system failure. There probably are still some bugs out there, but this is great beta software, among the best that I've ever seen from anyone.

Was it worthwhile to run this release? Absolutely. While Red Hat explicitly recommends not running beta software in a production environment, if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software (at least until the other vendors incorporate this software into their release).

Re:full text

[Ilgaz]

Its stupid... Linuxjournal has ways to handle this enormious hits. At least they can do it.

Sorry but I am sick of reading a copy of a page as first page marked +5 informative.

Funny is nobody sends a copy of site as anonymous coward (anonymous), if it really worths it (site crashes etc), people can mod up that comment and make it visible.

Ah,same time they say they have enough karma etc. Well if you have enough karma, you can do it way that I stated above.

Stupid indeed.

Re:full text

[56ker]

Seems at last there's a Linux distro easy enough for even complete newbies to set up!

Re:full text

[jo42]

Where is Kunt, the K user network tool?

Re:full text

[Anonymous Coward]

If you didn't notice, trollercoaster posts at -1 by default, so he had to get modded up 6 times to get to +5, and 2 times just to be seen at all.

tv...

[digitalsushi]

i wonder if it will have the option of setting up those hacked X windows libs so I can continue being lazy and still use my tv card. i love being lazy, and i love watching tv. i'd do anything to watch tv instead of learning how to install the drives to watch my tv with x windows and linux. quite the paradox no?

Why 7.3?

[JoshuaDFranklin]

OK, I've explained to my boss how Red Hat does
x.0, x.1, x.2 every time--why 7.3 now?

Someone want to explain that, hmmm?

Oh, and the obligatory:
When is the final coming out?

Re:Why 7.3?

[NewbieSpaz]

7.3, if it is called that, doesn't break binary compatibility like the way jumping to the next x.0 release does. 8.0 will probably use gcc3 and other newer components, and it will break compatibility with the 7.x series...

Re:Why 7.3?

[L-Wave]

becuase x.0 version are generally known to be "buggy" versions. threfore, if they release version 7.3 which is quite,possibly a stable one, then people will buy it. Everyone knows you only move up to a x.0 version if 1) you competetor has a x.0 version above you, or 2) you are going to release a buggy version ;)

*This comment was supposed to be funny, not a troll, flaimbait, or off topic, do not attempt to hold me responsible for lack of humor thereof* =)

Re:Why 7.3?

[RunzWithScissors]

Red Hat wanted to release a new version of their product in Spring, but the features that the developers thought would be major enhancements would/could not be ready in time. So, instead of going to 8.0 (A major version number with very few new major features) Red Hat decided to go to 7.3. Most of the same features as the other 7.x line, of course, the latest versions of packages; with some minor new stuff. That's why 7.3 not 8.0. Not significant enough change in the distro to warrent a Major version change.

I've noticed lots of small things though. Mostly the fact that the latest packages fix a lot of the annoying, uh, undocumented features, of 7.2.

-Runz

Re:Why 7.3?

[JThaddeus]

Maybe they just decided to give up on trying to stay a version number ahead of Mandrake.

Re:Why 7.3?

[totallygeek]

x.0, x.1, x.2 every time--why 7.3 now?

I don't know, I don't care. This way, I get to keep my RHCE longer without having to retest!

Re:Why 7.3?

[Vinson Massif]

[ Everyone knows you only move up to a x.0 version if 1) you competetor has a x.0 version above you, or 2) you are going to release a buggy version ;) ]

Slack has been at 8.0 for ~1 yr; 8.1 is approaching the gates. SuSE just released 8.0. RH must be falling behind!! (laff)

Re:Why 7.3?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Mandrake is at 8.2 for a little while now. They even have the PPC version of 8.2 out.

Re:Why 7.3?

[mczak]

"gcc 3.0, the current so-called "stable" release (released quite some time after Red Hat released gcc 2.96-RH), fixes some problems, but introduces many others - for example, gcc 3.0.1 can't compile KDE 2.2 correctly due to bugs in gcc 3.0.x's implementation in multiple inheritance in C++. Until another set of 3.0.x updates is released, I still claim 2.96 is the best hot grits compiler yet."

I don't agree here with you. While gcc 2.96 may still have some advantages over 3.0.x, todays gcc 3.1 is better in every way: generates faster code (at least if you believe the people running speccpu all day long), even more c++ compliant (and yes, it has those bugs fixed which prevents the correct compilation of artsd from kde). Of course you can say that 3.1 isn't a release version - but neither is 2.96, so that's not a valid objection. gcc "2.96" might be (though I still have my doubts) the best compiler shipped in a distribution, since no distribution (that I'm aware of) uses gcc-3.0.x or a developer version of 3.1.

Re:Why 7.3?

[jdavidb]

This is the highest rated and most informative troll I've ever seen. Some kid is giggling that this got modded up to 5. Note the grits, portman, etc. junk thrown in at random moments. As someone has noted, this is a plagiarized article. You'll also notice that it doesn't answer the question asked at all.

Re:Why 7.3?

[orpheus2000]

Hey, yeah! I didn't think of that :-)

I just got it last month in 7.2, I'm glad I won't have to learn a completely new version (8.0?) just yet. That way I can leverage my 7.2 knowledge for another 6 months, effectively.

Re:Why 7.3?

[morhoj]

Without going into a long discussion about gcc... if I was Redhat, I would be releasing for the pure marketing need. Redhat is understood in the industry (whether you agree or not) as the defacto Linux distro... every bump in version they go, the more potential customers begin to think that perhaps there IS something with this entire Linux thing...

Re:Why 7.3?

[Anonymous Coward]

It perhaps will be 7.3 and not 8, because /usr/bin/gcc -v still reports that the version is 2.96. If this were to be version 8, I'd think they'd've moved to a more recent version of gcc.

Re:Why 7.3?

[doom]

because x.0 version are generally known to be "buggy" versions. therefore, if they release version 7.3 which is quite,possibly a stable one, then people will buy it.

And you know, I think I buy this explanation. I'm afraid that I was thinking more along the lines of: "Wow, they must be really embarassed about the poor quality of the 7.2 release. I mean, this used to be a joke around the time of '7.2', as in 'Uh, maybe I should wait for 7.3, huh guys?'".

But it's a good thing I didn't say that, or the moderators might have slammed me senseless. (Moderation Totals: Funny: +5, Flamebait: -7, Redundant: -3, Insightful:+1)

By the way, here's my standard RedHat 7.2 era rant: Changing the default file system is *not* a small change. Handing a relatively new, unproven filesystem to newbies to play with is a fundamentally a bad idea. Even if you did go beserk testing it, then there were almost certainly other quality issues you were neglecting. If you feel the need to toss new features in every release, here's a thought: "Quality is a feature". Learn to sell it.

Beta Cycle

[NewbieSpaz]

Skipjack is actually in its 2nd iteration, the first was also called Skipjack. If you do download it, make sure to use up2date, the RedHat Network's updating tool. It's a free registration for the beta channel.

Re:Beta Cycle

[ZaMoose]

And, in an even more confusing set of circumstances, Skipjack beta 1 was actually 7.3 beta 3 (there were two unnamed beta releases prior to Skipjack). So, in effect, Skipjack 2 (the current release) is 7.3 beta 4. Make sense?

Re:Beta Cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are only 2 public betas. Skipjack-beta1 and then skipjack-beta2. If those were beta 3 and 4 respectively, then it would only mean there were prior betas before skipjack. I would assume those were internal beta types or something, for internal beta testing before going public. But I could be totally off base. I wouldn't worry about the beta3-4 type thing, just know there was public beta 1 then beta 2.

Re:Beta Cycle

[lindner]

If you do download it, make sure to use up2date, the RedHat Network's updating tool.

Note that the up2date server is about 10-20 times faster than ftp. ftp.redhat.com gets me 20k/sec whereas I've seen 300-400k/sec using up2date.

If you're brave you can even update your 7.2 box to 7.3 using up2date. Just upgrade the redhat-release, and up2date RPMs and start downloading! (note you'll probably have to manually work around some rpm name changes, but it's not hard..)

Re:Beta Cycle

[ZaMoose]

Yes, "public" beta tests. However, one of the guys here at work is on the internal beta team, so we get the internal releases here as well. So, there were two internal beta releases, followed by the two public Skipjack releases.

Re:Beta Cycle

[An Onerous Coward]

Being on the short end of a 28.8 modem, how does this information help me at all? :)

Seriously, I've been trying to get all the up2date packages for a couple of months now. Is there somewhere I can just order a CD? I'm willing to pay money at this point.

Re:Beta Cycle

[chfleming]

But for the price of a CD you could find a 56k modem in a dumpster.

Re:Beta Cycle

[An Onerous Coward]

Good advice, but I actually have a 56K modem. The problem is that the phone lines out where I live are too dirty to get better than a 28.8 connection. So I just tell everyone I have a 28.8 modem to keep things simple.

RE: KDE heavy and GNOME shy

[BRock97]

And this is a problem because? Gnome 1.4 has been around for quite some time and has been hashed over in so many reviews, why bother to cover it again? Meanwhile, KDE is at a new version 3.0 and is on the tips of everyone's lips at the moment. I am all for equal representation of a desktop environment, but could you blame the reviewer for wanting to cover something new? Sheesh....

As for desktops, I have recently discovered Sorcery Linux. This has been a blast, and the best part is I only get those programs I want. There. My own mini-review of a Linux distro. Check it out, you won't be sorry.

stable compiler

[Jacek Poplawski]

How long will I wait for RedHat or Mandrake contain ing stable gcc ?
You know - gcc-2.96 was nice joke, but I still want my 2.95.3! Will they switch from 2.96 only to 3.x.y, becouse it's higher?
At least there is Slackware...

Re:stable compiler

[glwtta]

as far as I know 2.96 is 3.0.x, or at least closer to it than to 2.95.3

It's actually gotten a bit better, sure it's not 2.95.3 but it works for most things, and has come to the point where it's not worth the effort for me to replace it, if I'm setting up a server system. Which is all I ask of RedHat.

Re:stable compiler

[atcurtis]

If you want stable system components, you are using the wrong operating system. Use FreeBSD instead where things only get put in to STABLE which are largely stable. If you want bleeding-edge FreeBSD, then you can always try CURRENT.

Re:stable compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Use kgcc worked 7.1 and 7.2

Should be a 2.95 version

Re:stable compiler

[teg]

The beta (why did this hit slashdot now? It was released weeks ago...) contains the currently most stable version of gcc.

Re:stable compiler

[teg]

kgcc (which hasn't been used for the compiler since RHL 7... the kernel has since had that bug fixed) is egcs 1.1.2. We don't use gcc 2.95.x - next compiler (next major series) will be whatever is best (features, stability) at the time (3.1.1, perhaps)

Re:stable compiler

[glwtta]

Well if my opinion of the compiler is Flamebait (X2 no less) that says something about the compiler... or me.

Re:stable compiler

[HeUnique]

ahhm, yeah...

So if I want to use 3D apps with a Geforce 2 card? what should I do? cry and beg to nVidia? What about my Conexant WinModem that I have? (hey, it's cheap, it does the job great on Windows and Linux) they don't release driver for FreeBSD either...

Lets make a long story short - FreeBSD is GREAT for servers (umm, with open source server applications, I dare you to run Oracle 11i on FreeBSD), but it's horrible for workstations IMHO.

And besides - whats the point to run BSD again? Linux had a shitty VM in terms of performance compared to FreeBSD - it's over dude, kernel 2.4.9-pre6 (that I'm using now) or RedHat's 2.4.18 kernel (which INCLUDES the low latency support) makes Linux runs as fast as FreeBSD or faster + I got more drivers support on the Linux side, so I hardly see the point to run BSD.

Re:stable compiler

[br0ken by design]

And besides - whats the point to run BSD again?

Many people think the "BSD way" of doing things is better than the "linux way" of doing things.
This ranges from the less chaotic development model, to the documentation[1], to the init system, etc.
I think a lot of BSD users like BSD not really because the kernel is better, but because the system is better.
The linux kernel is great, but I've never seen a linux distro that's even close to as well executed as the FreeBSD system.

I'll put this in hick terms-
Linux reminds me of a hotrodded low-rider truck: big, flashy, fast, and made in a garage by guys named 'Joe', 'Bob', and 'Jose'.
Yeah, it's powerful and l33t, but not something I'd want take cross country hauling nuclear waste.

FreeBSD is more like a bigass Peterbilt...solid, reliable and strong.

I got more drivers support on the Linux side, so I hardly see the point to run BSD.

Drivers are really not that important on a server, as your Super-Ultra-Mega-GeeForce 8-Thallium edition framebuffer isn't gonna help with serving webpages or performing database queries.

:wq
[1] BSD documentation kicks the living hell out of GNU documentation. In BSD "RTFM"ing will probably actually help you...

Re:stable compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody in their right mind likes the bsd init system. Then again nobody like the sysv one either.

While i've never particularly liked netbsd, they have created a new system which looks quite impressive. No more large single files, no more soft links. Looks like the power of sysv without the messyness.

Anyone using netbsd want to comment?

Re:stable compiler

[guacamole]

Stop spreading FUD.

http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html

Re:stable compiler

[loply]

Good thing he explicitly stated he was talking about Desktop operating systems then :) Saying BSD is more organized than Linux is a bit like saying Microsoft is shite compared to my business: My two penciles and one sheet of paper are incredibly neat, and we do nothing, so theres none of that messy paper work. Well, thats a stupidly exagerated example, but you know what Im saying right?

Re:stable compiler

[br0ken by design]

Reread his comment.
He starts out talking about the desktop but goes on to generalize[1]:

And besides - whats the point to run BSD again? Linux had a shitty VM in terms of performance compared to FreeBSD - it's over dude, kernel 2.4.9-pre6 (that I'm using now) or RedHat's 2.4.18 kernel (which INCLUDES the low latency support) makes Linux runs as fast as FreeBSD or faster + I got more drivers support on the Linux side, so I hardly see the point to run BSD.

[...] but you know what Im saying right?

Uh...Not really.

It's not as if I was saying something like 'PalmOS is a better system than the average linux distro'.
I was comparing two *NIX systems with roughly the same capabilities, not two drastically different platforms.

:wq
[1] Maybe he unintentionally generalized, but that comment read like a well-disguised "BSD is Dying" post.

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[Nadir]

You hate it because you probably didn't understand its purpose. 2.96 is a much better compiler than 2.95 especially for C++ code.

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[NewbieSpaz]

read this: http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html
DiscaimerL Bero works for Redhat, so you might not believe him either... ;)

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still 2.96...

Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it my imagination or has slashdot fallen behind on linux news? No. Seriously. This isn't a poor attempt at flamebait. A link to this story was put on many other linux advocacy sites at the beginning of this week. How can we make sure that slashdot remains at the front end of things and not at the back end ... otherwise, why come here and discuss old news?

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Because
If it was posted monday all the stupid asshole like you will /.ed the site.
Now, on friday, everyone who are interressed by this kind of news as already read it. So we don't care if the site was /.ed !

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Post it too early an you get flamed for not letting mirrors update blah blah blah...

Post it too late and you get flamed that its no longer news blah blah blah....

Just freakin relax. No one cares.

Just a stupid question

[famazza]

Ok, I know that if I'm going to install in a empty machine it's very useful to have the latest version of your favorit distro.

But what about this upgrade stuff? I've heard a lot of people saying that they'll buy RH7.3 (or another brand-new version of any distro) to upgrade their current version.

Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

Please, don't take this as a troll of a flamebait, I just want to understand.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

You can upgrade all of the hundreds of programs you use by hand, but Red Hat isn't going to support you unless you run their version. This makes sense, after all, they can't be expected to support every version of thousands of software packages out there.

It's just easier to upgrade your whole distro at the same time, and it also lets you benefit from having other people have the same support issues that you would have, that way you won't be out on your own with weird problems.

Re:Just a stupid question

[loply]

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; I cant for the life of me understand this "upgrade every XY months" business of other distros, especially buying a new CD! It seems utter *MADNESS* after you have used Debian/Anything apt based for a while.

Re:Just a stupid question

[ZaMoose]

Upgrading is all well and good and it works, in theory. However, newly-released versions of distros tend to bundle all relevant new software into easily -installable packages, meaning that you won't bork your system with a faulty upgrade attempt. For example, I've had a devil of a time getting KDE 3 to work on my 7.1 desktop at work. We're skipping 7.2 and waiting for 7.3 to upgrade everyone's desktops. 7.3 is supposed to have a newly-revised kickstart process which will make our upgrades of everyone's boxes peachy.

Also, it's highly convenient for the bandwidth-impaired. Similar to the axiom "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes driving 65 down the highway".

Re:Just a stupid question

[ralphj]

Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

You can still always upgrade manually if you want. The fact is that RedHat wants to include KDE3 in their distribution, and KDE3 breaks binarycompatibility with previous versions. It's RedHat policy to only make changes like that in a new release of their distro.

And installing/upgrading something like KDE (or any other big softwarepackage) with a RPM-based distro can be hell. It's just more convenient to let RedHat do it for you.

Re:Just a stupid question

[MarkusQ]

Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

Given that I am reading this thread specifically because I'm interested in upgrading a few existing boxes, I may be able to explain.

I suspect I'm lazy.

Can't get more "Occam's razor" than that. There's one box in pariticular that I'd like to have KDE3 on, but to do that I'd also need to update Qt to 3.something, and lib-this.so and dev-that.so.what and I don't really feel like it. I don't need KDE3 on the box, and, as I concluded the other night when I started to think about upgrading, I'm lazy. Or to put a (slightly) more charitable face on it, I'd rather code, and play with my kid, and web-surf, and read, and doodle arround on the piano. Not all at the same time of course.

The point of OSS (to me at least) isn't that I always do things myself, but that I have that option, and at varrious levels of granularity. I eat out most meals, but I'd be annoyed if I didn't have a stove in the house, or some unpaved dirt in the back where I could plant things. But I'm still willing to let the folks at RedHat, etc. cook for me if they want to.

-- MarkusQ

Re:Just a stupid question

[kuiken]

In my case 2 reasons
1) I like SuSE, they invest alot of money in development (reiserfs, 4GB patch, KDE, X ...)
I have a job an can afford to buy their new releases. That way they make money and more importantly they have more money to invest in makeing Linux beter. So a part of my money goes to general linux devel and other distro's get beter from this as well

2)I am lazy and its easyer to buy and install than to download and upgrade

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there are people (yes, like you) who like to depend on the willness of people to package stuff...

Ask any Debian/KDE user how much time it took until KDE 3.0 was packaged for debian - a month, while other distributions had it at the announcment or 1-2 days later...

Well, I'm a freakin' snob - I love apt4rpm - enjoy both worlds ;)

Re:Just a stupid question

[RunzWithScissors]

You can upgrade each component of the operating system independently. The reason that people buy or download a newer version and "Upgrade" is to get the latest packages in one swoop. Red Hat's installer is based on RPM and one of the features of the RPM Package Manager is that it can Upgrade software to the latest version. Basically you point the rpm command at the newer version of the software you want and it will remove the old version and install the new version. There are quite a few packages on the Red Hat distro, 1233 packages on 7.2 to be exact. That's a lot of RPM commands to issue to update the machine.

One of the features of the Red Hat installer is that it will allow you to "Upgrade" as opposed to install the machine. Which basically consists of running an rpm -F for every package that you have installed on your machine. Recall that rpm -F will Freshen a package, if the package is there, but an older version we upgrade it, if the package is not installed, we die bitterly complaining that you can not Freshen a package that is not currently installed. So what the Red Hat installer does when you upgrade the system is determine which RPMS are currently installed on your older, current version of Red Hat Linux. Then it determines if there are newer versions of the software on the new version of Red Hat Linux. If the software has a newer version on the new RHL distro, the software is Freshened; if the software does not exist on the new RHL distro (like a 3rd party package or one that Red Hat no longer distributes) it is left alone.

Basically it's just a convenience issue, but as an added bonus of buying the box, you can now install the newer version of RHL on additional machines!

-Runz

Re:Just a stupid question

[rainwalker]

Of course, with many distro's, upgrading to KDE3 is trivial...for my MDK 7.2 boxes, I downloaded all the RPM's, switched to runlevel 3, and typed urpmi * and waited 3 minutes. Switched back to runlevel 5 and all was good. No more problems. [shrug]

Re:Just a stupid question

[spencerogden]

Upgrading is a lot easier with a source based distro. Versions ( of the distro ) almost don't matter. Its more like a continuous flow of up to date software.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Daemonik]

Wish that were entirely true. Just recently I had KDE3.0 working great on SuSE 7.3, then decided that I wanted Pan, the Gnome newsreader.

Installed the Gnome update from SuSE (heheh, the Ximian update wanted to uninstall KDE before installing Gnome)and now sound output is broken in KDE.

Re:Just a stupid question

[jsprat]

I'm curious... did you mean 7.2, or 8.2? If 7.2, where did you get the RPMs? I have an oldish laptop running Mandrake 7.2, I generally don't upgrade anything anymore (unless by source) because I don't see new rpms.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Geeky]

I came to the same conclusion recently. I was contemplating doing a linux from scratch install, but laziness (and better weather outside) sidetracked me. In the end I installed Mandrake 8.2, which has virtually everything I need ready to go (I believe it comes with three varieties of kitchen sink).

Only downside is that sometimes the home cooked stuff doesn't play well with the ready made distro stuff, and it's all to easy to drift into only running stuff that comes with the distro.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Andrewkov]

Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here

Two words, my friend: dependency hell.

Every package you install depends on certain other packages being installed. Say you have package A installed as version 1, which requires package B version 1. You want to install the latest version of package A, but it requires package B version 2. You can't upgrade package A until you upgrade package B. ... But what packages does package B depend on? It often seems to be a never ending chain. Dealing with these types of issues is one of the great things that the distro makers take care of for you.

This aside, I have never used the upgrade option when you boot off of the Redhat CD, has anyone had any experience with that? I've always reformatted my HD and started from scratch with a clean install.

Re:Just a stupid question

[gosand]

Not a dumb question at all, IMO.

Personally, I am waiting for 7.3 for a fresh install on a new 120GB HD. My current system is on an 8 gig drive with a secondary 2 gig drive. It was originally installed with RH6.1, upgraded to 6.2, then again to 7.1, and again to 7.2. I upgraded KDE as well along the way. I could upgrade it to 7.3, but I think I want to do a fresh install. I didn't have too many problems with the upgrades, but I want to make sure I am fully on 7.3. And I have the new HD. Yeah, maybe it is overkill, but I am going to install the whole damn distro on there.

Re:Just a stupid question

[jazman_777]

Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

Two words: Dependency Hell.

Re:Just a stupid question

[ZaMoose]

I'll agree with that. However, we're dealing with RedHat, which is hardly a source-based distro, so the point is moot.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually its still not done yet

But it really doesn't bother me.

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

How's that sudo exploit from the other day coming? Last I checked unstable and testing still didn't have fixes..

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the 7.3 beta says that you can't upgrade from it to something else, so I'd definitely wayt for the 7.3 release. In fact, given the "7.0 respin" debacle, I'd wait a coupla weeks at least. (Or do what I do, upgrade your stable machines to 7.2 now that 7.3 is about out, and then your fun machine to 7.3).

Re:Just a stupid question

[HiThere]

That's the kind of effect that drove me away from Ximian a bit over a year ago. Sounds like they haven't cleaned up their act any.

I don't know that they're malicious. They may just never test their software on a box that has KDE running. In my mind, however, that's incompetent. So you get your choice about what to assume. In either case I don't particularly want their software on my box, which is a pity as they do some good work. Just not good enough to justify that kind of behavior (*could* it be that good?).

Re:Just a stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just want to keep individual packages up to date with a package distro, it's just as easy. (For example, Redhat's Rawhide) However, if you're trying to install a new glibc or something, do you really want to spend a week of having your computer recompile all the big programs? No, you just install a new version.

Re:Just a stupid question

[aulendil]

GNOME tends to start esd for sound. So open a terminal and do a ps ax and kill esd, or even easier do a "killall esd" and be set. A more elegant solution would be to open the GNOME control-panel and disable the sound server (esd).

Also, you can propably make arts (KDE) pipe the sound to esd, not sure about this one though...

Re:Just a stupid question

[Tony-A]

It's the RedHat licensing scheme. Buy some boxes. Upgrade some computers. And don't pitch that old box.
It is upgradable just where needed, but it is so much less hassle to let the latest version update all those "little things" that you would really rather not mess with.
What's hilarious is that I don't think anyone would buy a "RedHat 7.3 Upgrade" ( except maybe out of morbid curiosity ;)
Seriously, the new box comes with a bit of installation support, etc. which you just might need.

7.3 Final?

[yota]

Sorry for the somehow trivial question but: when can we expect a 7.3 final release?

Andrea

Re:7.3 Final?

[ZaMoose]

Beta release mailing list has gone rather "developer-silent" as of late, usually signalling the imminence of a release. Also, there have been two recent massive package upgrades to Skipjack 2 with little to no public note of such, which is another indicator of release imminence.

Official release calendars would suggest an early June release; circumstances being what they are (and according to some traffic on the beta release mailing list) a mid-May release might end up being the actual case.

Re:7.3 Final?

[glwtta]

How's that trivial? I would definitely like to know.

Redoing my home LAN for the summer, 2 of the 6 machines will run RedHat, would be nice if it was the final 7.3 (in case anyone's curious, the other's will be running LFS, Mandrake, YDL and OpenBSD... not curious? Didn't think so.)

Re:7.3 Final?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stars are lining up. The cats lay restless in the thicket. The seventh angel....

Can't we just wait for an anouncement? It seems silly to use psychology to predict when Redhat will predict a release.

Re:7.3 Final?

[crow]

It is interesting to note that while they were updating the cutting-edge Rawhide release every day, there hasn't been any updates there since April 15th.

I don't have any historical data on how they handled Rawhide prior to new releases, so I can't say exactly what this indicates.

Re:7.3 Final?

[toolz]

Both 7.1 and 7.2 Betas showed major issues during beta testing - issues that were actually resolved during the Beta process. Butthe release versions had the problems deteceted even very early in the Beta cycle.

If I know RedHat, they will have rolled the Gold at least 6 weeks ago, if not earlier. The Betas are typically used to prepare the support staff for what is coming.

If you like the desktop...

[joestar]

you will be more pleased by using Mandrake 8.2 than any version of Red Hat. Don't forget: Red Hat is designed as a traditionnal Unix replacement, while Mandrake is designed as a Windows XP with Linux kernel (and solidity).

I'm afraid many ones should twice before considering Red Hat (which is a great distro) for their desktop environment.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[glwtta]

eh, I used to do exactly that (RedHat for servers, Mandrake for desktop, I use LFS for desktop now) and I can't say there that much of a difference. I'd say it's more of a personal taste thing, than "this distro is right for this applications, and this one for this!" - that's about as much FUD as that whole "linux isn't ready for the desktop" thing.

Incidently, something I really liked about Mandrake was that it allowed you to install with ReiserFS by default, something I would definitely appreciate on RedHat, when used for things like webservers and CVS servers (for file servers I'm just fine with ext3 though)

eh, just my .02

Re:If you like the desktop...

[joestar]

Why would Red Hat provide ReiserFS at install? They paid a guy to develop Ext3 for a while and they were certainly angry when ReiserFS was available before Ext3. So I guess Red Hat sees ReiserFS as a competitor...

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD as that whole "linux isn't ready for the desktop" thing

This is not FUD.

You cannot use Linux as a replacement for Windows desktops because Linux doesn't have MS Office.

Period. StarOffice and other replacements will not do because they will not open or print most MS Office documents properly.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[glwtta]

So I guess Red Hat sees ReiserFS as a competitor

That would be rather sad if they didn't include it for that reason, it's a good product (er, both of them, that is)... Although if RedHat included ReiserFS it would be rather hard for ReiserFS to "compete" with RedHat, I would think...

Re:If you like the desktop...

[glwtta]

Did I say anything about "reaplacement for Windows"? No. Desktop use doesn't start and end with bloody windows.

Oh yeah, I'm going to karma hell for being *gasp* off-topic, so - how 'bout that RedHat 7.3, prettey neat, eh?

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

NO THANKS!

Here's my machine specs: 80GB hard drive, 768MB RAM, Pentium 2@2Ghz, Asus board, SBLive, Geforce 3 - nice high end machine, isn't it?

Now - I installed Mandrake 8.2 and I installed VMWare 3.1.1 (yes, there's a 3.1.1 version if u didn't notice), and configured VMWare to use 384MB RAM, while the rest will be free. I'm using XFree 4.2.0 and KDE 2.2.2..

Imagine my surprise to see that when I'm switching from VMWare windows session (Windows as a guest OS) to Linux - the hard drive was swapping like crazy, while I didn't have ANY other windows or tasks that choked my machine..

I re-formatted my machine, installed RedHat 7.2, upgraded all the RPMS (thanks to engima.freshrpms.net), re-installed VMWare, same config, same guest OS - and the thing worked PERFECTLY well, with NO SWAPPING...

Adios Mandrake, welcome RedHat..

Re:If you like the desktop...

[HeUnique]

If you have MS Office CD - then I would suggest you go and buy CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers..

If you don't have the Office CD - then either give Hancom Office a try or Open Office. Buying Star Office 6 will give you support + other nifty stuff..

Re:If you like the desktop...

[GrenDel Fuego]

The swapping problem is a kernel issue. If you don't mind compiling your own kernel, you can most likely solve the swapping issue, and then just choose your distribution based on the other features that it includes.

I would suggest trying either the later -ac releases which include the rmap vm system, or the stock kernel with the -aa patches.

Redhat 7.2 uses the older Rik Van Riel VM system (unless their later updates started using the newer rmap, but i don't believe so). I'm not sure about Mandrake, but it's probably using the stock kernel's VM system. Someone else may be able to provide more information about that though.

I've tried Mandrake a few times, and I've always found it very nice. However, I always ended up finding a few things that just didn't work the way I wanted them to which switched me back to Redhat.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[GrenDel Fuego]

Rather off topic, but if you like LFS, you might want to give gentoo a try.

I liked the ability to compile packages optimized by my system, but I always ended up giving up when trying to get gnome installed. Figuring out the dependencies, and getting every required package to install was a pain. Gentoo helps out a lot with that.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Joe Rumsey]

Here's my machine specs: 80GB hard drive, 768MB RAM, Pentium 2@2Ghz, Asus board, SBLive, Geforce 3 - nice high end machine, isn't it?

I guess, but you must have some serious cooling hardware to be running a Pentium 2 at that speed! I thought my Athlon ran hot, but wow!

Re:If you like the desktop...

[lunenburg]

I've tried Mandrake and really don't see why everyone fawns over the distro so much. It's Red Hat with a different installer. It's been years since I ran across desktop hardware that wasn't supported in Red Hat right out of the box, and they provide the GUI tools just like anyone else.

I'm sure Mandrake is a fine little distro, but I fail to see the big gap that separates it from Red Hat, SuSE, or any other RPM-based distro.

$.02

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us would prefer a more traditional Unix like system on our desktop. Saying Mandrake is like Windows XP with a Linux kernel is a quick way to keep me from using it :)

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Boiotos]

... something I would definitely appreciate on RedHat, when used for things like webservers and CVS servers (for file servers I'm just fine with ext3 though)

glwtta, could you elaborate on this preference or point out a link or two that would explain reiserFS's superiority in the webserver/CVS department?

Re:If you like the desktop...

[glwtta]

Never had that much trouble - maybe because I don't use Gnome? :) Yeah, I heard Gentoo is good, but I rather like this whole "from scratch" idea.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[glwtta]

I believe the consesus was that reiser has better performance when accessing many small files (sorry, I'm not gonna dig up links, but the comparisons are all over the place). In all honestly it probably wouldn't be noticeable on a web server, but when doing operations on projects with hundreds (or thousands) small text files, it definitely does make a difference. Not a big difference, but definitely tangible.

In the end it's all personal preference. I "trust" reiser stability more, probably because I've been using it longer. More importantly, I "like" running on reiser, and yes, that is important.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[batemanm]

Mandrake is designed as a Windows XP with Linux kernel (and solidity).

Still not quite as good an install as Win XP. Windows XP install first time with no problems on my system whereas Mandrake (and RedHat btw) both refuse using the default boot kernels. Mandrake at least lets me use a different kernel from the second disk to boot (which after a bit of messing boots).

From what I've seen neither Mandrake or RedHat can fully replace Windows on the desktop just yet. Mainly due to problems of installation and lack of MS Office. OpenOffice etc are good but don't handle MS Office documents correctly. Also if you need extra help with writting documents (for exmaple if you are dyslexic) the only option is MS Word which none of the other programs have the support for the required software.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a tip for you since you seem to not know anything about linux.

linux=linux=linux=linux=linux

besides the install and a few package admin tools there is almost no difference between distros. The only people who say different are just trying to act l33t.
For example the recent spat of people who want to compile there whole system are a bunch of morons.
Seriously 95% of the apps these people compile are no better than the binary ones available. Its just a waste of time and people trying to act cool.
The problem is the people who have been using linux for a few years no longer feel l335 because any idiot can install it. Thus we have this push by the l33t to try to seem cool by doing things a newbie wouldn't.
Of course this is no different from when I started using linux. When redhat 4.2 came out there was no such thing as user friendlyness. And connecting to your isp really sucked ass.
The general attitude was "I had to suffer so you should to". Thus this still prevails today sadly.

So in conclusion if you feel the need to feel l33t when using mandrake change the default background and using something l33t like fluxbox. But remember that just cause your trying to be difficult to emulate doesn't mean anyone can't accomplish the same tasks in the "XPish" KDE.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[torndorff]

"Also if you need extra help with writting documents (for exmaple if you are dyslexic)..."

This is an honest question but I really dont know, but what tools are offered by MS Office for individuals that suffer from dyslexicia? I've never checked into that; I have however seen things for other disabilities.

If you are an individual with this disability I would strongly suggest you enter comments to developers about this (e-mail, irc, etc) because without your input they may never realize there is a need. Some of these developers havent used Microsoft products in several years!

Re:If you like the desktop...

[TheLinuxWarrior]

Personally I would take Redhat OR Mandrake over Windows XP. That's just my opinion. I don't feel Windows XP is ready for primetime yet. As with any other MS product, I'll be waiting for service pack 2 to come out before giving XP any serious consideration.

If you need Microsoft Office, I would suggest trying the CodeWeaver Office. I have Redhat 7.2 with Gnome 1.4 running on my Dell Latitude, and Office 2000 works great using CodeWeavers. It isn't free, but it's well worth the price.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Ozric]

Gentoo is GOOD. I am posting this from KDE 3.0 on my Gentoo workstation, Gentoo is FAST. You need to knock off a few corners here and there to get things nice, but every thing I need has work almost flawlessly. It only takes about 1 day to setup on a 1GH+ system. But once you are done you will never have to fdisk and start over.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[rdieter]

Incidently, something I really liked about Mandrake was that it allowed you to install with ReiserFS by default, something I would definitely appreciate on RedHat...

RedHat's stance of ReiserFS all along is that it has yet to pass their QA tests, and until it does, will not be officially supported.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

You solve a kernel configuration problem by re-formatting your machine and install a different distribution? You sir, are a moron. Let me guess, you learned that particular maintenance procedure from years of working with MS products? You should have saved some of the money you spent on your "high end machine" to buy yourself a clue. Jesus christ man, wake up and smell the baby oil

If your car idles too high, do you take it to the junkyard, have it scrapped, and buy a different model?

When your girlfriend is in a bad mood, do you shoot her in the head and find a new one?

If you're kids screw up in school, do you take them to the adoption center to trade up to a different version?

Your approach to problem solving is no better than a brute-force attack - keep trying different solutions until something works better. You have to make an attempt to understand the problem before we know you're an intelligent agent and not some poorly coded automaton.

This rant brought to you by the letters A and S (twice).

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Isaac-1]

Why would anyone want to be like windows, you say unix like as if it were a bad thing.

Re:If you like the desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

to me they both install the same. sometimes i get the same problems with both (bad hardware and their drivers.

the main thing that keeps linux from not being on the desktop is a preinstalled computer at best buy and some actual shelf space for third party products

Re:If you like the desktop...

[batemanm]

but what tools are offered by MS Office for individuals

None but all the tools that I have found and that actually seem useful are plugins to MS Word.

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[johnjones]

right get this gcc2.6 is ALOT better than 2.95

before I get people whineing that debian/***BSD and the rest use 2.95 thats because they dont care about speed

2.6 was a branch off what has become gcc 3

3.0 was pretty bad beacuse redhat/cygnus did not care about it so much and frankly it had taken 2 years to get there they just wanted it out the door

3.1 will I think after a couple of months bashing and a few point releases... rock in the end

dberlin whys that down I want to try out bugzilla ??

regards

john jones

Skipjack is an unfortunate name

[Anonymous Coward]

Skipjack is a phenomenally bad name because people will confuse it with the "government standard" key-escrow encryption scheme.

Re:Skipjack is an unfortunate name

[MindStalker]

Redhats product named in the beta cycle are never the same as the final name. So I doupt they are really worried what they call the beta, but I'm sure they will give the final a bit more thought.

Re:Skipjack is an unfortunate name

[Anonymous Coward]

all 15 people that care?

3 disks of sheer joy.....

[CDWert]

Well I touhgt I would DL and play with it.

So I , as I have done for years downloaded disk 1 and started to install, it asked for 2, I dl and burned it, put it in, and then, and this is a first, It asked for 3.

I can figure out for the life of me what the he** takes up 3 disks.

But if you are going to do anything other than a MINIMAL install do yourself a favor, download and burn all 3 Disks, you will need em.

Another thing I found interesting , albeit a pain since Ive never had a problem, is the CD integrity check, although you can bypass it.

Why dosent RedHat partner with Ximian and put the whole jobber together with the exchange connector and Ximian Gnome in a nice premium edition, hell I'd buy it....But then again I bought an Apple Lisa when they were new.....

Re:3 disks of sheer joy.....

[HeUnique]

Why would they??

Exchange connector costs almost $70 - which means your Redhat 7.3 package will costs you something around ~$130..

Another thing - Ximian RPMS simply break things (although I heard from one of the developers there that this will be fixed very soon) - try to install the Ximian RPMS for mozilla (for example), and then upgrade them with a newer version of Mozilla, not from Ximian.. bzzt - RPM will tell you that Ximian RPMS are newer, despite the fact that it's wrong..

Also, don't forget - they ARE competitors - both sell competing services (up2date VS. Red-Carpet) to their clients at the same prices, so why would RedHat bundle their competitor stuff into their distribution? that doesn't makes any sence..

Re:3 disks of sheer joy.....

[CDWert]

Heres why.

"Exchange connector costs almost $70 - which means your Redhat 7.3 package will costs you something around ~$130.."

True, BUT bulk liscencing for redistribution is MUCH cheaper to the end customer, remember things like TriTeal CDE or something or another RH packaged, it was over 200 in the store and the whole RH with it was less than 75$ , same for stonghold, and other things RH bundles, Ximian sells 100 times more than they ever would on their own and RH gets a great prodcut

"Another thing - Ximian RPMS simply break things (although I heard from one of the developers there that this will be fixed very soon)"

True again, this is a reason Ximian and RH working in tandem could completley eliminate this problem while making both their products better.

"Also, don't forget - they ARE competitors - both sell competing services (up2date VS. Red-Carpet) to their clients at the same prices, so why would RedHat bundle their competitor stuff into their distribution? that doesn't makes any sence.."

RH has before packaged a competitiors product. I dont see this as much of a problem, They are a half a dozen ways to work around it to both RH and Ximians satisfaction I am sure.

Re:3 disks of sheer joy.....

[epukinsk]

Connector is not part of Ximian Desktop, which is what he is talking about bundling.

Desktop is ~$30 I think, and would be discounted as part of the bundle.

-Erik

Re:3 disks of sheer joy.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Even for minimal installs it seems you will need disk 3 as from what I understand the kernel rpms are on disk 3

Re:3 disks of sheer joy.....

[CDWert]

Actually no charge for desktop even if redhat felt like bundling it now, its all GPL

So is evolution, which is included in 7.3

The only thing in need of a purchase of a mass liscence on RHats part would be the connector.

desktop? server?

[Atilla]

the one thing I love about Red Hat linux is the fact that it is a very strong server platform (yes yes I know it's not the only one). I sure hope they stay on that track and not spend all the r&d time making it a better desktop. I'm not downplaying the importance of having a good desktop system that's not windows.. But it's equally important to have a stable VM, file system, strong security, logging and auditing capabilites... So far, Red Hat has had all of the above and I hope the next release follows suit.

Re:desktop? server?

[Anonymous Coward]

"and not spend all the r&d time making it a better desktop"
What are you talking about? Seriously redhat has not made any serious efforts ever to make a better desktop. That is their trademark. I have been using Redhat since 5.0 and they have consistantly avoided going the route of Mandrake, Corel etc. If you have been using linux for any length of time, its obvious that they are not spending R&D on the desktop.
Redhat packages stock gnome and kde and thats it. They have made few gui apps over the years and I don't expect that to change. Your not for example never going to see a Mandrake style font importer on redhat.
Redhat simply does not make any money on the desktop. Their market is the enterprise server market period.

Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is a last resort.... To Lisa, whom I met at the Brooks Café in Seattle last Saturday. Lisa, I lost your phone number and I'm trying to figure out how to reach you! Oh, that magical night we had. I never believed in love at first sight until I met you. I remember talking with you at length about the upcoming Redhat 7.3 release, so I thought maybe, maybe you will read this Slashdot forum. Oh, I hope I will get modded up to something where you will see it!!! I love you so much and I don't know what I would do without you! Love, Gerard P.S. if you do get this, meet me at the same spot this Saturday at 10!!!

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe you do realise your gonna have millions of desperate gimps hunting you down now

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, who do you think you are fooling? This is Slashdot, remember? People here will find it hard to believe you've even spoken to a girl.

Unless, of course, Lisa is the barista with the restraining order against you.

Re:Help!

[jungd]

* Don't forget to let us know if you manage to contact her! *

Re:Help!

[loconet]

Yes please, let us know if you manage to contact her ... this story would make /.'s front page !

configuring hardware under redhat?

[Socratis]

Difficult with RedHat? Kudzu automatically scans for and configures almost all hardware at boot. Even in other distros, typing insmod bttv wasn't too difficult, and rnning xawtv with -nodga and -noxv takes care of most any problems with X video drivers.

Code name: Skipjack or Hampton?

[gaj]

I know that 7.3 has been called Skipjack all along during development, but I've recently been hearing the name Hampton thrown around. Anybody able to lend a clue here? Obviously not very important, but I'm amused by things like this.

Re:Code name: Skipjack or Hampton?

[general_re]

Skipjack, eh? Is this the RH version with password escrow, then? ;)

Re:Code name: Skipjack or Hampton?

[ddstreet]

Hampton, VA maybe? About 1/2 day drive from Raleigh, NC (Redhat's headquarters).

Re:Code name: Skipjack or Hampton?

[MSG]

We've been told that Hampton was a code name used for an internal development tree, and is not expected to be the name of the final release (whatever the version number)

Re:Code name: Skipjack or Hampton?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you're mistakening Hampton with Hamilton 95, I know I was amused :)

http://www.kluge.net/ham95/

Great, I wish them luck...

[Lumpy]

I have had too many problems with Redhat AND Mandrake (The latest iterations of both (7.2 and 8.2 respectively) in regards to Firewire, installing a current kernel to use firewire, libs, STANDARD LIB PATHS not being included.. (Come on /usr/public/lib takes no effort to have it in the ld.so.conf file from the box.. WHY THE HELL DONT THEY PUT IT IN THERE!!!... ok done ranting) and several non-standard issues that the "shiney/fluffy" distros love to throw upon everyone.. Granted if you use redhat you should NEVER do anything bus use rpm's or you will have problems like I have.. and if I was a newbie that didn't want to do advanced things with my computer, redhat would be great.

Otherwise... I stick with slackware.. I can upgrade X without blowing the machine up.. i can upgrade GCC without blowing everything up, and perl -mCPAN doesnt blow the hell out of your perl install when it cant detect perl and re-installs it because it thinks you need an upgrade because some moron at Redhat thought that putting perl in a non-standard location is a smart idea. (Yes, I took that cheap-shot.. whoever put perl where it is in redhat needs to be called a MORON. any decision that breaks standard tools for no reason deserves public ridicule.)

Slackware... Less headaches more productivity for the advanced user.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[ekrout]

Slackware was the greatest for the ultra power user until Gentoo came along.

Currently in version 1.1a, it's the coolest Linux to come along in a decade and includes an amazing Portage system that is the best (apt-get / BSD ports)-like package management system ever created.

Come on over to [irc.openprojects.net channel #gentoo] and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

/usr/public/lib?? Is that some kind of a slackware thing? It certainly isn't "standard"; for example it isn't even mentioned in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

If you truly are not a newbie as you claim, what's the big deal about mkdir'ing and adding it yourself?

As far as "upgrading X" goes, I run X built from scratch from cvs on my RH 7.2 box. No big deal.

And by the way, there is no "standard" location for perl. Tear yourself away from your precious slackware box and look at Solaris and HPUX if you don't believe me.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

I normally dont' do this, but I'll repost for you since you seem to fall into the I'm l33t crowd.
"Here is a tip for you since you seem to not know anything about linux.

linux=linux=linux=linux=linux

besides the install and a few package admin tools there is almost no difference between distros. The only people who say different are just trying to act l33t.
For example the recent spat of people who want to compile there whole system are a bunch of morons.
Seriously 95% of the apps these people compile are no better than the binary ones available. Its just a waste of time and people trying to act cool.
The problem is the people who have been using linux for a few years no longer feel l335 because any idiot can install it. Thus we have this push by the l33t to try to seem cool by doing things a newbie wouldn't.
Of course this is no different from when I started using linux. When redhat 4.2 came out there was no such thing as user friendlyness. And connecting to your isp really sucked ass.
The general attitude was "I had to suffer so you should to". Thus this still prevails today sadly.

So in conclusion if you feel the need to feel l33t when using mandrake change the default background and use something l33t like fluxbox. But remember that just cause your trying to be difficult to emulate doesn't mean anyone can't accomplish the same tasks in the "XPish" KDE."

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[mgkimsal2]

Funny enough, a new slackware box last summer did exactly that when I tried to perl mCPAN stuff. Something wasn't where it thought, so it downloaded and installed the entire perl 5.6 stuff, which is not what I had on there initially and not what I wanted. It ended up overwriting some of the other perl stuff, so now I simply don't use any perl on that box. Quite a shame. :(

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Debian i386 package is just as good as an application that is optimally compiled for my own system?

Wow, you're dumb!

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Debian i386 package is just as good as an application that is optimally compiled for my own system?

Yes.

Wow, you're dumb!

Hardly. They are right, you're the one who has no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Baki]

As a long time FreeBSD user, being "forced" to run Linux because of some desktop issues (read, vmware3) I do NOT AGREE at all.

Everyone seems to be raving about how cool gentoo is, almost like FreeBSD; how the FreeBSD users formerly attracted to Slackware all run to Gentoo now. Well, I don't think so.

The FreeBSD ports system might have some technical similarities to Gentoo portage (which is even more advanced), but there is a huge and crucial difference:

Portage is instable, ports are broken all the time (just read the forum on gentoo.org); also in FreeBSD the ports are just an add-on, the base system is not ports-based, but is one monolithic (stable) block.

I still think that Slackware is the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro, even though it does not have a ports system. Because:
- it is stable
- it feels more like FreeBSD, because of little things such as simple init scripts (BSD based)
- the base system is not monolithic as in FreeBSD, but still installing the a,ap,d and l series provides you with a base that doesn't change all the time. Almost any slack installation has the same set of basic packages installed, it is much less a choose and pick than any other Linux distribution.

Portage looks nice and impressive the first day you use it, but becomes a nightmare after a few weeks useage (believe me, I was amazed at start and have used it some weeks). Everthing updates all the time, not all dependencies are caught and strange interactions between the ports begin to happen. Not one user of Gentoo has the same versions of packages installed together, because this depends on the (random) timestamps that you decide to run an 'emerge rsync'.

I think gentoo's approach is interesting, but it is not ready for prime time, it should be version 0.1, not 1.1(a).

No no, Slackware still is the greatest for the 'ultra power user', and shall remain so for a long time. Creating your own 'ports' is trivial, I wrote some scripts myself (and I think many slack users did) to create them easily. I like to figure out how to 'port' any package running on my machine myself, except for the packages of the only other person I trust (Patrick Volkerding) in this respect.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[arcade]

Actually, you are the one that doesn't know what you're talking about. I don't remember the specifics, but here is (almost) how it works.

Different processors has different layouts. Newer processors thypically have a longer pipeline, which means that the processor can do several things at the same time. Think 'washing clothes'. You would be stupid if you filled your washing-bag with one kind of clothes, went to the washer. put the clotes in the washer. waited. took the clothes out of the washer, put them in the centifuge, waited, put them to dry, folded them and put them in the drawers, and THEN started to wash another batch.

What you would do, was to dig the washed clothes out of the washing-machine, put them in the centifuge, put a new batch into the washing-machine, take the clothes out of the centifuge and put them to dry, prepare a new batch of clothes.. and pipeline things in that manner.

Now, the same goes for processors, but since different parts of the processors does different things, you need align the instructions in a proper way. A pentium needs the instructions aligned differently from an i386, and when you add MMX, 3dNow! and all sorts of stuff, and the processors have various designs, you can get an even better boost.

If you recompile yourself, you can get about 20+% speedincrease just by compiling for pentium. If you compile for your new Pentium 4 (not sure wheter GCC is optimized for it yet, but lets say it is) - you can get an even better efficiency-increase.

So, when all comes to all - you're the dumb one. ;=)

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

This 20% increase thing is a huge load of horseshit. I hear it everywhere, but go looking on Google and where are the benchmarks?

There aren't any.

For one thing, even including i386 in the discussion proves you are somewhat ignorant, because gcc on Linux always optimizes for at least i486 (which is fully backwards compatible to i386) and has for many, many years. Furthermore, the actual USE of the extended i586 and i686 instructions is rather limited in the real world (at least as far as most Linux apps). The vast majority of binaries see NO SPEEDUP when compiled for i686/athlon. The processors are going to pipeline effectively when presented with an i486 binary anyway.

However, if you compile you machine yourself, you stand a much better chance of FUCKING THINGS UP as compared to using precompiled packages from nearly any distribution that is prepared by experienced professionals. Even Gentoo is a highly experimental approach (they fail to factor in the compile environment as part of the equation). I'd never deploy Gentoo on any kind of production system.

Re:Great, I wish them luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat (and I believe Debian) compiles everything as -mcpu=i686 -march=i386. What does that mean? It means that the executable is laid out the way the i686 processors like instructions to be laid out but it doesn't use any i686 specific instructions. So, you're entire pipelining theory is moot because the executables will have the instructions correct for i686 pipelining.

Does compiling with -march=i686 increase performance? Well, that totally depends on the software. Very little software on today's hardware is cpu bound. Mozilla can only run as fast as your network can download a web page. Apache can only serve pages as fast as your network allows it to. A very low power system can saturate a 100mbit link with no problem. So, only those applications which are strictly cpu bound will see these huge performance gains that gentoo users like to talk about.

There are a few pieces of software which should definitely be optimized tho. 1 is your kernel, the other is your libc. Fortunately for Red Hat users, Red Hat packages kernels and libc's optimized for i386, i586, i686, and athlon.

Don't get me wrong, some multimedia apps will gain from using MMX (but apps like mplayer decide what ops to use at runtime, not compile time so it doesn't matter what it's compiled for). But, by and large, your system will not be significantly faster by compiling everything from scratch.

People using gentoo should be using it for the experience of working on getting a distro going from nothing. But gentoo has plenty of problems of it's own (tmp file vulnerabities in portage, .keep files lying around everywhere, package managers should not allow multiple versions of the same package to be installed, etc).

I don't get it

[MisterP]

I don't understand this. Aside from the install, these distro's seem quite similar. What makes Mandrake more Windows like and Red Hat more UNIX like? It doesn't make any sense.

Re:I don't get it

[jonestor]

Red Hat seems to be more focused on the command line and Mandrake seems to be more focused on gui.

This is what I thought the last time I used Red Hat which was around 6.1. Maybe things have changed now.

Re:I don't get it

[Daemonik]

The differences are mainly in the 'behind the curtains' stuff. Mandrake has a lot of stuff running to make your system more Windows/Apple user safe, whereas RedHat doesn't care so much about it.

Personally, I've turned to SuSE exclusively (still open to trying others though), it seems to 'feel' more 'right' than the others.

8.0 will follow

[dybdahl]

It looks pretty much as a 7.3 version because most tools, installation etc. are almost unchanged compared to version 7.2. But since a 7.3 version also means binary compatibility, including gcc Red Hat edition 2.96, it will probably be followed by an 8.0 version within few months, featuring newer python, gcc 3.x, much improved installation routines, improved graphical looks when booting etc. The competitors already have this, and Red Hat must be working on it, too.

Re:8.0 will follow

[MSG]

Red Hat does not pre-announce release dates or version numbers. I find it highly unlikely that 8.0 will follow in anything less than the ~6 month release cycle that they've always followed. IF 8.0 is what follows at all...

Re:8.0 will follow

[d.kalor]

>improved graphical looks when booting

Why would graphics while booting be an improvement? I hate the way Mandrake hides what's going on when it boots; with RedHat I can see what happens. RedHat should just stick with how it shows messages while booting.

Re:8.0 will follow

[dybdahl]

As the market size increases, Red Hat has to target more Windows users. Getting the boot process more graphical is one way to do it.

Some people don't like GUI tools for administering their computers, but they are around and they are here to stay. People actually use them.

If you look at SuSE's boot process, it's really nice. It contains everything Red Hat does, but it's extremely much nicer.

If Red Hat doesn't improve on this, they'll lose the big market.

Dybdahl.

Re:your sig

[The Ape With No Name]

Nope. Cato ended speeches thusly. It is a joke on George Bush. Think About It.

dumb question

[jchristopher]

Probably a dumb question, but RH 7.2 was my first experience with Linux and I've been using it on and off.

If you just stay current with something like Red Carpet or Up2Date, do you basically end up with 7.3 eventually? Or do you need the cds to 'upgrade'?

Re:dumb question

[sgoggin]

You likely need the CD.

At least in the past the RedHat network would only patch your system.

RedHat understands you may still need to run an old distribution so patches continue to be made for the old versions.

Re:dumb question

[mohaine]

You can keep an system pretty up to date w/out upgrading.
But not completely.

Up2Date will not change major versions, only bug fixes.
ie:
Kernel 2.4.X will stay 2.4.X, but not go to 2.6.X
Gnome will stay V1.4.X.

RedCarpet, using the Ximian channel will probably update you to the next version of Gnome, but it will still not change your kernel, Glib to the latest version.

Upgrading is great, especilaly with Red Carpet. Most people don't care about upgrading the Kernel/Glib unless the new version has major benefits. A Redhat 6.X with Ximian will look/act pretty much like Redhat 7.X with Ximian.

Kernels are not to bad to upgrade yourself, but for Glib, you really need a new Distro.

Re:dumb question

[Glenn2372]

Not completely true. Up2date by default does not upgrade kernels but you can ask for it to download and install the latest kernel.

Re:dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel 2.4.X will stay 2.4.X, but not go to 2.6.X

Both an upgraded 7.2 system and a new install of 7.3 will give you a 2.4.X kernel. 2.6.0 has not been released yet, and cannot be expected to be ready before the final release of 7.3. I don't think we will se 2.6 kernels in Red Hat before 8.0 or perhaps 9.0.

I hope Red Hat will not repeat the mistake they made in 7.0. They have decided that 7.x would be to use 2.4 kernels, and made a complete system for 2.4 kernels. But they could not wait for 2.4.0 to be released, so they shipped 7.0 with a 2.2.16 kernel.

No more redhat for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran Redhat for a good long time, up until a couple of weeks ago (started with slack, then switched to redhat when version 6.2 was released). When gentoo 1.1a was released I installed Gentoo and am never going to another Linux distribution (well at least any of the current ones).

If you haven't tried Gentoo already give it a try. You really aught to have a PII or greater, and a fat pipe.

Re:No more redhat for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should also not mind that portage has a major tmp file vulnerability, .keep files lying all over the place (because that's obviously a good way for your package manager to decide whether or not to delete a directory when uninstalling things), a portage tree which may or may not work depending on time of day, packages breaking because library dependencies aren't handled, a package manager which allows multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time, and a bootstrap process which doesn't correctly bootstrap the base system. Besides that it's a great distro.

Re:No more redhat for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get your gentoo distro, I'd like to try a copy. It certainly is not the same one I have been running for months...

Re:No more redhat for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should point out where I'm wrong then. You don't have a emerge that uses /tmp/sandpoxpids.tmp? If you do, you've got a major tmpfile vulnerability. You don't have /usr/.keep, /usr/lib/.keep, etc? You don't need to run emerge clean or whatever the switch is to remove redundant packages because emerge --update doesn't uninstall the new package before installing the new one (thus you have multiple versions installed at the same time)? You haven't watched libpng upgrades break gnome and kde for everyone because it doesn't recompile programs that depend on libraries like it should? And, your bootstrap.sh recompiles gcc and glibc three times (the minimum number of times needed to get a glibc and gcc correctly linked against each other)?

Hmm, you must be running a completely different distro then the one distributed at gentoo.org then.

Re: KDE heavy and GNOME shy

[spencerogden]

I would also highly recommend Sorcerer Linux, I have been running it for about 3 months now. I upgrade to KDE3 about a week ago and it has been great. The value of running a stripped down system cannot be overstated, overall system response is better, and running Moz1.0rc1 the day after it comes out can't be beat.

All of that said, now may not be the time to jump in. There was a big shake up in march and things are only now settling down. After a new install ISO is released however, I would give an enthusiastic go ahead.

True example

[Sabalon]

I wanted to have OpenLDAP use sleepycat's BerkeleyDB instead of GDBM in hopes to fix a problem.

RedHat by default uses GDBM. So, even if I upgraded just that one part of my OS to the latest OpenLDAP, I would still not have what I wanted.

So, I decided I'm a big boy - I can compile my own LDAP server. I figured I could then uninstall what came with RH and put my version in its place. As far as RH would know, I don't have OpenLDAP installed.

Well...easier said than done. RH does a lot of work to force a lot of different packages with different styles as far as file system usage to conform to their own method. They would download the same tarball as me, and then patch the bejevus out of it so that all config files are in etc, all temp files in var, etc...

So...while you can upgrade bit by bit yourself, if you want to keep an orderly system like RH installs, it could be more than of a pain.

Not to mention that even if you take the lazy approach and let RH upgrade to the latest of a particular app, it may have dependency upon dependency, hence the need for the full upgrade.

Re:True example

[Dehumanizer]

Why not just download the OpenLDAP SRPM from Red Hat, edit the .spec file so it uses Berkeley DB, then do an "rpm -ba openldap.spec", go drink a cup of coffee, and you get exactly what you want... in Red Hat's usual places... and as an RPM?

I usually do that.

Re:True example

[Sabalon]

Guess the best answer to that is cause I'm a dumbass. :)

Never knew that option existed - never looked into building rpm's - thought that was more for packaging stuff you've compiled.

Learn something everyday...cool.

Heaven and Hell is a much better album though :)

Beta or Release

[moankey]

When it comes to stuff like open source, aside from support, do people really care if its beta, release candidate, or final release? Unless its extra unstable in alpha form or serious security hole most people will run betas and be happy.
Heck M$ does it all the time and makes money on each minor revision.

Re:Beta or Release

[Anonymous Coward]

Supposedly a final release would be of better quality than the beta's/release candidates.
And some people prefer ultimate quality.

but then they would be using other distros....

*ducks and runs* ;-)

"KDE Heavy?"

[Bowie J. Poag]

Amusingly, i'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but, i'm sure it will devolve into that anyway......

I think the reason why the review is "KDE-heavy" is because when it comes to GNOME, nothing major has really changed (functionally or asthetically) between the version that shipped with 7.2 and the version you see in 7.3..In other words, theres not really much to say that hasn't already been said.

The reason why KDE got so much coverage versus GNOME in this review is probably due to the fact that the changes between KDE 2.2.x and KDE 3.x are rather large. Theres no bias here on behalf of the reviewer. One desktop changed radically from 7.2 to 7.3, the other did not.

Moderate this post however you want. Just don't be a goddamn idiot and say "I like GNOME! KDE suxx!!! I'm going to mod this down!!" since this reply is neither pro-KDE or pro-GNOME.

Re:"KDE Heavy?"

[Tintivilus]

As I understand it, KDE3 is awfully heavy...


[rimshot]

Re:"KDE Heavy?"

[SomeOtherGuy]

I think the KDE heavy vs. Gnome light is perfectlly understandable:

As a long time Gnome fan, I have always thought KDE was nice but never ran it for more than a few days at a time before switching back to Gnome...But I must say that with KDE 3, there is some amazing maturity that I just can't deny. The transparent menus are really cool -- along with the anti aliased fonts.....It just LOOKS and FEELS much better all the way around. Plus the web browser holds it's own. I am very impressed and have been using it 99% of the time since 3 came out. Gnome seems to be lagging behind a bit these days when it comes to overall polish and pizazz....And Nautilus seems to be hurting more than helping the overall FEEL of the whole Gnome experience...

Re:"KDE Heavy?"

[Anonymous Coward]

As a longtime KDE users, I recently tried the GNOME 2 beta releases and have switched. Believe me, it came as quite a surprise.

Not only is it much faster to start the desktop, it's faster to start programs. It looks better. The apps are much better (I used to use them under KDE)... now that I'm not running GNOME within KDE - which is essentially what I was doing when running evolution - I'm using less memory too. The GNOME 2 betas are a hell of a lot more stable than KDE 3 too... which is suprising given the release status of KDE, and the beta status of GNOME. It all contributed to me switching completely to GNOME, and I can only imagine a lot more people doing the same thing on the release of GNOME 2.0.

Re:"KDE Heavy?"

[corz]

Another thing I find interesting is to see the work that has been done in the KDE and Gnome camps in the last two years or so.

If I remember correctly Red Hat 7.0 came with KDE 1.2 (with optionaly KDE2 Beta) and a version of Gnome that looks pretty similar ones today. We are almost at 7.3 and already KDE has progressed through 2 more versions.

So, in the 7.X Span the KDE folks have gone from

RH KDE
7.0 1.2
7.1 2.1
7.2 2.2
7.3 3.0

Meanwhile, Gnome pretty much looks the same in all of the versions.

I'm sick of this crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we are talking about RedHat beta on slashdot. Who cares? Suse 8 is out now and it kicks butt on RedHat and always will. It has KDE 3 now.

Re:I'm sick of this crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I like RedHat and am using 7.2 as our main Bind 9 servers. It just seems that SlashDot really favors RedHat over other distros and gives a warped view of what is out there. Suse may not be GPL but it is a great bargain and sets up and works beautifully. Mandrake 8.2 and others all work quite well as too. I think there should be more news items on other products than just RedHat.

Re:I'm sick of this crap...

[EyesWideOpen]

It has KDE 3 now.

Is this the reason that Suse 8 "kicks butt on RedHat"? Because RedHat has KDE 3 now as well.

Re:I'm sick of this crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

But RedHat is still in beta. Suse comes with more CD's, more apps, a DVD and a better setup. Not just KDE 3. Plus you can update your files and security without paying for some service.

Re:I'm sick of this crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Is this the reason that Suse 8 "kicks butt on RedHat"?

No. It's just that SuSE works, on all levels. Few examples;

- Doesn't mess up with 'beta' unstable/incompatible compilers (SuSEs 2.95.3-136 has same object layout than latest stable gcc)
- They release stuff FAST, and with working builds that have great deal of fixes already in them (example: rpm -q kdebase3: kdebase3-3.0-49)
- YaST1, YaST2, sax, sax2, .. = easy, flexible and fast maintenance. Tools that are used to install the system can later be used to fine-tune it. With SuSE, easy installation doesn't just mean that it is easy to install. It's also easy to maintain it.
- Very, very good support even for developers
- QUALITY. Even 'rawhide' stuff they do is fairly solid.
- ..

Re:I'm sick of this crap...

[papason]

Yes, SuSE 8.0 is one to get. But each his own.
I dumped RH when they quit working with LUGS honestly.

Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat for all practical purposes owns GCC since Cygnus is part of Red Hat.

I'm using GCC 2.96.85 under Red Hat and it is a very fine compiler, as good as any version of GCC which I've ever used. It compiles everything quite well, including the kernel. Try it, my friend. You will like it.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[the_2nd_coming]

Red Hat for all practical purposes owns GCC

Ha!!! and all this time I thought the G in GCC stood for GNU. as in RMS, as in the Author and Copyright holder. how silly.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to burst your bubble, sonny. Red Hat owns GCC by way of owning Cygnus.
Red Hat controls GCC. Better get with the program, or continue living in your dream world.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope!

What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus / Red Hat?

It is a common mis-conception that Red Hat controls GCC either directly or indirectly.

While Red Hat does donate hardware, network connections, code and developer time to GCC development, Red Hat does not control GCC.

Overall control of GCC is in the hands of the GCC Steering Committee which includes people from a variety of different organizations and backgrounds. The purpose of the steering committee is to make decisions in the best interest of GCC and to help ensure that no individual or company has control over the project.

To summarize, Red Hat contributes to the GCC project, but does not exert a controlling influence over GCC.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

You are having trouble with the phrase "for all practical purposes" from the start of this thread. While RMS may hold the copyright gcc would still be generating 486 optimized code and the x86 community would have moved on to something else were it not the likes of Cygnus. Who owns the copyright and who makes it a useful and valuable tool are two different things with respect to gcc.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

face it you are losing.

just because some one has done a lot of work on it does not mean that they "practicly own it"

get real moron.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to jump in here and say that it is you who are losing. Red Hat basically owns the project. Deal with it.

Re:Compiler is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

well I am going to have to jump in and say that it is you who are losing, so YOU deal with it.

Plagiarism alert!

[BlowCat]

The whole article was copied from http://bero.org/gcc296.html. The coward didn't even change relative links, so they are broken. Those who moderated it as Informative obviously didn't check the links.

Besides, posting of clear text mailto: URLs on Slashdot should be considered unacceptable. That guy gets enough spam already, why not link to his homepage instead?

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[fantastic]

Yup, that is the size of it and also why bzero
works at Redhat and not a Fortune 1000 company.

On the one hand the changes are explained as
essentially that developers are compatible with the spec.

But on the other disregards *backward* compatibility for dynamic libraries etc

You can't have it both ways, my customers would
accept a binary that works over my source compatibility every time. Why? They buy solutions not code.

Troll

[rsidd]

The above is cut-and-pasted from bero's site (http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html), without acknowledgement and without changing the links (which is why the mplayer discussion points to slashdot.org and doesn't work). The AC has, however, contributed his own adjectives concerning natalie portman etc. That qualifies for +5 informative?

what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[mrm677]

Why can't distributions just install all previous versions of glibc and libstdc++??? Then there wouldn't be so much of a problem with breaking binary compatibility.... am I missing something?

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[Hoonis]

There are usually glibc-XXX-compat.i386.rpm files that you can install alongside of the newer ones for backwards compatibility. They don't seem to get installed by any of the options unless you go in and pick individual packages or just do it post-install though. hunt in your various rpm dirs for *compat*, can be quite helpful!

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing older glibc generally isn't needed --
glibc2.2.x (and the mislabeled mix of glibc CVS
head and 2.2.x branch RedHat ships in SkipJack)
is all the way backwatds compatible to glibc 2.0.0
(Module bugs, anyway)

Yes, you need a separate library for libc5, but it's
rarely needed now.

libstdc++ is an another issue -- Mandrake ships some of
the older versions, but having it only partly
solves the problem -- a KDE app compiled with gcc-2.95
wouldn't run with 2.96 no matter how many c++ libraries
one installs..

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[mrm677]

Would you mind quickly explaining why a KDE app compiled with gcc-2.95 wouldn't run with a system using 2.96? I'm not disagreeing, I'm just curious for my own knowledge.

Does it have to do with dynamically linked against KDE libs compiled with 2.96? If so, maybe KDE libs could be provided that were compiled with 2.95?? How many C++ ABI's are there anyways?

Thanks!

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

>How many C++ ABI's are there anyways?
GCC have a tradition for breaking C++ abi with every release...

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[sebol]

i want to add some more,
usually RH n.x contained with libcompat for Rh (n-1).x .

RH 7.x can run RH 6.x apps
RH 6.x can run RH 5.x apps.

but RH 7.x cant run RH 5.x aps.

therefore i've installed libc-5.3.12 & ld.so-1.9.5 , taken from RH 6.2 , on my RH 7.2 box.
Then i can run netscape 3.0.x :)

Re:what's the big deal with binary compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Every damned compiler has a different ABI for C++ - that's why anyone with any brains writing a cross-platform desktop uses C. That's quite apart from the increased speed... lower memory requirements... faster startup time... and on and on...

Why redhat?

[sydneyfong]

(At the risk of sounding -1 ignorant, here goes...)

I have not used Redhat since 7.x came out, but as a lot of people out use Redhat, I would like to ask a few questions:

How does Redhat compare with other "server" distros like Debian, Slackware and the likes? What advantages does it have over the other distros?

How smooth is a major upgrade on Redhat (eg. 6.x -> 7.x) would there be efforts needed to tweak the system such that it doesn't break?

Is RPM really as bad as some people advertised?

Re:Why redhat?

[bogie]

Redhat is probably the most "sever" distro available. They do the most QA and load testing on high end hardware of any linux vendor. "Servers" are Redhat's ONLY market. They target the enterprise server market and that's it. If you are questioning me you need to read their financial data and press releases. I'm not making anything up. The fact that gnome and kde are included is really just a bonus.
RPM is not a bad as people advertise. The thing you have to realize is that people in the linux community talk a lot of smack. Ever since redhat became the leading distro the fringe linux distros have become more and more vocal about their hatred for redhat. That doesn't mean its not a good distro, but it does mean you can expect them to call it a "newbie" distro even though it is not.
Redhat is not meant to be exciting or cutting edge, or the best desktop.
Its meant to be installed as a server and left alone.
Regarding a comparison to debian or slack directly, all I will say is you can use any distro for any task. They all have pluses and minuses.
Personally IMHO one of the big advantages of redhat is the software and hardware vendors are behind it. You can be sure that if and when a vendor decides to support linux, redhat will be first on the list.
So in a nutshell redhat is a corporate centric server distro, which although not as sexy as Gentoo, will server you well and be supported for a long time to come.

"...KDE heavy and Gnome shy..."

[dagnabit]

If it's a distribution review, who cares about the desktop system coverage? I want to know about kernel/gcc/etc versions, any new installer mods, clustering tools, etc. The desktop is just another app that I can upgrade from the owner if I want to...

If you're gonna cry about little Gnome coverage, what about all the users of better (faster) systems like WindowMaker, etc... :)

Re:"...KDE heavy and Gnome shy..."

[EyesWideOpen]

If you're gonna cry about little Gnome coverage

I'm not "crying" about lack of GNOME coverage. I was simply observing that there was a whole heck of a lot more coverage on KDE than GNOME. And in fact I now realize why (thanks to a comment above) -- because the changes to KDE in this version of RedHat are far more significant (being that 7.2 came with KDE 2.x or whatever) than those to GNOME.

And I agree with you about desktop system coverage which is why I stated the following in the submitted story: "It's not the most complete review ... focusing mainly on the install and desktop components".

LSB

[javilon]

On their last release, Suse made a point about being LSB compliant.

Apparently Red Hat is not, but I don't see any comment about it.
It seems to me that the linux people should follow their own standards.
Is Red Hat planning to be LSB compliant any time soon?

Re:LSB

[HeUnique]

RedHat 7.3 is simply an update and it's binary compatible to all previous 7.x versions - so you cannot play with file locations and binaries to be fully LSB compliant on an updated version..

I guess they'll be LSB compliant on 8.0

Re:LSB

[tempest303]

Actually, I can just about guarantee it. RH said back in March that they'd release a LSB 1.1 compliant distro in 2002, and seeing as how 7.3 can't be it, it'll have to be 8.0 in the Fall/Winter later in this year.

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[MSG]

But on the other disregards *backward* compatibility for dynamic libraries etc

Backward compatibility is provided by compat-libstdc++.

my customers would accept a binary that works over my source compatibility every time. Why? They buy solutions not code.

Smart customers buy solutions that include code. Software that doesn't include code will eventually have to be thrown out, every time.

Another way to say it is that your customers don't buy solutions, they license them. We buy Red Hat Linux.

Re:Is gcc still "2.96" ?

[fantastic]

Backward compatibility is provided by compat-libstdc++.

Theoretically yes, there are still issues, c++ exceptions etc
libpthread another problem library, glibc 2.2.5 another.

I *just* knew we would meet again

[Anonymous Coward]

That Saturday night was just incredible. I never met a man like you. I was so worried you would never call me. I thought you might try to finger me, lisa@brooks.com, after mounting your device. At least I thought that was your .plan, but to actually open yourself up to the criticism of the slashdot community shows your true love. Of course I will see you Saturday at 10.

Gentoo

[torndorff]

Yes, I know that a Gentoo [http://gentoo.org] review was covered in a recent Slashdot frontpage, but I would like to emphasize how amazing it is.

Fully source-based, get-only-what-you-want distro. I was running RedHat at the beginning of the week but decided to switch over to something a little slimmer.

My workstation now loads windows in half the time and my memory usage has been cut in half. And this is all on a Athlon 1700+.

Setup to a console took 2 hours (using stage-3 filesystem image) and took about 4-6 hours to get into XFree/KDE.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Gentoo is great if you like tmp file exploits in your package manager. Also have see the horrors of how it handles directory removals? .keep files wtf is that.. come back when it sucks less.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

source compiling sucks. It takes too long and is annoying.

Debian with apt is the best I've found. Installing Debian can be painful, but after that everything is much better than any other distro. I only run off the unstable tree. Upgrading to the latest software is so freaking simple and fast, I love apt.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile my XP machine took less than an hour to fully install, including a GUI and the best web browser available today. And I guarantee it is faster than X.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that include installing the security patches? Or do we have yet another unprotected XP machine to play with? Did you manage to install them before the machine was compromised? Usually spend more than an hour on reboots on a clean install.
By the way, starting up a machine with XP preinstalled does NOT count as an install.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

ahhh... you installed Galeon on a XP box? schweeeet!

/me on hands and knees

'meeeee nottttt worthyyyyyy....
meeeee nottttt worthyyyyyy....'

Install directly from the ISOs

[mnordstr]

I love this feature of the RedHat install. Since it's a beta, I don't want to waste 3 cds on it. No problem, I just downloaded the ISOs to another computer (with an NFS daemon), and installed it over the network. Just had to create a simple boot disk, and voila. This is a great and fast way to install the new RedHat if you don't neccessarily need it on CDs. And it is faster because my CD doesn't read as fast as my network can transfer.

Re:Install directly from the ISOs

[WinterSolstice]

That is really cool. I have never tried that before, but I think I will when I test the beta tonight!

I can't wait to see what cool stuff is planned for RH 7.3 :)

-WS

Debian, still behind the times?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Well it appears Debian is not kept up to date with the rest of the Linux community. Do they even supply a 2.4 kernel in their production release? Last time I checked - they did not. Has this changed?

I like the idea of Debian - but I want to be as current as possible. Running an old (2.2) kernel or having to upgrade major parts to get 2.4 running is not worth it - a distro is supposed to make things easy - so you don't have to deal with upgrading all the support packages yourself.

Re:Debian, still behind the times?

[Cro Magnon]

Debian 2.2 (potato) still uses kernel 2.2. Debian 3.0 (woody) installs 2.2 by default, but I think everything is set up to use the 2.4 kernel. However, woody will NOT include KDE3. Which means it, like potato, will be obsolete the day it's released.

Re: KDE heavy and GNOME shy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't slashdot articles dated with the year ?

Re: KDE heavy and GNOME shy

[Anonymous Coward]

The default /. date display format (for anonymous readers and folks who haven't bothered to change them) is dow+month+year only. (grrrrrrrr)

To fix it, you need to:

1) Set up a /. user account.
2) Adjust your date format in the user settings to whatever you like.
3) Only read /. while logged in under your account so the custom settings are used.

The rolling "upgrade" problem

[satch89450]

I keep a daily-update mirror of the Red Hat updates for the "enigma" release, and as of yesterday (Thursday) the CD-ROM image for the updates is at 588,644,352 bytes. In other words, it's more than half of the original distribution. Further, upgrading all of the modules is a royal PITA unless you do a full install because of the hell of dependencies.

One reason I also tend to reformat and load a new version instead of update is that my IDS database is then rebuilt from scratch -- I know that my servers are not compromised at the re-install (of course I yank the Ethernet connections during the install) and I can re-establish a baseline. It takes longer, but I believe the extra effort is worth it.

Some people will complain about having to reconfigure everything. Some things, like my spam-blocking list, get carried over (I run PostFix). For some things like my Web server, I cut and paste from the old config to the new config the access control information; when I move to Apache 2.0 I will have to re-work this, but it'll be worth it.

And when 7.3 is released and the people on the bleeding edge have had time to spill some blood on it, I'll move up and start keeping a new mirror of updates...

Wishlist

[caluml]

Wonder if the broken e100pro.o driver will work now? Anyone tried it on a new Compaq SFF deskpro? Hangs on moderate to heavy network usage. Also, for fscks sake, put an ntfs driver in there by default. How else can you convince Windows users to change?

Re:Wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable "sleep mode" if it is enabled. Run eepro100-diag, if sleep mode is enabled, it will tell you how to disable it. Power down the system and reboot. Mine has worked fine since I did this.

Re:FAKE TEXT

[semeniuk]

And being fake text, I wonder if the bit about how much more efficient KDE 3.0 is really true ... I installed KDE3 and now my computer is using 50% memory, 50% CPU, and 25% swap, compared to 25% memory, 25% CPU and nearly 0% swap with 2.2.2 ... is this normal?!

I'm a big KDE fan and therefore I'll put up a hit on resource usage just to run the latest/greatest, but I'm just debating the validity of the claims.

And you wonder..

[Anonymous Coward]

..Why many businesses will never take Linux seriously.

"KDE SUX!" "NO NOME R SUX!" "OMFG NOOB WTF USE MANDREK" "OMG MANDREK BLOWS AHAHAHAH IT R 4 N()()BS U SHULD USE SLACK@!!!" "AHAH SLACK ROTFL THATS LIKE 300 YERS OLD OMG" "FUX()R U USE SUSE" "HAHAHA STUPID LIZARD BOY"

Yeah.

Bandwidth of a Station Wagon...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes driving 65 down the highway"

I never understood that saying until I took a Networking class this semester. One of the funniest things I ever came to understand!

FTP install, & a suggestion

[Isaac-Lew]

It is also possible to do an FTP install using a boot floppy & text mode (I used this to upgrade at home from Skipjack beta 1 to beta 2.

What I would like to see is the CD that the package is located on during the install, and also better arrangement of packages on the CDs (server stuff on CD 1, X/KDE/Gnome on CD 2, & maybe devel packages on CD 3).

Finally KDE3 to work on my RH Linux 7.1...

[antdude]

I was still using old XFree86 (4.0.3-5) and compiled Kernel 2.4.9 (didn't want to upgrade Kernel and X yet). Anyways, I wanted to install KDE3 from scratch so I uninstalled KDE2.2.1(?) packages. I installed most of the RPMs needed for KDE3.

I managed to get it to work, but some things crashes like Control Center's Fonts. Someone told me to compile qt libraries from source, and it took abou six hours. Eventually, this works. KDE3 appears to be working when I used it for ten minutes.

I installed it yesterday

[theblacksun]

and am posting from it right now. I stuck it on a piece o' crap 233 at work with a history of hardware problems. It's seems to be working fine so far, except that apache wasn't set up to run automaticly and (sigh) NIS was. Oh well, most of that is taken care of and it seems to be working just fine. The install was pretty nice too.

Yea that sucked

[theblacksun]

I was downloading while i was installing, and I had 1 package left, and it asked for disc 3. After filling the office with cursing, I piddled about while I waited for the last iso to be downloaded and burned. yee-haw.

Huh?

[cowbird]

What the hell are you talking about?

Re:FAKE TEXT

[HiThere]

I think that it may depend on your system. On one of the systems that I tried it worked quite well, and I didn't notice any slow down. On a much more limited system ... it seemed to be a lot slower than the prior version. Of course, this is still a beta, and that might have something to do with it.

Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat, ha ha ha ha.

9.0 ? (was Re:Why 7.3?)

[sebol]

Anyway, from my instict,
the next RH after 7.3 will be RH 9.0
reason : the others already 8.x but with binary compatibility. with 7.x .

It's will be easier to differentiate 7.x/8.x binary with 9.x binary.

Re:9.0 ? (was Re:Why 7.3?)

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess will be that the major news in 8.0 will be gcc3. Hopefully Red Hat does not release 8.0 before they are able to compile the entire system with gcc3. Keeping gcc version 2.96 for compiling half of the system would be like 7.0 over again.

In 9.0 we will probably see a new kernel that presumable will not be ready before the release of 8.0 anyway. Let's hope that Red Hat will realize that soon enough and not try to get it into the 8.x series.

Skiping a version number to keep up with other distributions sounds like a silly idea. Was that supposed to be a joke?

Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

KOffice, KMail, KAlarm, etc. are all incredibly stupid names, and make the entire KDE project look very amateurish. Microsoft uses names like Outlook, Explorer, Frontpage. All sound more appealing than "KMail".

Re

[Anonymous Coward]

since this reply is neither pro-KDE or pro-GNOME.

You're right, it's pro-BS.

Positives/Negatives of both Gentoo Linux / FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

(from Scott @ http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=937)

FreeBSD

Positive
probably more stable on good hardware
More documentation
Probably faster (subjective impression)
Ports are probably better kept up than portage--more people working on it and it's been around longer.

Negative
If you're used to Linux, takes some getting used to
A bit less tolerant of iffy hardware, including KVM switches and ASUS Motherboards (there's workarounds for both though)
User groups are often (though not always) a bit less tolerant of newbiness.

Gentoo

Positives
Very fast, as a Linux distro
speed comparable to FreeBSD (subjective--single user workstation, sometime web/mail/ftp server)
As it's Linux, better documented (in general but see below)
More tolerant of iffy hardware

Negatives
New, often cutting edge--can (not necessarily does, but can) make it risky on a production machine.
Many things will be broken, and take a little while to fix. (Happens in FreeBSD stable as well--other times, thing are quickly fixed, and waiting an hour and doing another rysnc, or cvsup in FreeBSD's case) will fix the problem.
Not yet well documented--that is, unlike RH, for example, you can't go all over the web and easily find answers--there's a search function here--God bless whoever did that--Kyle?--and someone has a searchable archive of the mailing lists (I've misplaced that url) but nothing yet comparable to the FreeBSD online handbook.

If you're familiar with Linux already, and like it very much, Gentoo may be your choice--when a well-known FreeBSD person mentioned on FreeBSD-questions that he needed to run a Linux distro for something and was asking for suggestions, several besides myself suggested Gentoo.

Pluses for both
Original install isn't bloated and overloaded with unnecessary programs.
Ports and Portage--anyone who's run Linux from Scratch knows what a pain it can be to track down dependencies--though neither ports nor portage is perfect, their keeping track of the dependencies for you is great.

Re:FAKE TEXT

[semeniuk]

Yes, I think 'limited system' would adequately describe mine :-)

Oh well, KDE 3.0 is really nice, even if it does take more resources ... maybe one day I'll upgrade, but I just graduated so I need to find a job first!

Install directly over the web.

[mrsam]

And if you think that's convenient, try an HTTP install next time. You don't need to mess around setting up NFS, and you do not need a special boot disk. Only you need is a garden-variety apache install, and an HTTP install option is included in the bootnet image.

Simply copy everything off Disk 1 somewhere in your DocumentRoot, then take RedHat/RPMS from the remaining install disks, and add all the binary RPMs to the RedHat/RPMS directory that was copied off disk 1. Now, use the bootnet image to boot the installer, and select HTTP install.

reiserfs ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if ver. 7.3 support the upcoming reiserfs (ver. 4). If not, how about the reiserfs ver. 3.x

Re:reiserfs ???

[rhavyn]

I'm sure when reiser becomes stable they will support it. Same with xfs and jfs and lvm. But, since that day has not yet happened, I can promise you that reiser won't be in 7.3.

Re:reiserfs ???

[Matthew Austern]

I can promise you that reiser won't be in 7.3

You mean they'll be removing a feature that they've had in several earlier versions? That sounds unlikely, and it sounds like a really good way to alienate customers.

7.1 and 7.2 have reiserfs compiled into the stock kernels. I've been using reiserfs for my /home partition for some time, and I've had no trouble with it on my Red Hat system. Red Hat may encourage people to use ext3fs, but they do supply a kernel that supports reiserfs and they supply all of the userland tools that you need to manage a reiserfs partition.

I'd be shocked if 7.3 were less capable than 7.1 and 7.2.

Here's why linux isn't ready for the desktop

[Ilan Volow]

http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/983984049/9842806 51/addPostingForm

Re:Here's why linux isn't ready for the desktop

[glwtta]

I think that moment, more than anything else, defines why Linux just isn't making as much progress on the desktop as it should be.

Yeah, you are right - GNU/Linux would be making a lot more progress if it was even more pretty.

Damnit!

[dalutong]

AM or PM!!!! (you can't really expect me to wait 12 hours for you... you weren't THAT good.)

Lisa

*linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is no where as good as FreeBSD. No wonder RHAT and SUSE are dying. Good riddance.

PPPOE still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

The default install of rpppoe is broken. If your remove it and reinstall it all is well

A question for Linux users.

[jdeakle]

I have been wondering why Red Hat and the Linux world in general are so big on Gnome and KDE? From what I have seen of the two, they are bloated pieces of software that eat up too much ram. It seems to me some users want Linux to run like Windose. If they keep bloating the code, they will have their wish.