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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."
"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.
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).
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
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?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
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...
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
read this: http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html ;)
DiscaimerL Bero works for Redhat, so you might not believe him either...
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
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.
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
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
The beta (why did this hit slashdot now? It was released weeks ago...) contains the currently most stable version of gcc.
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.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
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.)
sic transit gloria mundi
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)
Maybe they just decided to give up on trying to stay a version number ahead of Mandrake.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Well if my opinion of the compiler is Flamebait (X2 no less) that says something about the compiler... or me.
sic transit gloria mundi
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!!!
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.
I don't know, I don't care. This way, I get to keep my RHCE longer without having to retest!
Click here or here.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Nope. Cato ended speeches thusly. It is a joke on George Bush. Think About It.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
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.
Hetz (Heunique)
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'?
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.
Spencer Ogden
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.
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.
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.
Bowie J. Poag
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?
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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.
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...
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
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.
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.
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.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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...
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).
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html
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.
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.
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
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.
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/983984049/9842806 51/addPostingForm
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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.