Slashdot Mirror
New Red Hat Beta: LIMBO
joyoflinux writes: "Red Hat has released a beta version of its distribution, called LIMBO. It includes the latest desktop technology, gcc 3.1, Mozilla 1.0+, OpenOffice 1.0, and much more. You can download it here or use a mirror. Submit bugs here." Here's the announcement.
Code naming software has really annoyed me. Jaguar for OsX. Longhorn for Windows. Palladium for the upcoming hardware software venture. AMD Corvette (before it was renamed). Does this kind of naming have any point or relevancy? What does naming an upcoming code base LIMBO mean?
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
From what I understand, Limbo (or whatever the whacked-out name crap means) is the 8.0 Beta.
What I usually do is of the following (depending on what OS):
If it's MS Windows, I wait about 6 months till most of the bugs are worked out. XP has been a show-stopper to me. I wont install that piece of Spyware-ridden crap.
If it's Linux distro XYZ, I usually wait for about 1.5 to 2 months till I touch the new distro. If there's bugs, it'll be usually worked out in that time. Course, if something currently works, I'm gonna leave it alone.
Should I forge ahead, and head into beta-land?
... do you want something you can count on? Or ... would you rather play with the latest and greatest toys.
... I have been running Debian woody (the current "testing" distro) for WELL over a year. I haven't had significant stability problems with it yet.
One question
It's been my experience that Linux apps (not to mention the kernel itself) tend to be stabler in bets than Windoze apps at approximately release level 4.0.
Going to beta-land is a decision you can only make for yourself, but
utter rubbish
I imagine some of them are SRPMs or something but they aren't labeled as such. They have open office and a bunch of stuff on there though, maybe not. I am afraid that if I don't d/l and burn all five I'm going to get half way through an install and need disc 5 for some silly package. The last time I installed 7.3 on a server I needed all three, the install size was only 400 MB too.
Why can't Red Hat build thier disc images with Disc 1 being the base, disc 2 being X and Gnome, 3 being Open Office, etc. I can't imagine any benefit to spreading things out so much.
My biggest gripe with RH is the install /configuration too. The standard options doesn't fit my need on my desktop or my servers. So I always end up using "costum" with "kernel-development" (and "XFree"), and then select the rest of the individual packages.
/etc/foo.conf" saves the day.
The best solution is probably spending some time, learning to use "Kick-start".
Another thing: if you dislike being a CD DJ, and have the disk space, then remember that it is possible to install RH directly from the downloaded ISO images on a harddisk partition.
About maintance. Hm. My experience is different from yours. I think RH has become much easier to maintain, especially with RH-network. Mastering RPM to a certain degree is a must though.
Simple stuff like "rpm -Fvh *.rpm --test" or "rpm -qa | grep foo" or "rpm -qf
And underappreciated tool is "mc" or Midnight Commander", a dual panel "Norton Commander" ncurses based clone. Among other things, it is able to browse inside rpm packages. Nifty.
You mention that up2date filled "/". It is configurable where up2date dumps the downloaded rpms. On my servers "/var" and "/home" are on seperate partitions, so that eg. huge, growing log-files etc. doesn't spill over the "/" partition.
Gentoo Linux looks very interesting, and the guy that makes it, D. Robbins has written some extremely well written tutorials for IBM on: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/
That's complete BS. KW'ing actually does serve a useful purpose -- it brings facts into the discussion that would not otherwise be brought up. The people who get the +5 get it because they contribute to the discussion.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton