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Red Hat 9 To Be Released March 31
Garfunkel writes "Looks like Red Hat is breaking tradition and skipping 8.1 and 8.2 and jumping directly to 9.0 RHN subscribers
get it a week ahead on March 31st. Available to the rest the world a week
later (April 7)." The website refers to the upcoming release simply as "9" -- which doesn't rule out future point releases, but could it be?
Just trying to keep up with Slackware.
"Are you running Linux 9 yet?"
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Anyone know if they'll release DVD ISOs? I think for previous versions you had to be a member or whatever.
It would be kinda nice to download just about every package and put it on one DVD.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
And to think, I'm still waiting for Ximian to release it's version of Gnome for RedHat 8.0.
I suppose that higher numbers are better from the perspective of new users comparing products, although the race ahead didn't seem to do Mandrake enough good.
A day shy of April 1 is kind of fishy, though.
Lastly, imagine the chaos that will reign when Redhat releases Red Hat 10.
Yes, it will be "ten", as in the same version as the Apple OS X, also a UNIX.
Oh, but "X" is the windowing system for UNIX, you know, "eks eleven", which is much better than "X10", the same as the clunky old protocol for handling devices around your house. Not Windows, but "X Windows"...
It'll be like "Who's on First" all over again...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
So essentially Red Hat upgrades from 8 to 9 in ~6 months. No wonder no one wants to write general-release commerical apps for Linux .. by the time they develop & test their product, the distro essentially discontinues the release & doesn't support it. At this rate, I don't think we will ever convince developers of some great software (Adobe, Macromedia, etc) to port to Linux. Way too much support-related cost involved.
But I'm sure that there are some really excellent features packed into 9 to make it worth being a full version upgrade and not a point upgrade (uhh.. not)
It's been pointed out on the beta list that 7.0 was just called 7 when it came out. That didn't stop a 7.[123] from appearing later.
It's all very well RedHat playing "keeping up with the Jones'" with Slackware and Mandrake, but what about those of us who have spent our hard-earned money on a not-so-cheap certification that will now be rendered expired because of this jump to 9.0?
I got my RHCE less than a year ago, at RH7.2. It was stated that RHCE's are valid for two releases - ie when 9.0 came about, I have to recertify.
Was I wrong to expect that since it took two years to go from 7.0 to 8.0, I might actually have been able to hold onto my certification for more than one year!?
Uh, because being a subscribed user has its perks?
It's not a scam. If you don't want to pay, then don't. If you want to pay, then you'll not only get things a whole week ahead of time, you'll also get support.
What on earth does this have to do with "the cult of Linux"?
Since it's free software, couldn't an RHN member technically just leak it without consequence?
evil adrian
Also in the 8.x series redhat does not ship apache 1.3x or perl 5.6. Only the latest 2.0 with perl 5.8 which no mod-perl modules is available.
After an install alot of downloading is diffinetly required.
http://saveie6.com/
Phoebe (8.0.94) has 2.4.20 (too many versions!!!)... it includes the O(1) scheduler and some latency patches... the desktop is really quite snappy (X 4.3 will be included, Phoebe is working off a pre-4.3 snapshot). I hope 9 includes Nautilus 2.2.2 because the GNOME team added some speed increases there too.
Anyways, the nVidia drivers (the kernel module component) needs some changes to be able to run on the beta (they're available, but not from nvidia directly), but I suspect nVidia will have this released shortly after RH9. Additionally, some third-party stuff will have to be relinked, because of thread local storage stuff and the new NTPL -- Redhat backported a lot of stuff from the 2.5 series. Hence the 9.0 release (IMHO) since an 8.1 release would seem to imply that it's relatively backwards-compatible. It seems there are too many low-level interface changes to justify a point release.
Some drivers are already ready for the 2.5 kernel (as ready as you can get for software-in-progress), so you just need to hack the version numbers a little bit to get it to compile properly -- for example, the PowerVR drivers. Specifically, the VM API has changed quite a bit, so when RH backported these changes, they got the new API as well.
The beta looks really nice though, especially with GNOME 2.2. And CD burning is integrated in Nautilus (drag-and-drop, then click the burn icon, and it writes it to disc). Very nice stuff is on its way...
In related news, I'm changing my job title to Systems Analyst 2.0, to better highlight new features and capabilities. Of course, biweekly licensing fees will be readjusted to reflect this enhanced functionality...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
i'd heard complaints about the unified desktop repeatedly here and in the newsgroups since 8.0 was released. over the week i finally downloaded the iso's and installed psyche on the last machine in my house that still had windows on it, and damn, i was impressed.
redhat still offers full customization of EITHER window manager, and if there is some esoteric g/kde setting i'm not aware of, download the newest k-rad alpha of whichever and install it. the point of the unified desktop was to make it appeal to corporate and grandmas without taking away either option.
within about 2 hours, i had my desktop looking and acting like mac osx (via kde) and my wife couldn't believe how wonderful it worked.
so, speaking as a person who's brand new to the unified desktop, and as an RHCE, either install whatever you prefer, learn how to install theme packages, or stfu.
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
There is one and only one reason that Red Hat bumps the major number, and that's binary compatability. If you can't run binaries under it that you could in the previous release, then it can't have the same major-number. Period. Usually the reason for the change in binary compatibility is due to library changes (e.g. new major version of glibc).
Now, there may be political, marketing or contractual reasons that a major number is prefered, but since binary compatibility is not guaranteed between major releases, you'll usually find that the one leads to the other, and thus the original statement holds true (i.e. engineers are free to rev libs in a major release, so they do).
The reason that Red Hat would release a new major version so soon after 8.0 is almost certainly to track the latest desktop updates which have been fast-and-furious since 8.0 was released, especially from GNOME (2.2.x is FAR more reasonable than 2.0, which IMHO, Red Hat released too early).
Historically, RedHat has always guaranteed that all .x releases will be binary compatible with their major number. However, I don't recall any major changes with gcc & glibc. Is there some other change that would make this release not be binary compatible with RH8?
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Marketing figured 8.1 wouldn't sell as many copies a 9.0
.0 releases are by many considered to be problematic. I tried 7.0 when it was released and I hated it. I had decided to upgrade from 7.3 to 8.1 as soon as 8.1 was released. Now I start wondering if I should rather stay on 7.3 and wait for 9.1 to be released. Or is it about time I try another distribution?
Why? I'm still running RH7.3. The reason I didn't upgrade to 8.0 is mainly that the
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
With no PR build-up, and no listing of new features on RedHat's website (can anyone else find any, because I certainly can't!) this release certainly looks like a bad joke, and if it's not an April Fools then it makes Red Hat look like a bad joke.
I'm using 8.0 now, and RH's games with registration and update-systems combined with their ridiculous "BlueCurve" rebranding (I'm sorry, but it just takes RH even farther away from any sort of standard, and forces it's users to go to RH for software updates), combine to make Red Hat look un-professional. Why should I buy any of their software, if they're just going to come out with a new major version months later and leave me in the dust?
I mean really, what warrents this? Is there a brand new Kernel major version that I've somehow missed hearing about? Does RH have the inside on a new blazingly fast XFree86? If this is serious it's a ridiculous marketing game, and if it's a joke it's wholly unprofessional!
As soon as I've time it's back to the source and on to Gentoo for me!
credo quia absurdum
Additionally, Redhat wants to make some money and the subscription model isn't a bad one. If you want to be the last on the block to have it, you don't have to pay anything. But if ya want managed updates, early access, and whatever other perks they throw in then ya pay the fee.
--------
Free your mind.
I've been using the beta version of this for a month now. Phoebe is the name of the beta if anyone is interested in seeing what might be changed as of the last update.
My impressions as a person who uses this as a desktop at home and is normally a Mandrake kind of user:
It is a very easy to use and install and stable distro. I don't like that they include almost no configuration tools. To make it a good desktop distro I had to download a lot of extra rpms because the cd's with the distro are packed with server/workstation rpms. Also, though not RedHat's fault, NVidia's glx driver doesn't work properly with the new kernel and some weird dis-optimizations to the code have to be done in order for it to work (as of mid Feb; haven't checked lately). This is an issue with all 2.5 and 2.4.20 and above kernels, IIRC.
It is very similar to 8.0 (but they might have changed some things in the last month). The biggest gripe I have is that they use GRUB as the bootloader, but have no configuration utility for it. I'm a LILO person, but I thought I'd install GRUB to see if it was better. The man pages weren't very helpful and RedHat includes nothing to help, either. I went back to LILO, but since RH has no priority for it, there was no graphical options for LILO, just text.
It works for what it is supposed to work for: servers and workstations. As a desktop user that wants to have a simple and easy distro, I switched to Mandrake 9.1 rc1.
IANAL, but I play one on
Great timing, i *just* switched over my kde to kde3.1 via apt-get. I'm not really sure how I feel about redhat's odd way of grabbing their revenue stream. I do like the fact that they have a slew of people paid working on the code but the up2date thing makes me really unhappy. I'm very close to making a redhat wrapper (in the same way that mandrake was a redhat wrapper at some point) that is basically redhat/rpm compatibility based but w/out some of the annoying revenue stream add-ons. The obvious one is that is officially moving redhat over to apt Right now there are only a few redhat apt-mirrors, but I would be more than willing to host a mirror and it will easily allow us and anyone else to keep the security updates at least "up2date" w/out paying per year per node. The other thing to look at is synaptic which is also a really nice gui for apt as well and puts what i've always liked about debian on the redhat platform.
:)
,synaptic and having a slew of decent apt-mirror sites would be an obvious and simple fix
Also redhat doesn't seem to be doing very well w/ kde. I am not sure whether it is because kde3.0 was really buggy or something happened w/ the 7.3->8.0 transition but I wouldn't mind a redhat that was "un-unified." At the very least, a kde/konqueror that was usable then, since many people think the unified thing is a good thing
Anyway maybe talking to a few people and seeing if it would be possible to collect a cd of non-gpl but "open" developer software (Kylix 3, intel compilers 6.0 (kind of a weird license)) would also be nice addons.
At the very least I think defaulting/forking redhat to include apt
the security updating issue w/ the current incarnation of redhat. Its also I think obvious that redhat will never release the up2date server source and have obvious reasons for not incorporating apt into the offical distribution so it may require the redhat' wrapper trick to get apt in there.
In any case, i'm curious as to what you guys think, one the one hand i think its a bit "assholish" as it deprives them of one of their obvious revenue streams, on the other hand I think for those of us who run clusters or whatnot or even want to auto-redistribute custom software onto our own nodes having access to the equivalent of our own up2date software (which apt is a better version of to be honest) is a reasonable task, and furthermore wrapping around redhat (like mandrake did) is somewhat what open source is all about as well, especially as redhat and redhat-compatible rpms/source(i.e. ati/nvidia/vmware drivers) is a bit ubiquitous.
-bloosqr
I bought Redhat 8.0 a few weeks ago (it had been out for some time before that, of course) and have been pretty impressed with the completeness of the package and the work they have done on adding some consistency to the configuration apps bundled.
However, I can't really see what Redhat are going to put in this release to justify a +1 version upgrade.
I agree with other posters that frequent version changes will threaten the release of 'industry standard' apps on the RH Linux platform, and as such Linux in general because of the perceived volatility of the environment.
However, strong sales of 8.0 might have given Redhat the impression that consumers look favourably on 'integer' releases, when really I think 8's popularity was almost entirely due to the well-publicised 'out of the box' antialiased fonts and UI work. If it was called 7.4 it would still have been very popular for these reasons.
It would be nice to see Redhat give a clear rationale behind it's numbering scheme and clear up the confusion that obviously reigns in this area.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Subject: Red Hat Linux 9 | Get the latest Linux early
Dear Dirk:
You may know that Red Hat Network is the best way to keep your
systems running the latest errata and always up to date. What you
might not know is that Red Hat Network passed the one million users
mark earlier this year. We've listened to valuable feedback and have
added two items of interest to keep those users happy - early release
of Red Hat Linux 9 ISOs and improved technical support.
Beginning March 31, 2003, paid subscribers to Red Hat Network will
have access to Red Hat Linux 9 ISOs - a full week before retail store
and Red Hat FTP availability. Also, Red Hat Network subscribers will
receive dedicated Red Hat Network Technical Support.
Learn more about the benefits of being a Red Hat Network Subscriber:
http://redhat.chtah.com/
To purchase a Red Hat Network subscription:
http://redhat.chtah.com/
Thanks again for using Red Hat Linux. We appreciate all feedback
from our users and hope you enjoy Red Hat Linux 9.
Sincerely,
Red Hat
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My RH 9 beta has a grub configuration util, it is located in /bin/vi
What it means is, starting with RH9, you have 12 months of errata. You'll be able to use RH9 until March 31st, 2004, a year after release.
This *is* inconvenient, because it means, at minimum, taking a machine down to kickstart it every year. THAT is annoying as hell, especially since you aren't going to deploy RH9 site-wide for at least 2-3 months (shortening the releases "lifetime" by 3 months).
I thought this was a huge problem until I looked at their ES level enterprise solution. Since enterprise entitlements are $120 anway, paying $230 for an OS that doesn't expire for 3-5 years seems perfectly reasonable.
If your systems are mission-critical enough to NEED to be left stable for *years*, then going with Advanced Server makes more sense than any other distro - they stabalize the platform for 18 months between releases, minimizing your QA and upgrade time significantly.
Here is your parachute and here is the manual.
Welcome to Linux.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The next edition of RedHat I believe is supposed to include the new kernel threads stuff, with the glibc that supports it (hence re-implementing pthreads), it has a new compiler, and the new glibc. So probably the applications aren't binary compat with 8.0, so this is now 9.0. The price you pay for upgrading. It's not like the upgrade path doesn't work, and it's not like upgrading past these things will be vastly superior on Gentoo.
They are pushing out new big things, if you want to stay current, then upgrade to it. What's the big deal about the major version number? I really don't see why your panties are in a bunch with RedHat. Gentoo will do most of the same crapola to your machine that Redhat does when you upgrade, it just won't have a major version number change. Big whoop.
Kirby
redhat laboratories releases linux9 advanced server pro champion edition(tm)
redhat laboratories has announced today the future release of 'linux9 advanced server pro champion edition(tm)'. redhat scientists have announced that this will be the most numerically advanced version of linux ever sold. by abandoning older 8.x technology (found on previous releases), redhat has been able to accelerate the versioning capabilities of linux by nearly 10 percent.
numerically advanced versioning technology is an important step in bringing redhat to the enterprise. many enterprise customers, who run high-availability servers on big iron hardware, demand the stability and maturity that can only come from numerically advanced version numbers. moving to linux9 puts redhat in direct competition with sun microsystems' (SUNW) solaris operating system, which has been sporting version 9 release enumeration for over a year.
in other news, redhat has announced that linux9 advanced server pro champion edition(tm) will be distributed in a six dvd set, that includes 2 dvd's containing the basic distribution, and 4 dvd's of pre-compiled packages. additional dvd's supporting non-x86 architectures may also be available for purchase.
I am not overly pleased about this. The changes from 7.2 to 8.0 were not overly significant in my opinion, and 9.0 isn't going to be that different from 8.0. How could it be? There has not been enough time between them for major kernel changes or radical security modelling to alter, etc.
Click here or here.
Please don't start comparing RedHat to Microsoft... There are some truths that can clear up a lot of these misconceptions...
1) RedHat releasing this as a major version number is consistent with their numbering schemes in the past and is likely not a marketing plot. RedHat does major number versioning when binary compatibility is broken between versions. The Native POSIX Thread Libraries used in the latest beta Phoebe broke binary compatibility with a lot of applications. Thus, a new major number is warranted.
2) RedHat has an interesting challenge in that it must balance the "release early, release often" philosophy to satisfy those of us who like having cutting edge distros with the need for corporations to have some longevity in their releases. RedHat has found a good balance here. These consumer releases are going to continue to be released every six months to satisfy those who want its raw power. They will continue to be free, and RHN update services will continue to be free (though recently they've asked for about ten seconds of your time to complete a five question marketing survey). These six-month releases will continue to have same QA process as always. RedHat is willing to continue to invest so much into these freely downloadable versions because the feedback they get from them helps them work on the slower release versions. Redhat has said this more than once during a recent thread on the phoebe list.
Please don't start villifying RedHat. They do a lot of good for the whole Linux community, pay many of the best developers of our favorite projects, and give Linux a wider acceptance in the RealWorld (tm) which helps all of us.
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
Now what if RedHat changes it's mind and renames the release to 8.1 at the last minute? Does that mean you would use it?
Now we see the problem of judging an app by it's version number rather than it's reviews.
Reguardless of the version number, either wait until the reviews are in, or try it out on a machine you don't care about. A version number is meaningless.. even the difference between 9.0 and 8.1 is arbitrary.
The regular ISO's they will see as something nice to do for the community, and have it be the test bed for new features, and the "beta/gamma" release of the upcoming Enterprise series. Then the new enterprise releases will have lots of software that has been tested and released on all kinds of hardware and they will have a very good chance of making a very, very stable release for the enterprise lineup.
Because they have the stable release, I believe you'll see fewer, and fewer X.1 and X.2 releases, and you'll see a lot more .0 releases. Somewhat because it will be enticement to have people buy the Enterprise line, and somewhat to keep the "beta/gamma" testing on the bleeding edge. It's a pretty clever scheme all in all. If they can pull it off, and keep the bugs in the .0 releases down, and put out a .1 to solve big problems in .0, I'll happily use the standard ISO on my desk, and happily pay the money for the Enterprise lineup for my servers.
Kirby