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Technical Review for Red Hat Linux 9
ewilts writes "Dax Kelson from Guru Labs has posted a technical review for Red Hat Linux 9. It's a definite read if you want to get away from the marketing fluff that focuses on eye-candy and instead read about the release from a sysadmin's point-of-view."
Red Hat Linux 9 Technical Changes
/boot/grub/grub.conf file, the replacement of Xconfigurator with the redhat-config-xfree86 program, and the new dhclient DHCP client daemon. There are not nearly as many behavioral changes from RHL8.0 to RHL9, yet the ones that exist are significant.
(or when the RELEASE-NOTES are just not enough)
by Dax.Kelson@GuruLabs.com
Copyright 2003 Guru Labs, L.C.
Intro
Over the past eight years or so, I've been excited each time a new version of Red Hat Linux gets released. During the past few years, people have even been writing reviews of each release. As a general rule, I've been dissatisfied by the superficialities, inaccuracies, and irrelevancies in the reviews often times performed by someone who does not have intimate knowledge of Red Hat Linux. A systems administrator needs an in-depth review that covers ? relative to the previous release:
Architectural & behavioral changes
Installer changes
Changes to included software packages
Normally, with each new release of Red Hat Linux, someone here at Guru Labs combs through it looking for the above changes to update the Guru Labs Linux courses. This time it was my turn, and I decided to simultaneously write a technical review for the system administrators out there. I hope that the results are satisfactory.
Abbreviation notes:
RHL = Red Hat Linux
RH = Red Hat Inc.
Architectural & behavioral changes
There were many changes between RHL7.3 and 8.0, for example, the use of root=LABEL=/ in the
Kernel 2.4.20-8
The kernel in RHL8.0 was based on the 2.4.18 kernel. Despite the name, the RHL 2.4.20-8 kernel is based on 2.4.20 plus bug fixes identified up through 2.4.21-pre4-ac4. During the past couple years, the RHL kernels have included back ported functionality from development kernels that has proven stable. The new RHL9 kernel is no exception. Major changes since RHL8.0 include:
Addition of Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) for standards based threading support with impressive performance. This is definitely a nice addition, however, I anticipate that sys admins who add patches on-top-of the RHL kernel from 3rd party (UML, FreeSWAN, etc) sources will have a more difficult time getting the patches to apply and work cleanly. Presumably when the 2.6 kernel comes out, the divergence of the RHL kernel will drop substantially.
Certain applications using the old LinuxThreads API in a certain manner may no longer work (was that vague enough?)
In particular if using Java, update to the latest version from Sun at:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/download.html
The WIN32 API translation software, WINE, suffers from this problem. Proper fixes are in the works, however, workarounds exist.
Installing and running Oracle 9i R2 has major issues since it includes two different older embedded Java JVMs that don't work with NPTL. The solution is stick with RHL8.0 or the officially supported Red Hat Linux AS edition.
ACPI support appeared in a beta (as well as in a 8.0 beta), but was removed for the final shipping kernel.
Filesystem ACL and EA support appeared in the betas, but was pulled for the final shipping kernel. I was really looking forward to ACLs and EAs support in RHL (Solaris had support since 2.5.1), maybe an errata kernel will re-add the feature.
To see what software specifically supports ACLs and EAs (beyond setfacl/getfacl/setfattr/getfattr), run:
rpm -e --test libacl
Just a quick observation. The way text editors save files normally, is to create a new file with a temporary random name, and then move/rename the new file to name of the original. Using this technique, if the file being edited has ACLs, the ACLs will be lost. The Vim editor uses libacl to obtain the original ACLs, and then add them back after the save. It is important that other applications that save files in the same fashion are updated to use libacl.
rpm -e --te
He left out a feature in his review: 9 includes devlabel.
www.lerhaupt.com/linux.html
While I have your attention, I'm gonna make a tiny little rant about gnome, which I generally like. In gnome-1.4, gnome-terminal takes arguments like --foreground=lightblue --background=black. This annoyed me when I first encountered it because it breaks the standard color choice arguments that work in so many X11 appsl for example: xterm -fg lightblue -bg black.
But now gnome 2 breaks the old 1.4 convention! As far as I can tell, the only way to choose your colors is to create a bunch of profiles, and then use --window-with-profile. This business of manually creating profiles is doubly annoying!
The reason it matters to me is that I admin several boxes, and I use different color codes for terminals and editors on the different boxes. I have to keep on re-creating my admin scheme with each new iteration of gnome. Why keep changing it?
OK, rant over; thanks for bearing with me.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
well, I used BitTorrent and in about 20 hours I had the ISOs burned to a cd... I'm connected via a 256Kb cable connection, so for the 1.7GB download that wasn't too much... At some point the transfer rate was going at the maximum possible (32KB/sec), although I got about 26/27 KB most of the time I cared to look at it...
Bittorrent is amazing. Guess I'll give it more use from now on... I left the client running for a couple of hours after the download finished, but I had to stop it. My cable connection allows me a maximum of 1,5GB per month of upstream (and 5GB downsteam) traffic and it's the first frickin day of the month and I am already at 700mb! Well, at least during the time it took for the download some folks got some parts of their ISOs from me...
You may have technical issues; the AVERAGE bandwidth not too long ago was running about 50K/s.
To get BitTorrent to function optimally, make sure ports 6881-6889 (can be reconfigured if you're running the full version and not the windows install) aren't blocked by a firewall.
This is during the installer, not after install So if you're worried about someone compromising your system during the install process, and you've already removed the network cable/wireless card, then you have a larger problem to deal with :)
If you want a single NIC to appear on multiple VLANs, then you need VLAN support.
Red Hat 9 includes a new threads implementation that breaks compatibility, most notably with things like Java VMs and WINE. So, they bumped the major version.
See this mailing list post by RH manager Matt Wilson for more on the reasoning behind the numbering.
I made several edits, and added a whole new section on devlabel.
/. post. I would like people to visit the web page.
Please honor the copyright, and don't cut-n-paste the review into a
I'm OK with being Slashdotted, in fact everything is holding up fine here.
Dax Kelson
Guru Labs
You should check out ifplugd. It's a daemon that automaticially configures your network device when a cable is plugged into it, and unconfigures it when the cable is unplugged.
I don't believe it currently works with all network cards, but it does work on many of them (read, works fine in my laptop)
http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/projI used BitTorrent to get RH9, which worked smoothly when I let it run overnight on a cable modem.
- Mozilla is up to v1.2.1 and supports AA fonts. Unforunately, Galeon is on 1.2.7 and does not.
- Nautlius has no problems browsing SMB networks, just make sure your firewall settings are at or below "Medium" if you use RH's firewall tool.
- Menu editing appears to be totally b0rked. I am so far unable to add items to the applications menu, neither by right clicking on the menu and then clicking "Add new item to this menu" nor by dragging launchers into the "Applications:///" view in Nautlius. Major disappointment here, I was really hoping this would be fixed in 9. With any luck, RH will make it a priority to fix it.
- Java works fine (whew).
- "Extras" menus are now submenus in each menu that contains "extra" programs. Much nicer layout IMHO.
- "Security Level" firewall configurator no longer has option to add extra ports, which makes it quite worthless to those of us that require this feature. At least it remembers settings this time (the RH8 version did not).
Overall it seems to be a fine product, runs as fast as RH8, just with a bit more polish.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)