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."

Comments

devlabel

[lerhaupt]

He left out a feature in his review: 9 includes devlabel.

www.lerhaupt.com/linux.html

I just installed it on a dual P4 mobo

[elwinc]

I just installed RH9 (shrike) on a dual P4 mobo. It installed both an SMP and a regular kernel, automatically, whereas RH8 only installed a regular kernel (i.e. failed to sense dual CPUs). So this better sensing of multiple CPUs is an advantage in RH9.

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.

Re:This must be an April Fool's article...

[pcardoso]

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...

Re:Possible Comprimise?

[velkro]

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 :)

Re:Is this really worth a 9.0?

[ubernostrum]

I have two words for you: binary compatibility. If the new release means things compiled for older releases will not work, then they bump the major version (i.e., 8 to 9). If not, they bump the minor version (i.e., 7.2 to 7.3).

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.

THE REVIEW HAS BEEN UPDATED

[Anonymous Coward]

I made several edits, and added a whole new section on devlabel.

Please honor the copyright, and don't cut-n-paste the review into a /. post. I would like people to visit the web page.

I'm OK with being Slashdotted, in fact everything is holding up fine here.

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs

Re:Multiple network profiles! Yay!

[_Upsilon_]

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/proje cts/ifplugd/

A few first impresssions.

[ChangeOnInstall]

I 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.