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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."
i spend 2 full days downloading the isos, only to read the review and determine i shouldn't bother
... FOR ME TO POOP ON
ip security bit stories are good enough
vodka, straight up, thank you!
OMG!
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Does it support RFC 3514?
stupid posts will be modded down, intelligent posts modded up. Only this one day a year.
lysergically yours
Thank you lord, finally back to my normal nerdiness. Yes, we can now return to our opinionatd, often un-substatiated, rants!
No more April Fools.
Of course the real joke could be that no one gonna say the following.
1. Red Hat Sucks
2. Debian Rules
3. Been rolling my own with Gentoo since the dawn of time.
4. PROFIT
That would be the real April Fools. No my distribution is better than yours. THAT is what would shock the hell outta me.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
if it supports the George Foreman iGrill? I'm waiting on the boxed set, and could really use the functionality.
C|N>K
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
Is it just me, or does this seem like a hole waiting for a compromiser? Does anyone know of if there a way to turn this off?
I've had BitTorrent going since last night, and I have about half of the ISOs so far.
...considering that at 9KB/second nobody has gotten past ISO 2 of 3 to install and review the thing...
So now in addition to White Hats and Black Hats, we're supposed to buy into Red Hats? Next thing we'll be getting reviews of Blue Hat, Orange Hat, and Green Hat, or even software named after obscure African antelopes.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This is an excellent review of the Red Hat 9, way better than the review over at OSNews; I'm still not sure if it justifies upgrading from Red Hat 8.0 and it's stability though. For all those people that blame 9.0 for WINE's new problem, you're DEAD WRONG...blame WINE for that.
On a side note, I have no idea how those OSNews people stay in business. They may be exclusives, but their writing is HORRIBLE.
Just a pet peeve of mine, and I would like to see more reviews/articles like this. Now, back to the fake-RFC's and slew of other shitty April Fools jokes.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
This is one of the most immediately handy things about the new release. The ability to choose how interfaces behave via a grub boot menu item means that a laptop that is trundled around to be used in different places is now very easily usable without extra tweaking. No more hitting "I" for interactive boot to make sure that I skip "eth0" configuration when I power up on the train!
On the bright side, I think that RedHat's decision to split their software in a publically available, bleeding edge distribution and a more conservative, corporate version is just great. The former is a test bed for the latter. Donwnloaders and enthusiasts do the stress tests, corporations get a stabilized product. Excellent scheme !
He left out a feature in his review: 9 includes devlabel.
www.lerhaupt.com/linux.html
This is the FP after completely reading the article
Seriously a very nicely written article worth reading. This article has one thing i always look for in reviews of New distros. and this is diff. between OLD and NEW distros.
Most s/w release notes has a section called "What's new", but this is grossly inadequate to make a decission whether to upgrade or not. What is needed is the exact diff. in terms of functionality rather than a CVS code change LOG. and this article makes an effort to provide that.
Having said that, I just finished completely configuring and customising my RH8.0 so i guess I wont be upgrading. I will wait till 2.6 comes out. (I am speaking of the kernel version for those of you who dont get it)
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
this lets me know that there is nothing worthwhile in it for me to get.
which saves me time and effort.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Yeah, it's not quite on topic, but I figured someone should mention it...
As of this posting, 26 hours after it began being distributed via BitTorrent, 5400 people have received copies of the ISOs using that protocol, and over 11 terabytes of data have been transmitted over that torrent.
There are now also torrents available for the source and documentation ISOs. To download either set, please visit f.scarywater.net.
Thanks
What, me Tweet?
From the RedHat site:
/lib/congress/..." [um...I'll leave that one up to the imagination] /...." /...."
"...evil bit support under IPv4..."
"...Volkswagen-sized packaging..."
"...support for
"...support for new hardware, including the Foreman iGrill..."
"...networks with Windows versions, Macs, and all one version of BSD..."
"...guaranteed to filter dupes at
"...guaranteed to filter dupes at
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
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!
a well thought out review on SD? Say it ain't so! Regardless...the meat of the review sums what other reviews have said...most of the changes are rev bumping of utilities. A new kernel is used, which will probably break Free/SWAN, and UML. Does the freeswan break matter? People who are running firewall and or VPN boxes aren't likely to be rushing out to get an upgrade, and the same can probably be said for UML, although that is more of an issue.
For me, the biggest thing to change is the availability to take screenshots easily during the install...makes it easier to get good documentation. All in all I'll wait for 2.6.x...THAT will get my attention, sincee UML AND IPSec are in the mainline kernel.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
..a wonderful article like this comes along. Granted I had to wade through the 10 previous posts of reviews on RH9 that catalogued every change to the gui, but this one made it all worthwhile.
In fact, it's articles like this that make me wade through the oodles and oodles of whining about jobs, or the DMCA. Gems like this make it all worthwhile.
I'm not sure when slashdot decided to turn all political, but I really miss the technical stuff like this. Does anyone have any suggestions on slashdot alternatives?
Is this a review or a April Fools Joke? Reading Slashdot today, is like watching Fox "News".
my sig
Sympathy from one who shares growing pains.
Eterm is a better terminal, IMHO, but even *it* changed its argument processing between 0.8 and 0.9 (yep, there's that low-version-number open source thingy again).
I have a shell script that "randomizes" the background for each new Eterm I launch, and plays an equally "random" sound file at the same time. I had to change the script when tiling vs centering changed.
It's irritating, but come on, you don't actually type in that stuff from the command line, do you? I changed my shell script once, and it worked after that [um, except for the fact that I then had to upgrade all the Eterm software on my linux boxen, as the script was mirrored on them all! ;-]
And, of course, at the other end of the spectrum is Java and MS-DOS, which acts in a deprecating fashion and never drops any baggage, respectively...
Redundancy is good; triple redundancy is twice as good! - Me.
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.
Not meaning to sound like a troll but give me a little room for criticism here... (Keep in mind that I am a hardcore Linux user: RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Linux from Scratch... just to name a few distros I've used)
Selecting a network profile from the GRUB menu is OK, but it implies rebooting. Who wants to reboot just to change their network configuration? I know you don't NEED to reboot if you know what you are doing. But, if you are "Joe User" who just decided to try RH 9 because people are saying it rocks, you are probably going to be stuck either rebooting (if you have a friend who can set GRUB up to do this for you), or at worst you are just going to get frustrated with the fact that when you unplug your laptop from the network that the wireless NIC doesn't just fire up and work. This is exactly what "Joe User" will expect if he is coming from Windows XP land.
Say all you want about XP being a piece of crap (and I agree wholeheartedly), it's still got features that really need to make their way to a Linux distro or two. One of them being that the system is usually smart enough to figure out which route to take for network access when there is more than one interface. If no access is available, then it just indidcates that you are "offline".
I know this will get me modded down, but I had to point it out.
Un-news
Has anyone else reviewed the pricing model? Why does the Enterprise Workstation Edition cost $299? This seems kind of steep for an enterprise license... Or do most Slashdotters buy one copy (or download one copy) and copy it across the world?
Most enterprises go for a 1 to 1 -- one license for each desktop to ensure they have legal and proper support. Does that model not work for RH Enterprise Workstation Edition?
Does the upgrade path (upgrades of the stable product yearly, supported for only one year each) seem as bad as or worse than that supplied by MS? After all W2K has had a 3 year run and will have had 4 to 5 before support ends! A 1 year support window seems to:
1. Force upgrades
2. Force re-investments in technology and training on the vendors schedule -- not ours
We know and deal with that with MS but how does such a short (1 year) release cycle help the enterprise?
Wait, their are no ACL fle permissions in ext3???? And you call this an enterprise system? When we roll out desktops they are locked down -- the users have access to only what they need which includes rights down to the file system level. Am I missing something here or is this not already in NTFS????
Honest answers appreciated. If you only have the intelligence to flame please at least have the courtesy to write "flaim bait" as your subject.
Everytime a story comes out on Red Hat, we get the "Red Hat is the MS of Linux" posts and the "F@ck Red Hat, roll your own with Gentoo" and the "Debian Rules" posts.
First, I think Red Hat is far from the MS of Linux. I paid 60 bucks to be a part of RHN and I actually downloaded RH 8.0 without paying anything. Now, I will complain (as I did in a previous story) that it pisses me off that I pay that 60 bucks for "priority ISOs"and I am on my fifth try of downloading RH 9.0 disk 1, but that is a different issue.
It was my understanding that the "goal" of the open source community was to get a "desktop Linux" up and running to compete with MS. Gentoo and Debian are way too complicated for that... I can install Debian and Slackware with difficulty (never had success with Gentoo). But I am a "regular user" with just enough gumption and knowledge to be dangerous to myself when it comes to Linux installs. Frankly, that is why I like Red Hat. I have never had an install problem and I always have a working "desktop computer" to use.
Yeah, rolling your own kernel is great, I guess... I've never actually done it... I frankly don't have the time to sit down and figure it out. I count on solid, trouble free distros like Red Hat to get me a working Linux "desktop system" and then I'll compile Apache the way I want on my own (and I still have to do some planning to get it right). But, most desktop users are just fine and happy with the "easy install" of the system and the software they want (Apache, Open Office... whatever).
If the community ever wants to get Linux out of the background for desktop computing, more time has to be spent on easy installs from ALL distro providers and easy (basically meaning, no command line) configurations. Rolling your own kernel and command line configs will always be be there for the hardcore geeks.
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/projDios, porque será que no podemos ser felices con nuestras consolas, ahora es todo grafico ... definitivamente nada como un BSD, será feo pero uno sabe lo que esta haciendo.
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.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)