Red Hat Linux 9 Release And Interview

Gentu writes "Red Hat Linux 9 has been released to the official mirrors, brace for impact! Additionally, OSNews features an interview with Red Hat Linux's manager, Matt Wilson and they discuss everything from mp3/dvd playback, to Randr, dependancy policies and more." Also on the Red Hat front, DdJ writes "So, I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit this morning, and checked the news to find out why. It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product. Both appear to be based on Java/Tomcat, which would mean it's not Zope-based or Zend-based. But, they're supposedly open source. Anyone have any further info on this stuff yet?" Update: 04/08 05:24 GMT by T : Don't forget that the new Red Hat release is available through BitTorrent, too.

Comments

Idiot's guide to NPTL

[Enry]

Can someone speaking relatively technical* explain what is so cool about NPTL?

*as in, I'm not a coder, but am an experienced sys admin.

Re:Idiot's guide to NPTL

[Zapman]

The Native Posix Threading Lib (IIRC) is something Ingo cooked up in addition to the O(1) scheduler, and a few other goodies. Previously, posix threads could only have a couple hundred threads going concurently on ANY hardware. It just couldn't scale past that.

With NPTL, Ingo on a dual proc box (granted, a nice one) was able to get 16,000 concurent threads going, and the IO system wasn't suffocated, the CPU's wern't useless, and you could still browse the web.

Granted, these threads wern't doing much, but they were alive, and switching in and out of context.

This means the foundation can scale to effectivly any size, and so long as the hardware can keep up, you'll be fine. You can now unleash your massivly multithreaded java apps (and what not. That's just the easiest example).

This doesn't help you if you need more than 4-8 CPU's on an intel platform, but it gets you a lot closer. If you want something that can parallelize that far, you really need something like Sun's e12k or e15k. IIRC, the DoD commissioned an e15k farm with a total of 4096 CPU's to model the first few nanoseconds of nuclear explosions. It had to be a single system image for various reasons, so don't go crying beowulf.

using RSYNC to get ISO files

[stonebeat.org]

I am faithful RedHat Network subscriber. However last week I had lots of trouble downloading the ISO files. I think RedHat should allowing RSYNing to d/l ISO images. CURL and WGET are not good as RSYNC.

Dependencies.

[BHearsum]

The article states that "if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have dependency problems".

I don't see how any guidelines would change the fact that the non-RH RPMs are based on older libraries, (or newer, as the case may be). That is by far the biggest problem.

Example:
I wanted Eterm on my RH8.0 install, couldn't find any RH packages for it, so I tried a generic one. It depended on some Perl modules, no big deal. I grab those -- one module depended on an old version of Perl (it would only accept that version).

The only solution to this is for the RH packages maintainers to make RPMs for _everything_, which of course isn't possible. But that's part of the reason Debian has less of a problem with that, sid has about 8500 packages last time I checked, a LOT more than any version of RH.

Which brings us to another problem. All the RPM distros I've seen have big version differences in all their 'releases'. Which makes it hard for developers to release packages for the distro. They need one for 7.x, 8.x, etc.

Re:NPTL and 2.4 kernel confusion

[Wiz]

It is a bit confusing.

As I understand it, NPTL is part of glibc 2.3.x and has nothing really to do with the kernel. The other part of increasing the speed of Linux threads is the O(1) scheduler in the 2.5.x kernel. In a real world, you'll need both but either one will help the situation.

With both, Linux should scale very well as long as the hardware is up to it.

I like RH putting NPTL threads, hopefully it'll force people to get good threading code in so when we get the new scheduler we can run MT apps like there is no tomorrow.

Impact of RedHat 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the marketshare of RedHat, it would be interesting to see the impact version 9 has on the adoption of newer versions various applications and tools. For example:

XFree 4.3
Gnome 2.2 & KDE 3.1
Mozilla 1.2.1--yea, 1.3 is out but many use 1.0
Subversion 0.17.1--never included before!
Perl 5.8--so many folks STILL using 5.6.1, why???
Apache 2--much better but 1.3 is not budging, yet
and more...

Re:I'm running it

[Arethan]

actually, i have a reason for you.
Prism2 support.
I have a DWL-650 (2nd gen), based on the prism2. I had used wlan-ng in redhat 7.2(or was it 3?), but gave up on wlan-ng as it was pretty lame on the configuration side, and too much of a bitch to implement. (Kernel recompiles necessary, ripping out all the original pcmcia support and replacing it, etc) However, RedHat 9 supports my dwl-650 right out of the box... er... bitorrent acquired iso burned to cheap cdr media... ;)

So there you go. Good reason right there. I used to have to run XP to use my wireless card, now I don't. Yay for me.

Oh, and gnome 2.2 is actually cleaner than 2.0. Expecially the fact that meta themes are now officially implemented, and the new menu system isn't as freaky as that funk ass "Extras" submenu.

As usual, your mileage may vary, but all in all I'm quite happy with RH9. If I wasn't dirt ass broke, I'd probably go out and buy it just to have real media.

Mirror (Europe)

[Yenya]

My mirror still have lots of free bandwidth (and is accessible also by IPv6).

This is probably the first release of RedHat Linux, which generates on my mirror less traffic, than a corresponding release of Mandrake Linux.

Apparently copying Red Hat CD is illegal...

[Anonymous Coward]

When Red Hat Linux 9 ISO files showed up on BitTorrent, I thought there might be some folks out there with dialup connections that may want it but could not get them due to bandwidth and time. So I decided to sell them on eBay. In case you didn't know the CD's are GPL so I'm not breaking any laws there. It was pretty clear from the description that CD's I'm selling were burned copies and that they weren't the original boxed Red Hat you get at the store shelf. Anyway, immediately I got an email from Red Hat accusing me of trademark infringement and told me to stop selling them. With some grumbling, I immediately stopped selling them but the story doesn't end there. They also got eBay to take all the past closed auctions off the system and emailed everyone who bought the CD's that they just have purchased "Unauthorized Copy" meaning pirated, bootleg illegal copies. I had bunch of law abiding citizens who were confused and afraid that they might get into trouble for buying those CD's. Let just say that I've spent hours explaining that not only copying GPL'd software was perfectly legal, it was encouraged. Despite my best efforts I'm not sure if I was able to undo the damage the Red Hat has done.

I think it's perfectly within the company's rights to protect their trademark and their good name. I also think it's also perfectly fine for company to try to protect their bottom line. However when that effort comes at the cost of doing harm to the community which brought the company into existance, I have some problem with that.

As a redhat shareholder

[dr_canak]

I can tell you that: "I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit" is meaningless in terms of attributing it to "Redhat in the News." Redhat stock goes up and down like a rubber ball in a game of jacks. For every shift in price that seems attributable to some news, there are 20 days a month where it shifts based on the vagaries of the market. Be careful of attributing changes in price reflecting news about a company with a low priced stock like this. Its all over the map and wil be for some time I'm afraid. just my .02 jeff

great release

[brsmith4]

I have been playing with some of the new features in redhat 9, one of those features being that CD burning deal built into nautilus. That is a really cool feature, drop-n-drag files and click burn. I also like the additional eye-candy with the custom mouse cursors. They have greatly improved the menu system so you don't have that gay extras menu anymore. The greatest added feature of all is the increase in performance. On both of my dells, performance has increased at least 4 fold with regards to the UI. A suggestion to you all who bitch about dependency hell: download apt-rpm for RedHat 9. Its at http://shrike.freshrpms.net. Then, apt get update && apt-get install synaptic. Synaptic is a bad ass front end for n00bs who want a nice point-n-click gui for apt. Once installed, you can quit bitching about your mp3 support and lack of a dvd player since all those packages are located on the freshrpm's apt repository.

Re:great release

[Anonymous Coward]

"Synaptic is a bad ass front end for n00bs who want a nice point-n-click gui for apt. "

I just wanted to point out the vast majority of the world's computer users prefer point-n-click, myself a longtime linux user included.

Ease of use isn't for noobs, its for everyone. Until operating computers is as easy as making toast, computers won't be truly easy to use. Any step in that direction be it a gui for apt-get, X resolution changing, or kernel compiling is not only welcome, its the right thing to do.

The sooner people stop thinking those who want ease of use are noobs the better. We are afterall the normal ones. Its the people who want to spend time learning every detail about their computers and not actually using them that are the freaks. :-)

my humble point of view on RH vs Debian

[aeoo]

I've been a long time mostly happy Debian user.

However I just made a decision to move to RH9 for my workstation, while leaving my server on Debian stable.

I tried upgrading to Debian sid, and I had all kinds of hassles and problems. I had to recompile my kernel many times to get the latest ALSA and NVIDIA drivers to work. And then, Gnome for some strange reason ran painfully slow, like it would take visibly long time to open a nautilus window. And in general I thought it was a bit too flaky for my taste. Somehow I believe it's possible to get all the latest stable versions and still have a stable distro! But Debian sid isn't it for me.

And then I hear RH has apt now too?!! Ok, I just had to give it a try. I now have a functioning RH9. What do I think? Let's see: flawless and brainless NVIDIA driver installation -- check; very, very nice bluecurve theme (man I love it, and I wish other distros would adopt it!) -- check; very smooth, stable, and *fast* Gnome desktop -- check; used apt-get from freshrpms.net to get ALSA and some other extra packages -- it's not as nice as Debian (i got some flaky complains about some missing signatures and such) -- check.

So far I had few problems: biggest annoyance is that RPM hung solid a few times. Namely it hangs in a way that I can't even use control-\ to kill it! I can kill -9 it, but then I have to *reboot* to get it unstuck. When i strace it, I notice that the last command it runs when it hangs is "futex". Anyway, it's definitely embarassing for Red Hat to have a flaw like that, but it happens rarely enough that I can overlook it.

Overall I am very pleased with RH9 and I plan to use it for a while. I'm also an official RHN subscriber too! Good work Red Hat!

Correct, Redhat CMS = ACS/Java

[aquarian]

ArsDigita never made "Open"ACS. ArsDigita created ACS as an open source toolkit supporting the Oracle database. The OpenACS project came about when ArsDigita decided to make their Java project which is what has become Redhat CCM.

This is true. In fact, ArsDigita's new VC-installed managers decided the original ACS, written in TCL, wasn't buzzword-compliant enough, so they had the whole thing rewritten in Java. But in fact the Java version was never really finished when ArsDigita went under.

Red Hat purchased all of ArsDigita's assets and this project belongs entirely to them now.

Yeah, right. More like Redhat, out of the goodness of their hearts, gave jobs to a few ArsDigita programmers, and allowed them to continue working on ACS/Java, now called CCM. This also let ArsDigita's management save face, by allowing them to say they "sold the remaining assets" to Redhat. In fact, there was nothing left. ArsDigita had been run completely into the ground.

CCM did/does have promise. Its development has continued, albeit slowly, by both Redhat and some third party developers. I believe it's also open source, as is the Postgres variant it works with. One implementation that's been around awhile is the Aplaws project, a portal/intranet app for governments and municipalities in the UK.

Version 10 on 10th Anniversary of Halloween Releas

[bitfoam]

That's why I think they're skipping 8.x and on to 9.. at this rate they can unveil RedHat 10 on Oct 31, the 10th anniversary of the "Halloween" release, the first RedHat distro.

Brace for marketing impact...