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.

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: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.

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.