New Red Hat Linux Beta: Severn

JofCoRe writes "Just got a message from the redhat watch list today, announcing the availability of a new beta, called "Severn". Some snippets from the announcement: What's its development status? "It doesn't seem too horrendously in flux. Difficult at this moment to make a specific diagnosis." Among other things, SEVERN has: a new graphical boot, GCC 3.3, an updated 2.4.21 kernel, updated Evolution and Mozilla, More information about the beta can be found at rhl.redhat.com. And the Release notes are found here. Looks like they have it currently labeled as v9.0.93." Update: 07/21 15:11 GMT by H : It's 3.2.3 GCC, not 3.3, as I had above.

Comments

Torrent file?

[jsvesnik]

Where's the torrent file?

Re:Torrent file?

[JofCoRe]

that's actually what I'm waiting for too :) I haven't been able to pull it down yet... but hoping that somebody will get a torrent up soon and then I can...

Re:Torrent file?

[brent_linux]

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

Just the Binary ISOs

Re:Torrent file?

[JofCoRe]

thanx to an AC a few posts down:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

And more specifically:

severn-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc3.iso.torrent

orAll severn Binary isos in one torrent directory

Theres torrent linx to the SRPMS there too.
Thanx AC!

Re:Torrent file?

[Mr_Icon]

That was Seth Vidal who is too lazy to get a /. account. :)

Seven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't RedHat 7 get released already? I am so confused.

Re:Seven?

[hafree]

It's been at least a month since Redhat 9 was released, shouldn't we be on release 13 or so by now? Of course that would mean that Redhat officially stopped supporting anything prior to 11 or 12 by now...

but but but..

[Anonymous Coward]

(heard all over Munich) "Ver ist Klippy?!"

Re:but but but..

[Havokmon]

(heard all over Munich) "Ver ist Klippy?!"

(shakes head) Even I got this right without looking.

"VO ist Klippy?!"

Bablefish ist ihr freund.

Re:but but but..

[uwmurray]

Actually, you didn't get this right.
It is 'Wo is Klippy?!' 'w' not a 'v'. Babelfish ist kein Freund.

Re:but but but..

[alistair]

or perhaps "Was ist Red Hat?" since us good Europeans selected SuSE rather than Red Hat in this instance.

Re:but but but..

[Havokmon]

Actually, you didn't get this right.
It is 'Wo is Klippy?!' 'w' not a 'v'. Babelfish ist kein Freund.

Dah you're right, and I didn't even notice when I checked Babelfish.

My grandmother would be so disappointed ;)

Re:but but but..

[Ed Avis]

But '_Who_ is Clippy?' is a much more interesting question.

Anyway, Klippy would presumably be the cease-n-desist-prone 'Assistant' in some future version of KDE...

(As others said, it's 'wer' not 'ver'. I think.)

Re:but but but..

[owenb]

Don't you mean 'Babelfish ist dein Freund.' or 'Babelfish ist Ihr Freund.'?

'Babelfish ist kein Freund.' means the opposite - it's not a friend.

Re:but but but..

[hcat]

wrong again... it's 'Wo ist Klippy?!'

Re:but but but..

[jonadab]

Klippy ist en das vigor rpm. HTH.HAND.

Version numbering

[erlando]

With RedHat's latest sprint version wise (7.3->8.0->9.0) it's probably a safe bet to say that this release is going to be RedHat 10.0. Or maybe "RedHat X"? Roman numerals are popular this time of year.. ;o)

Re:Version numbering

[Erwos]

It's just 9 now, not 9.0. So, really, "version sprinting" is only cosmetic, unless you consider i++ a huge jump. I don't.

-Erwos

Re:Version numbering

[setzman]

That would be better than RedHat XP...

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

Yes. A new kernel version is a definite good reason for a whole version increment. But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign. True, they were probably expecting the new kernel to be ready for 10, or, I rather hope, 10.0, but it seems like a statement of "We won't have any intermediate bug fix releases", and that bothers me.

OTOH, a lot is going to depend on what their new release style is. Assuming that everyone has a broadband connection and doesn't pay for bits downloaded is... optomistic at best. Perhaps they aren't interested in anyone else as a customer (if you can't pay for a broadband connection, you're unlikely to buy an Enterprise Edition), but they might consider that developers are also an important market for them. Not so much as a source of cash, but as a source of skills that make their product useful to enterprises. And many of them *don't* have broadband connections.

Well, there's Mandrake and CheapBytes, but Mandrake is diverging more and more from the Red Hat model (nothing deep, but the tools are different, some of the directories are different, etc.) OK. There's CheapBytes. But CheapBytes (etc.) has no particular brand loyalty to Red Hat. They will sell you whatever the hot distro is. And Red Hat has explicitly told them "Don't use our name." That's fair, but it cuts down on the advertising exposure.

Altogether, I think that they still need to make boxed sets. And that if they don't then they'll regret it. But this isn't the same thing as paying stores to carry it on their shelves. That's probably something of dubious value. Perhaps they should set up a JIT manual printing, disk burning and boxing shop. And only make as many as they have orders for. They'll need to ensure that what comes out is good quality, but there wouldn't be any excess (or not much). There's a company that was trying to get a JIT book printer into bookstores (distribution of the right to copy was a problem), so they might be glad for a sale. And CD burners aren't that hard to come by, especially if your forcast is that you won't need thousands of copies.

Re:Version numbering

[kasperd]

A new kernel version is a definite good reason for a whole version increment.

Had they used kernel version 2.6.0-test1, I would have agreed with you. But going from 2.4.20 to 2.4.21 really isn't that big a step. Consider that there are more differences between the kernel which came with the distribution and what you will soon be running if you just keep up with the security updates. For example RH7.1 when released was using kernel version 2.4.2-2, if you have installed the security updates, you will now be running kernel version 2.4.20-19.7.

Re:Version numbering

[GauteL]

That is not safe bet to say at all.

Red Hat 9 was actually a release that broke some backwards compatibility, mainly due to the new kernel threads.

It might just be that this next release is Red Hat 9.1.

Re:Version numbering

[Zathrus]

But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign.

So when they released "Redhat 7" did you consider it a bad sign then as well? There was no 7.0 -- there was 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. Any reference to "7.0" was either not following the official Redhat naming scheme or was changed after 7.1 was released.

As has been stated many times before (to no apparent effect... but this is /., so why am I surprised?), Redhat increments major version numbers only when there is binary incompatibility. Right now there's no reason not to make this 9.1. If they integrate the 2.6 kernel later on in beta, however, then this will probably need to become Redhat 10.

Re:Version numbering

[Wesley Felter]

If you look at the Web page, Red Hat Linux X (Cambridge) will not include 2.6. The first version with 2.6 is Cambridge++.

Re:Version numbering

[weave]

Wonderful, which means RHCE certs are near worthless because they are only "current' for two major releases. I got my RHCE for RH 8.0 this April (they switched to RH 9 the very next release).

I'm certainly not going to shell out $750 every year to keep my RHCE current. Bastards...

Besides, the RHCE thing makes no sense. If RH 9 is consumer only, why do they do RHCE certifications for the consumer version and not the advanced server products?

Re:Version numbering

[stefanlasiewski]

Or maybe "RedHat X"?

It's clear that RedHat's new release strategy is designed to confuse as many new users as possible. Therefore, I bet the new RedHat release mix numbering systems and will be

RedHat X.0 (Ecks dot zero)

Re:Version numbering

[AlanS2002]

As has been stated many times before (to no apparent effect... but this is /., so why am I surprised?), Redhat increments major version numbers only when there is binary incompatibility. Right now there's no reason not to make this 9.1. If they integrate the 2.6 kernel later on in beta, however, then this will probably need to become Redhat 10.

I think this will be version 10 or X (or some permutation there of) regardless of the kernel version (or any other changes, binary compatiblity or otherwise). I've read press releases and interviews from Red Hat people that pretty much state that the consumer releases from now on will be test beds for the enterprise releases. Hense the jump from 8 to 9 and as far as I can tell the likely jump from 9 to 10 (or whatever versioning system).

Re:Version numbering

[buchanmilne]

but Mandrake is diverging more and more from the Red Hat model

You say that like it's a bad thing to have decent package management software (urpmi[e,i,q,f] and rpmdrake), multiple 3rd-party software "media" available (plf.zarb.org, jpackage.org), a sane library naming convention (so you can happily have two versions of the same library installed), solid community involvement (yes, some contributors who know their stuff maintain packages in the main distribution), and an open development process (the cooker distribution itself, the mailing lists, cvs, wiki).

Actually, with their recent announcement, it seems more like RH is converging on the Mandrake model ...

Re:Version numbering

[L.J. Hanson]

RHCE is tied to Red Hat Advanced Server not the desktop release. This was worked out when 9.0 came out.

L.J. Hanson

Re:Version numbering

[jasonbowen]

Can you back up your ideas with information from Redhats quarterly reports? Redhat is being very vocal about making good money from the Enterprise line.

Re:Version numbering

[Crispy Critters]

"A new kernel version is a definite good reason for a whole version increment. But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign."

It may not be that complicated. How big is the difference between a Redhat 7.1 with all the updates and Redhat 7.3 with all the updates? Not very much. But it must be expensive to support so many versions concurrently. I bet they will still sell CDs. They would be insane to assume every home user will download the isos. OTOH it is not so far out to let people download all the updates and dispense with x.0, x.1, x.2... Or even offer a CD of all the updates for $3, new one every month, for those who don't want to download.

Re:Version numbering

[Anixamander]

With RedHat's latest sprint version wise (7.3->8.0->9.0) it's probably a safe bet to say that this release is going to be RedHat 10.0. Or maybe "RedHat X"?

If it is version 10 it will almost surely be called RedHat X, as RedHat 10 would be read by all the ubergeeks as "RedHat 2". This of course also explains why Apple uses the Roman numeral, because if they didn't OS 10 would be read as OS 2, causing IBM, and by extension SCO, to sue them.

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

I didn't buy version 7. I was probably looking at other distributions then. I did end up buying 7.3 (or possibly it was 7.2).

Yes, I probably would have considered it a bad sign. I would have been wrong. And it's sounding like I was wrong this time. (I think the link was http://rhl.redhat.com .) But they left it hanging for quite awhile this time without comment (actually with unsettling comments, but I can't pull them up), so if they'd felt the concern then they could have answered it.

One clear statement is that for every full release there will be iso's released. And that sometimes, at least, there will be boxed sets available for purchase, just not via the retail channel. (That's probably quite reasonable. I've never bought a copy of Red Hat that way, and I could have.) I do hope, however, that they, at least almost always, make boxed sets available for purchase from their web site.

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

Actually, I say this like it's a bad thing from Red Hat's point of view if they are depending on familiarity with Mandrake to translate into use of Red Hat. And I feel that it is.

This doesn't mean that it's a bad thing for either Linux or Mandrake. It's probably a very good thing for Mandrake.

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

According to the roadmap below http://rhl.redhat.com, they are planning a release with the 2.6 kernel this October. Or sooner. (They're calling that version Cambridge [or possibly Cambridge++].) Whether this is the same version as the current beta...

If it isn't, they've really upped their rev. cycle.

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

As of today (monday), there has been an announcement that they will be releasing iso's of all releases, and that for some of them they will also be selling boxed sets. Just not throught the retail distribution channel.

To me the difference between a 7 (or 7.0) and a 7.1 (etc.) is that the x.0 series always contained large changes that affected the way the base system operated. And could be expected to be a bit unstable, but probably a lot better in some ways. But the bugs that inevitably crept in would be exorcised during the upgrades to the higher point releases. So if I were installing on a system of someone who was frighted by error messages, I would specifically avoid the x.0 releases. (And, also, so I was more interested in the features of the x.0 releases.)

If there aren't any recognizable stabilizing releases anymore, then I'll need to drastically slow down my rate of installations. (I don't have that many spare systems to run as test systems.) It's not like these are people who could EVER justify running the Enterprise Edition. These are replacements for Win95 systems.

Re:Version numbering

[kasperd]

planning a release with the 2.6 kernel this October.

I found this page. Doesn't mention a date for the 2.6 kernel though.

Re:Version numbering

[Crispy Critters]

"To me the difference between a 7 (or 7.0) and a 7.1 (etc.) is that the x.0 series always contained large changes that affected the way the base system operated. And could be expected to be a bit unstable. But the bugs that inevitably crept in would be exorcised during the upgrades to the higher point releases."

That is a very good point. I was looking forward to RH 8.1 for that very reason. Maybe this is part of the problem: too many people avoiding x.0 releases because of the perception (true or not) that they aren't quite finished yet. They will need to imply somehow that these releases are better than the old x.0 releases (and I hope it is true).

Re:Version numbering

[jroysdon]

If you look at the directory structure, there is a clear difference between all previous versions before "9". All others did include a ".0" version even if marketing didn't hype dot-oh (most companies don't like to talk about the dot-oh part of a new release):

http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/

Re:Version numbering

[packetgeek]

From the RHLP schedule page:

Cambridge

* July 21 2003 - Beta 1 release
* August 8 2003 - Stop Ship Mode starts (only StopShip bug fixes after this point)
* August 18 2003 - Beta 2 release
* September 15 2003 - Beta 3 release
* October 6 2003 - General Availability

Cambridge++
No dates set yet, but a driving goal or defining characteristic will be the 2.6 Linux kernel -- unless the 2.6 Linux kernel takes too long to arrive. That is, we'll shorten the schedule to accomodate an earlier release of the 2.6 kernel, but not lengthen it to accomodate a later release of the 2.6 kernel.

----- end of copy ------

Here they are calling it Cambridge rather than Severn (even at the beta stage of the schedule), but I guess moving to the 2.6 kernel would justify incrementing the major version number :-)

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

That's the link. They aren't saying when the 2.6 kernel will be out, because they aren't doing that. (They do say that if the 2.6 kernel comes out early, then so will they.)

Re:Version numbering

[salimma]

Altogether, I think that they still need to make boxed sets. And that if they don't then they'll regret it. But this isn't the same thing as paying stores to carry it on their shelves.

Exactly - and according to their FAQ, that is exactly what is planned:

Q: How will the Red Hat Linux project be made available to the public?

A:Red Hat Linux releases will be available as ISO images for both CDs and DVDs, and will also be available through other channels such as online sales of physical media; distribution at Linux User Groups, included in magazines and in books, and maybe even handed out at trade shows. The bits may be actively pushed into content sharing networks such as BitTorrent. (Not all mechanisms will be used for each release, except that ISOs will be freely available for each release.)

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

I didn't avoid them for my systems, but rather for those of other people that I knew to be problem averse. If I can't use the system for the other people, then I need to put my time in getting familiar with a system that I *will* be able to use.

And that looses Red Hat a (tiny) bit of support. But I was one of the early voices at work, and I suggested Red Hat, and we eventually went with Red Hat. If I'd pushed another distribution, I can't say with certainty that we would have gone that way. But we might have. Everyone was talking about how stable Debian was, and how easy it was to manage, so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that I would promote Red Hat for the server.

Now extrapolate into the future. Others will be in the same position that I have been in. How will they choose? (Right now I have LibraNet [==Debian] installed on my personal desktop. It was as easy to install as Red Hat, and has given me no more problems than the Red Hat systems that I also use. And it's cheaper to upgrade. Why *wouldn't* I reccommend it?) And Debian has a stable branch AND a testing branch (as well as an unstable branch), so each system can be configured to that system's degree of instability tolerance.

But if, as is possible, Red Hat is moving towards a system where it only makes BOXED SETS of the stable releases, and sells/makes available CDs & ISOs of the development releases then it could accomplish the same function as their earlier naming convention. It's not clear that that's what they're doing....but it could be. It sounds like Cambridge, or Cambridge++, is intended to be the first release of a RH distribution with a 2.6 kernel. And that it *won't* be a boxed set. But that some releases will be boxed sets.

OK. The boxed sets would, under this projection, be the stable releases, the x.1..n releases. And for the x.0 releases there wouldn't be a boxed set. This would tend to keep them (relatively) isolated from new users, who would be less able to deal with problems.

But it's a guess. They aren't really saying. And the uncertainty makes it difficult to plan on them.

Re:Version numbering

[juhaz]

Up2date is decent enough for RH errata (their servers are sometimes quite laggy but that's not the softwares fault...)

And there are plenty of good 3rd party software available (Fedora, Freshrpms, Matthew Hall's rpms, etc...), sure you can't use up2date with these, but if you're going to install 3rd party software, then one more software (apt-rpm or yum) doesn't matter anyway.

Re:Version numbering

[kasperd]

Why wait for 2.6.0 when 2.6.0-test1 is ready for testing?

Versions

[avalys]

What happened to their versioning system? I thought they were moving towards purely integer-based releases. Shouldn't this be RedHat 10 Beta?

Re:Versions

[IamTheRealMike]

No, the reason for the jump from 8.0 -> 9 was due to the introduction of NPTL.

For all I know, it may go from 9 to 10, because of the big changes in project direction - see here. But, when the major number changes, it's due to a major change, that much is certain.

Re:Versions

[mahdi13]

The RH9 beta was also called 8.0.93 as this is 9.0.93

Standard release practice, we won't know if it's a 9.1 or 10 until they release it =)
Also they went RH8 to RH9 with no point release because there binary breakage in the packages (major system changes) which made lots of RH8 packages incompatable with the latest release

Re:Versions

[deanpole]

The next Red Hat will be "X" in October. Look for books

It is a damn confusing name. Eleven wouldn't be much better, so I say skip to twelve.

Re:Versions

[Crispy Critters]

"we won't know if it's a 9.1 or 10 until they release it =)"

Or, heaven help us, Redhat X.

Re:Versions

[cpeterso]

There are already indications that the next version will be called "Red Hat Linux X". Red Hat is copy-catting Mac OS X. Amazon and B&N's web sites already have pre-release book pages for "Red Hat® Linux® "X" For Dummies" .

"...updated Evolution..."

[jvmatthe]

I didn't see anything in the notes about this (sorry if I missed it) but is this a GTK2 version? This is the last GTK1 app that I'm still using, and I'd love to upgrade if a GTK2 version is included in this install.

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[Bernie]

Yes, it's GTK2--ironically Gimp is one of the last GTK1 users!

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[hey]

Nice in-the-know use of "ironically".

But maybe not since the first version of GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit) had everything that Gimp needed. Why would they bother upgrading. Just guessing.

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[chabotc]

Bad gues, gimp is migrating to gtk2 but is currently still in beta. The latest version (1.3.16) which uses gtk2 can be found here: http://www.gimp.org/devel_ver.html

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[checkyoulater]

Yes, it's GTK2--ironically Gimp is one of the last GTK1 users!

I don't think so. I installed a GTK2 version of Gimp on Gentoo last week. I know this for a fact because I do not have GTK1 installed. I'm pretty sure it is beta, but still GTK2. Called the politically incorrect version, according to the splash screen.

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[Ender Ryan]

The development version of The GIMP uses GTK2, and to good effect to. Some versions are more stable than others, and overall I've had good luck with the GTK2 development version of The GIMP.

YMMV.

Re:"...updated Evolution..."

[jvmatthe]

Latest official update for Evolution from Red Hat (for RH9) is evolution-1.2.2-5 dated 20 March 2003. There is a RawHide version, but that doesn't translate into "releasing Evolution 1.4 for RH9". Thanks for playing, AC.

No Galeon?

[Erwos]

I see that they removed Galeon. How does Epiphany stack up to it right now?

I also like the option of a graphical boot... soothes the nerves of less-knowledgable people who will wonder why X, Y, or Z service is coming up.

Hopefully they'll add some more graphical configuration stuff for the system. I've always liked their style with it.

-Erwos

Re:No Galeon?

[Xpilot]

I also like the option of a graphical boot... soothes the nerves of less-knowledgable people who will wonder why X, Y, or Z service is coming up.

I've never understood why this is so. Even back in the day when I was a clueless newbie, I found those messages to be really cool. It was like the computer was doing...cool computery things, just like in the movies.

Re:No Galeon?

[baywulf]

Yes but in the movies they do cool computery things except with lots of flashy graphics around it.

Re:No Galeon?

[tomstdenis]

Funny or not, same thing here.

Also keep in mind that things like VESA were still new and shiny when Linux first came about. So at best you would have a 640x480x16color bootup instead of text messages.

Might as well have them. What I find lacking are the joke messages with useless twirling /-\| thingies...

like

pruning IP lateral sensors.......done
establishing networking matrix...../ :-)

Just to throw people off. Plus it would be funny to see how many "IT experts" that "read about many things" will go about talking about it. "Yeah, well my Duron 4Ghz can establish the network matrix faster than your 200Mhz ARM box... hahaha!"

Tom

Re:No Galeon?

[lokedhs]

Last I tried Ephipany is lacked the ability to disable popups. Needless to say, it lasted about 5 minutes on my system.

If you, like me, forgot just how painful popups are, make sure Ephipany has implemented the popup blocking before trying it. I still have nightmares after this experience.

Re:No Galeon?

[leifm]

In my limited experience with RH9 they had covered most of the bases as far as GUI config stuff goes, but those frontends could definately be more intuitive and less prone to crashing. I'd actually rather see the current GUI config things mature a bit rather than adding more new ones.

Re:No Galeon?

[geomon]

Yes but in the movies they do cool computery things except with lots of flashy graphics around it.

AND they get great looking people to operate the machines.

/homer mode on

Mmmmmm...Carrie Ann Moss (drools)

/homer mode off

Re:No Galeon?

[Xpilot]

Yes but in the movies they do cool computery things except with lots of flashy graphics around it.

Perhaps, but most of the time it's just some pseudo-technical looking text scrolling past in some fancy graphical font (see The Matrix).

When Windows '95 came out, some of the trade publications were drooling over the fact that the computer no longer booted up into "scary DOS messages", instead displaying therapeutic pictures of clouds. Bleh. At that point I decided Windows was ghey, and started to appreciate the nice technical-looking Linux.

Re:No Galeon?

[chabotc]

I think you put your finger right on the problem.. For people who are not intimidated it's 'cool' but for many others not understanding it is confusing and/or intimidating; They don't understand computers and prob. don't want to..

The graphical representation of the bootup info makes the user 'understand' more and makes it less intimidating.. Much like a GUI makes a computer easier to use then text mode programs ;-)

Re:No Galeon?

[kenthorvath]

Last I tried Ephipany is lacked the ability to disable popups.

According to this screen shot taken from the website, it does - at least in version 0.80.

Re:No Galeon?

[4of12]

it is confusing and/or intimidating;

So computers are going the way of automobiles.

In the old days, you'd have an oil pressure gauge and an oil temperature gauge and you'd be able to tell pretty quick not only if something was wrong, but have a good idea of exactly what was wrong. And you'd be able to fix it yourself.

But scary technical looking gauges on automobiles have gone away. Now, you'll get complicated behind-the-scenes Boolean evaluation from multiple sensors feeding into a microprocessor that results in a "Check Engine" light, which will mean that you'll take it into a specialist for precise diagnosis and repair. You probably won't repair it yourself.

The analogy continues.

My old Honda had a Check Engine light that would flip on going down steep hills for extended times (sounds suspiciously like the sensor was in the back of the oilpan, eh?) but would reset if I turned the car off and restarted it. And guess what most people do to their Windows computers start displaying "Check Engine" lights? You got it - power cycle!]

I'm one of the people that likes the more detailed diagnostics, even if they give a scary impression of a high performance race car about to explode to the casual user (My God - look at those packet collisions!)

Let distro makers hide those messages behind clouds or penguins, but make it real easy to see those diagnostics and you'll get a lot more backyard mechanics improving the vehicle.

As a piece of advice for distro makers that hide behind soothing graphical "Check Engine" lights: make sure your system readily handles sudden, abrupt power cycling at any time, but especially after encountering other problems.

Re:No Galeon?

[owenb]

pruning IP lateral sensors.......done
establishing networking matrix...../ :-)

Reticulating splines?

Re:No Galeon?

[archen]

displaying therapeutic pictures of clouds

As much as 95 needed to be (re)booted people could use as much therapy as they could get.

Re:No Galeon?

[Crispy Critters]

"So computers are going the way of automobiles."

Here's the part I don't understand: This happened a long time ago, in the 80's for macs and in the 90's for windows. It's one of the main reasons some of us switched to Linux in the first place! To know what's going on and to be able to fix it.

Every time you add another layer of abstraction, you add the possibility that some wacky confusing problem is in the new layer, in its interpretation of what is happening at the lower levels. (Kind of like a program reporting "file not found" if it fails to open a file for writing because the file exists but the user lacks write permission.) If these things get bad, then you lose the ability to fix things and you get to the stage where repairs consist of wipe the system and reinstall from scratch.

Why is this? Because companies like Redhat and Ximian want to make money off of Linux by using it to replace windows (not saying that's bad, just true). For people who don't want a windows-like environment, these changes are heading in the wrong direction. (please don't tell me I have to switch to debian :-).

Re:No Galeon?

[archen]

I think you're close but not totally on the mark. Evil looking command prompt messages (that I like) should definatly be optional (probably off by default as well) but there needs to be some sort of feedback. The worst thing I can say about the first couple cars I drove was the lack of status. All I had was "idiot lights". You know, the light comes on saying "Hey dude, you're out of oil" right around the time your engine screaches to a halt. The car I have now (an integra) has simple status gages. I couldn't tell you what the oil temp is, but I can tell you if it's really weird that the car is running hot (Honda's tend to be pretty solid temperature wise).

One of the worst things that can happen to computing started with Windows 95. A dumb ass screen where you have an animation at the bottom to tell you if your computer is frozen. That tells you nothing! Apple got it right with a friendly looking status screen coupled with some messages that say what's going on. A person may not know what sendmail is, but if it stops there you have something to go on.

Re:No Galeon?

[Issue9mm]

Just as an aside, and completely off the mark, most cars today allow you to read the check engine lights without any expensive diagnostic machines.

I recently had some problems with my Dodge Caravan, for example, and it sat in my driveway for a week before I had the opportunity to do anything with it. A friend of mine and I then checked the trouble codes as per the instruction manual. To check them, I just to turn the ignition to "On", then "Off" 5 times quickly. This then "blinked" the check engine light a number of times, and I was able to match the blinks up with a list of trouble codes.

As it happens, it reported a bad camshaft position sensor. Well, as I replaced that, it turned out to be a broken timing belt (I suppose if the camshaft isn't turning, the sensor would show bad), but the point is that those diagnostics are there a lot of the time, you just have to know where they're at.

Hopefully redhat keeps them intact as well.

-9mm-

Re:No Galeon?

[42forty-two42]

(please don't tell me I have to switch to debian :-).

You don't.

Re:No Galeon?

[NateTech]

They probably also don't need a computer for whatever it is that they're doing. Pencil, paper, and a filing cabinet are probably faster for these people.

Let them be intimidated. Who cares?

For those willing to put in a minimal amount of effort and learn how to use the machine (key word... machine...) they'll reap the benefits if there are any to be had in their particular endeavour.

For those willing to learn, let them pay those willing to teach an appropriate wage also.

And for those of us who just get things done with our computers, let's stop worrying about if Aunt Tillie likes the bloody thing. It's a box with a display, a keyboard, some storage devices, and some wires to her, and that's all it needs to be.

Re:No Galeon?

[chgros]

DOS-based (this was three years ago)
Even 3 years ago, DOS was largely outdated

Just so I know...

[JZ_Tonka]

Is RedHat Evil(tm) or Good(tm)?

I know Micro$oft is Evil, and Gentoo is Good, and *BSD is good (even if it IS dying), and, but what's the official alignment of RedHat?

Re:Just so I know...

[Dachannien]

Lawful neutral? ;)

Re:Just so I know...

[49152]

Then I suppose SCO is Chaotic Evil?

How dare you steal from Redhat!

[SHEENmaster]

They offer you there software for free, but that's just not good enough for you. The only thing that keeps them going is the knowledge that each new release with cause /. to rape their connections and that of there mirrors. You would take that satisfaction away from them!?

I wonder if a checksummed p2p system like bittorrent will ever be merged with apt.

Re:How dare you steal from Redhat!

[Joe Tie.]

I wonder if a checksummed p2p system like bittorrent will ever be merged with apt.

Never tried it myself, but I did hear that someone was working on setting up a debian apt repository on freenet.

Re:How dare you steal from Redhat!

[hatrisc]

hmm.. that's not a bad idea. instead of ebuilds, or some other thing have .torrent-builds which are torrents and ebuilds mixed together. if developed right, it could be the greatest and most server friendly package management system ever!

The meaning of Severn

[morcheeba]

I'm not sure if this is what they intended, but this picture comes up with google images... I'll just stick with 8, thank you.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[bohnsack]

I'll guess it's from Dam Simmons' Hyperion cantos.

9 was named "Shrike". This beta is "Severn". Both are characters from Hyperion.

In Hyperion, Joseph Severn was a cybrid reconstruction of the deceased 19th-century poet John Keats.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[mjmalone]

I live on the Severn River in Annapolis, MD. Perhaps it has something to do with this? Where is RH headquartered?

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Phillip2]

The River Severn is the longest river in the UK.
It could be named after this.

Phil

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Captain Large Face]

It's also the name of a river running through South West England, although I doubt that's the reasoning.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[wrenkin]

Which of course means it's also a River in Canada -- Same as the Thames, Don, Humber, and Avon. In this case, it is part of the Trent-Severn waterway, a long canal system which travels up from lake ontario, and features cool mechanized portages for houseboats.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Farley Mullet]

RedHat has an odd way of naming releases; the way I understand it is that each consecutive pair of release names has something in common, but (see here) for a good explanation). So for instance, "Pinstripe" followed "Zoot" (both kinds of suits), and "Guiness" followed "Pinstripe" (both British beers). So the last one was "Shrike" and this one is "Severn" which previous posters have noted are both characters in the "Hyperion" novels. Maybe the next one will be a river or a UFC guy.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Sabalon]

The could tie it into Marillion albums, as Brave was originally gonna be called Severn - due to the main female taking a junp from a bridge over the river.

I might just setup a RH machine again if they did that :)

Re:The meaning of Severn

[mattdm]

And the one in Canada has endangered loggerhead shrike.

I think the Hyperion connection is more likely, though.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[owenb]

Are you sure it existed first? Or do you just mean named first?

Re:The meaning of Severn

[ilctoh]

Guinness is Irish, thank you very much.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[cpeterso]

The final release of Red Hat Linux X is codenamed "Cambridge". Now we can start brainstorming the connection between Severn and Cambridge.

"Red Hat to change development model, abandon shrinkwrap"

Re:The meaning of Severn

[RussHart]

Pinstripe - a Britsh beer? Err, I'm a member of CAMRA , and I've never heard of Pinstripe Beer...

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Farley Mullet]

You got me. I must have been thinking of something else. It turns out that it's an American-made red ale. Google tells me it tastes like a bitter. Sorry about that. And good luck with your campaign

Re:The meaning of Severn

[Kaz Riprock]

The next one could be Baltimore. Severn is my hometown in Maryland.

It's next-door to BWI airport.

Re:The meaning of Severn

[salimma]

Simple - Severn is a river in England and Cambridge is the university town named after the bridge over river Cam.

Re:Is it binary compatible with RH 9.0?

[sebol]

The release notes state about gcc 3.2.3
but slashdot state it as gcc 3.3

so it should be binary compatible.

What About Kernel 2.6.x?

[C0deJunkie]

Since the promising 2.6 is alredy in a test phase, I would wait a couple of week to avoid the infamous module-related issues to upgrade a 2.4 kernel.
Is it possible to have 2.6.x (or even 2.5.75) as an option for the installation? Of course I woluld like it.

Re:What About Kernel 2.6.x?

[garcia]

of course it's an option. Read the Changelog, upgrade necessary utilities, and install the new kernel.

Re:What About Kernel 2.6.x?

[Ktulu_03]

You can download the 2.6 test kernel and the related utilities here for rh9:

http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/

These files are also setup as an apt repository if you read the readme.txt file.

Not sure if they will work with the beta.

Re:What About Kernel 2.6.x?

[C0deJunkie]

Ok, even if a bit "troll", I see your point.
I'll try to better explain mine:
I'm currently testing 2.5.74. Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5 was not so hard, even if it was really harder than in the past (2.2->2.3 etc.) due to the heavy changes to the module subsystem.
Since the 2.6 series has been "marked" as a sort of milestone, I would like to have it as an "installation option", not an option, which, as you note, is already.

slight correction...

[eupheric]

From the release notes, it seems Severn uses GCC 3.2.3, not 3.3.

Re:slight correction...

[chabotc]

Incorrect. Like older redhat's did, it ships with two GCC compiler sets.

The GCC you see mentioned in the release notes is 'gcc32', the backward compatible compiler (used forinstance to compile the kernel and much of the compat-* packages).

The default compiler which is also used to compile the normal packages is gcc 3.3

Shame such an incorrect correction made it as story update

Re:slight correction...

[Vallimar]

Umm, no.. according to the releases notes and the files in the beta directory, GCC 3.3 is the standard. GCC 3.2 is ALSO available. Learn to read.

OpenOffice.org

[Znonymous Coward]

According to distrowatch, this release still has OpenOffice.org 1.0.2

Wasn't the purpose of having 2 products (commercial and community) to offer the latest and greatest software? I hope Red Hat will include OOo 1.1 in the next beta.

Why Severn?

[Fastfwd]

Anyone know why it's called Severn?

Just finished reading Hyperion and I was wondering if there might be a link with "Joseph Severn".

Re:Why Severn?

[floydigus]

Could be the Severn Bridge (famously so long that once they finish painting it, it needs painting again)

Re:Why Severn?

[aug24]

It's a river in England famous for boring people? ;-)

J.

Re:Why Severn?

[VdG]

There are two of them now, (the new one imaginatively bein galled "The Second Severn Crossing".)

It could refer to the river itself, of course, but that would be a bit of a bore.
http://www.severn-bore.co.uk/

Re:Why Severn?

[Jodrell]

I imagine that Alan might have something to do with it - the River Severn is the largest river in England and Wales and separates the two countries. It's also spanned by one of the most impressive bits of engineering in the UK.

Re:Why Severn?

[floydigus]

Aha. Good point.
However, it is the Forth bridge. The nearly-a-number names got me confused. ...Forth, Fife, 6, Severn...

Re:Why Severn?

[greg_barton]

Just finished reading Hyperion and I was wondering if there might be a link with "Joseph Severn".

Well, considering the last release was named "Shrike" that's not much of a stretch. :)

term8or

[term8or]

In other news, Bill Gates rebuts rumours of a Red Hat release seven. "Windows is already at release 2003, and we will soon release 2005 (planned for 2007). This shows how much more mature Windows is compared to our Linux alternatives." A spokesman from HP has declined to make any comment, and has denied the rumour that HP will release a new version to compete. "The rumours of HP-UX 11.ie (Internet Edition) are a complete fabrication"

Nothing too impressive

[Bruha]

Lilo is removed from the packages *shrug*

Removal of lprng and sndconfig might cause a few grumbles but otherwise nothing remarkable here.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[RedHat Rocky]

lilo is deprecated, not removed. This means it is still there, but will probably be removed in the future.

Personally, I think this is bad. I've run into situations where GRUB just couldn't handle the configurations I needed to do. And changing hardware on GRUB can sometimes force one to a boot disk where it shouldn't be necessary.

Now pine IS on the removed list, ACK!! Guess it's time to pick a new mailer, but man, a decade old habit is hard to break.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[bofkentucky]

Now pine IS on the removed list, ACK!! Guess it's time to pick a new mailer, but man, a decade old habit is hard to break.
I got exposed to mutt a few years back when we moved to a freebsd machine at UK for the student unix server, that and zsh were the two things I absolutely loved about that machine from the command line compared to our old HP-UX machine (ksh and pine)

Re:Nothing too impressive

[RedHat Rocky]

Yep, mutt seems to be the way to go, been hearing about it for years. Excellent IMAP support is good.

Time to redo the email plumbing I guess.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[eyeye]

I find mutt very slow to load up my 2000 email IMAP inbox (IMAP server on the same computer).

Am I missing something or is that normal? I suppose it could be the IMAP server now i'm thinking about it.

Hmmm.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[CausticWindow]

Why do you use IMAP if it's on the same machine?

Re:Nothing too impressive

[gordie]

You could always get pine from here: http://www.washington.edu/pine/getpine/ and install it yourself. No need to drop a useful tool just because RH has stopped encluding it.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[eht]

The reason I use IMAP on the same machine I generally read my mail on is that I can also read it from any other machine in the world that I trust with handy webmail.

Which of course limits it greatly since I wouldn't trust most machiens in the world, but all I need is an http connection as opposed to hoping I can ssh in.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[eyeye]

Why does that seem odd?
When i'm at home I read mail with mozilla mail, at work via mutt over SSH.

Now i'll just grumble over the annoying 2 minute slashdot rule for a bit...

Re:Nothing too impressive

[CausticWindow]

Ok, but you can just setup mutt to read your mail as local files. I do this at work, where my mail is stored as normal mailbox files, and then "exported" with IMAP. I have no idea how IMAP is setup though, since I'm not running the server.

Should speed up parsing of your inbox quite significantly I would guess.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[smelroy]

Doesn't no Pine == no Pico?? What am I going to do without Pico??? I don't want to learn the power of vi!! I guess it will just take me a little longer to get up and running next clean install.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[bofkentucky]

GNU Nano looks like a gnu rip-off^Wversion of pico to me.

Re:Nothing too impressive

[RedHat Rocky]

Installing from source is not a big deal, granted. But, this is kind of like Netscape 4.0 used to be. You knew it wasn't open source, but it was there to use, so you did.

Installing from source means making a choice to use a specific app. Given pine's closed license, I'd be more inclined to choose another app.

Not so exciting

[Amomynos Coward]

One of the bad things in Linux distros is, that as we have almost all of the programs already available (and sometimes even newer releases), the launches are not as exciting...think about the OSX users, they literally wet their pants just seeing new screenshots of the latest feline.

Re:Not so exciting

[DiscoOnTheSide]

As a proud owner of a Powerbook G4, I can say two things about Gentoo with it.... 1) The drivers for the video card/LCD controller. Hah good luck. And 2) KDE with one mouse button is teh sux0r.

Re:Not so exciting

[Znonymous Coward]

Way to backup your claim there.

Re:Not so exciting

[HiThere]

You can stick a three button mouse on the Mac with no problem, but the last time I tried a Linux partition on the Mac it gave me much grief. There seemed no way to take data back and forth between the systems. (For some stupid reason I'm having an extreme amount of trouble getting either OS9 formatted partitions or the OS9 system to work. Otherwise that could probably be mounted.)

Anyway, I'm using the Mac to get my wife off of MSWindles, with the definite goal of eventually moving her to Linux. But Linux needs a bunch of applications that aren't there yet (or at least aren't there as far as she's concerned...and sometimes as far as I'm concerned too) before this will be possible.

Re:Is it binary compatible with RH 9.0?

[pp]

Yes, should work just fine both ways

One issue that might affect some people is the exec-shield anti-stack overflow technology, which
most notably doesn't play will with wine and alsalib (latter might be fixed nowadays, alsalib used to use a gcc feature that made it place code on the stack).

You can easily disable it through /proc, or use a program called chstk to enable executable stacks for specific programs. It's not included in this beta, but you can grab it from
here

Disappointed

[Sludge]

I installed RedHat 9.0, and it wasn't able to autodetect or otherwise utilize my configuration: GF4 ti4200 w/ dual monitor setup (21" + 19"). Installing the latest Nvidia binary drivers as-is caused hard lockups on boot (read: no num/caps lock or ping replies), despite many attempts.

I was hoping for a quick, clean install of a modern Linux OS to port my software over to (which uses OpenGL, so the binary drivers were a must), but I crashed and burnt. Many times over, even after tweaking my BIOS and following all available tips I could find on forums.

Sigh.

Re:Disappointed

[molarmass192]

It's not your BIOS, it's most likely the AGP on your mobo. There was a bunch of work on the nVIDIA related AGP code in the post 2.4.20 kernel series, particularly 2.4.22. Depending on your mobo and kernel patches RH applied to 2.4.20, this could explain your problems. The 2.4.21 series in general hasn't been anything to brag about -but- stability is getting much better again as of 2.4.22-pre3 (haven't tried pre7 yet). You may want to try 2.4.22-pre7 to see if it solves the lockup issues for you.

Re:Disappointed

[Brackney]

While I had no trouble getting my GeForce FX 5200 to work post-install after running the Nvidia binary and tweaking my config, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the installer itself did not work and play well with the video card. I ended up doing a text install of RH 9 - very kludgy. Also disappointing were my SBLive and Kingston NIC cards not being configured properly. They worked fine after I manually modprobed the emu10k1 and tulip modules, and thereafter when I stuffed them in /etc/modules.conf, but why not automatically?

Re:Disappointed

[Outland Traveller]

Every time a distribution is released, someone invariably says, "I have XXX hardware set up like YYY and the installer didn't work for me". I think every OS that attempts to support large numbers of peripherals has these kinds of issues.

A good place to report this is the distrubtion's support forum.

Re:Disappointed

[saintlupus]

Every time a distribution is released, someone invariably says, "I have XXX hardware set up like YYY and the installer didn't work for me".

Heh. Just another reason I'm glad to use Linux on Mac hardware.

YDL Just Works.

--saint

Re:Disappointed

[Sludge]

Geforce 4 ti4200, nforce motherboard, 2.4.22-pre7, tried both agp8x enabled and disabled in the bios, tried agpgart and nvagp. Tried a Gf3 that was lying around the office, and now I have tried Slackware 8.0 as well as redhat 9.0. Everything has the exact same hard crash. Bios option? Perhaps so. I've been using linux since 1994, and I can't get this up and running. It's a real shame.

Redhat is HQ'ed in the south, you know (NC)

[drgroove]

I can just imagine the process of coming up w/ the new release name...

RH Dev Manager: "Hey y'all - how many lines-a-code did we find copied over from-a UNIX?"

RH Dev'er: "Urrmmm... looks like about severn er ait to me, hoss."

RH Dev Mng: "Well'um then, that there's the next ree-leease name then. Severn."

Re:Redhat is HQ'ed in the south, you know (NC)

[jrcamp]

I'm from South Carolina and I found it rather humorous. However, I realize that Triangle Park is a little more civilized than most places down here. :)

Re:Redhat is HQ'ed in the south, you know (NC)

[smelroy]

Well they aren't really in the park anymore. They moved into Lucent's old home on CentennialCampus at NC State. That is in the middle of Raleigh. Trivial though...

I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to install

[Vengeance]

RH9.0, nVidia .bin driver installer, it was foolproof and easy. A tainted kernel was a small price to pay, IMHO.

Oh, and a suggestion: Don't try running your system at default runlevel 5 when messing with the video. Use runlevel 3 and startx.

Laptop mode, yes!

[morcheeba]

At the end of the release notes is this gem:

The Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 kernel now includes support for laptop mode. When placed in laptop mode, the kernel batches disk I/O, allowing the disk drive to become idle long enough for the drive's power-saving features to take affect. This can result in significant increases in battery runtime.

Considering I used to do most of my development while on batteries, this is great! (Gotta love the dell 7000 with its 7 hour batteries!)

Re:Laptop mode, yes!

[lmfr]

The laptop mode patch is also available with other patches in savannah

Re:Laptop mode, yes!

[onemorehour]

the kernel batches disk I/O, allowing the disk drive to become idle long enough for the drive's power-saving features to take affect. (sic)

On the other hand, once the power to your laptop finally does run out, you lose what you've been doing for the last few minutes ^_^

Re:Laptop mode, yes!

[D'Arque Bishop]

Sweet. I wish I had known about laptop mode while I was in Los Angeles a couple of months ago for E3; I got a rather rude awakening when my Compaq laptop running RH 9 would die at a fraction of the time it took for it to die when in Windows 2000. (Until then I had never run it on a battery.)

Having to watch the inflight movie instead of the one I brought with me sucked. ;-)

Doens't appear to have ALSA yet ...

[LizardKing]

Someone with the bandwidth to download this might be able to confirm this, but it appears that the beta doesn't come with ALSA. A shame for those of us who like RedHat, but want to use the latest MIDI apps "out of the box".

Chris

Re:Doens't appear to have ALSA yet ...

[radixvir]

anyone know why redhat doesnt ship with alsa as the default? most multimedia stuff i go to install requires it.

Re:Doens't appear to have ALSA yet ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a guess, but ALSA is sponsored by SuSE. RH tends to not like using things sponsored by other companies (Reiser, ALSA, etc).

That'd be my guess.

Re:Doens't appear to have ALSA yet ...

[Vallimar]

I can already confirm this based on constant Rawhide monitoring. There is no ALSA. None, nada, zilch.
If you really want it, grab a test 2.6 kernel.. even a RedHat one maybe and install the ALSA libs yourself or from freshrpms. You won't have to worry about modules suddenly breaking (much) as RedHat has
already had the forsight to include the 2.5 modutils code. You can flip between kernel versions with RedHats modutils package installed without difficulty. I know, I've done it.

Re:Doens't appear to have ALSA yet ...

[bzzzt]

Bullshit. Reiserfs wasn't included because there's no "clean" upgrade path from ext2/3 they can support. You can still install a clean system on a reiser/jfs partition using some unofficial boot parameters. My guess at ALSA is that it's a lot more complex than OSS and thus more difficult to support. Add to that the fact that the typical Redhat customer (business) doesn't have a need for low-latency sound and it makes more sense that stupid conspiracy theories.

Free continues

[digitect]

Maybe it's just the pressure for profitability, but I continue to be blown away at RedHat's committment to Free Software and community commitment. These guys have a huge share of the GNU/Linux commercial market and yet they continue to be as open as is possible for a for-profit company.

They have invested a ton of effort into software now distributed by most other distributions (GNOME, RPM, kernel development, graphics, etc.). I don't mean that there aren't others playing, too. But it seems every time I expect RedHat to start trying to greedily hawk their enviable position, they do just the opposite.

Thanks RedHat!

Re:Free continues

[Homology]

The article has some good points, but the author is, well, quite biased. Redhat did fund ext3, making a very easy upgrade path from ext2 to a journalling file system. Ext3 is a significant and valuable contribution. For the Xfree86 project, Mike Harris is an active contributor. Many other examples may be found of RedHat's contribution to Linux at large.

On the other hand, the RedHat "mangling" of KDE is controversial, and quite frankly it put me off. Enough for me not to use it. I'm not a Mandrake user, but the lates Mandrake KDE is very pretty and harmonic.

For development platform, SuSE 8.2 Pro is far better than Redhat Linux. Now, the other Redhat offerings is quite another matter, but also far more expensive.

Severn, eh?

[Darth_brooks]

Sounds like quite a beast.

Re:Severn, eh?

[EllF]

Woe to you, oh linux user, for RedHat sends the beast with wrath, for he knows the time is short.

Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast -- for it is a human number: its number is six hundred and sixty Severn.

GCC 3.2.3 AND 3.3?

[akiaki007]

The release notes list package gcc32 (which is version 3.2.x). The Package List list gcc and gcc32 as packages. gcc is listed with version 3.3 and gcc32 as 3.2.3, so I can only assume that you can have both. Probably configure which on using gcc-config, though that doesn't look like it is listed in the package list.

Re:GCC 3.2.3 AND 3.3?

[StarHeart]

The complete situtation when it comes to compilers is there are three. gcc 3.3, gcc 3.2, and gcc 2.96.

3.3 is gcc, 3.2 is gcc32, 2.96 is compat-gcc.

Mozilla, the kernel, and other code have issues with 3.3. I personally ran into an issue with Mozilla 1.4 complaining about a bug that mangled long long when using -pedantic. I wanted to compile with gcc 3.2, but found the c++ part was missing. I didn't want to go back to 2.96 so I used the --disable-pedantic option.

Actually i preffered RH 8

[floydman]

over RH9, the slownes in RH 9 was very noticable,besides they removed lilo(dunno why), i cannot see a single reason to upgrade from 8 to anything else unless its a totally new kernel.

Re:Actually i preffered RH 8

[UnuMondo]

LILO is being phased out by many distributers and users because 1) GRUB is the official GNU bootloader and is not as Linux-centric as LILO, and 2) LILO doesn't have anything that GRUB is missing.

Re:Actually i preffered RH 8

[DrWhizBang]

over RH9, the slownes in RH 9 was very noticable...

Yes, I have to concurr. although I also found RH8 to be much faster than RH8, RH9 literally crawls in comparison to RH9. I long for the good old days, when RH7 was just as fast as RH7. Vendor like Redhat need to make sure that they can maintain performance within any singel version...

If you were using RH7, it certainly would have been fast enough to capture that missing "s"...

Most pointless post so far on this subject

[mummers]

Over in England we have the rather splendid River Severn. Any relation? Mod: Off topic

Re:Most pointless post so far on this subject

[hotgazpacho]

There is also a Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland. The US Naval Academy is at the mouth of that river.

Have they fixed the menus

[wowbagger]

Have they added the ability to alter the Gnome menus in a fashion that does not require binary editing the inodes with a needle?

I have RH8 at home, and the there seems to be a decided lack of any way to add items to the menu structure.

There also seems to be no easy way to get a snapshot of the desktop or of an app window.

Re:Have they fixed the menus

[tuffy]

There also seems to be no easy way to get a snapshot of the desktop or of an app window.

man xwd

It's not a well-advertised little tool, but it does the job of taking screenshots nicely. As for Gnome, I never use it so I can't answer that one.

Re:Have they fixed the menus

[rixster]

heh... reminds me of my fav. unix trick ...

xwd -root -display [target_ip]:0 | xwud -display [your-ip]:0

for an instant looksee at what your mates are doing...

Re:Have they fixed the menus

[JanneM]

Editing menus:

To add/remove stuff in the preferences submenu, dor instance, type this link in nautilus:

preferences:

Same for all the other submenus.

If you want to change it for all users, use:

preferences-all-users:

details in:

http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/2.2/menus tr ucture-2.html

As for full screen screenshots, just press the "PrtScrn/SysRq" key. To get a screenshot of the currently focused window, press Alt-PrtScrn.

Some mirror sites have the beta

[Ktulu_03]

Visit mirrors to find a site close to you.

I can see the support calls now...

[jazman]

So what version of Red Hat are you using?
Severn.
Seven?
No, Severn.
You need 9.
I am using 9.
You said Seven!
No, I said Severn. Severn is a version of Nine.
Click.

What's the next version going to be called - Sicks? Hey chaps, here are some more great ideas for names: Fayiv, Fower, Thur-hee, Tahoo, Wun, Zilch, Miner Swan.

Re:I can see the support calls now...

[Chester K]

No, I said Severn. Severn is a version of Nine.

It's a marketing ploy, pure and simple. What geek wouldn't want to "beta test" Severn of Nine?

Re:I can see the support calls now...

[jazman]

yep, i totally missed the obvious joke on Severn of Nine. Must watch more Voyager...hmm...tight grey jumpsuits...drool...

Re:I can see the support calls now...

[cpeterso]

One of my Star Trek loving roommates used to call her "36 of D". It seemed a lot funnier at the time. :-)

Re:I can see the support calls now...

[Jugalator]

What's the next version going to be called - Sicks?

Perhaps they'll continue with the current theme and call it... Se7en? :-)

The end of RedHat as we know it

[pyrotic]

From the changelog:

With this release, the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project -- an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.

Looks like the old setup of 2 boxed sets (personal and professional) is going, as is the x.0, x.1, x.2 release cycle. This means they can break binary compatibility with each release. Also means that despite the fact that RH officially stops supporting this relase afer 1 year, package maintainers will be responsible for their own bug-fixes, not RH. Check out the article on The Register for more info. Looking at the package list, it looks too bleeding edge (Apache 2.045, PHP 4.32) for server use. If you want to keep with Apache 1.3x, then your only choice is RHES. Goodbye RedHat, it was good while it lasted.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[Jungle guy]

Anyone who had to work this weekend and hanged around Slashdot saw this post. Apparently, Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Linux Project, and that's why we have seen stories of the boxed version stepping out of the retail channel (it means, you will not buy a CD-Rom with RH for $ 40 on Amazon). According to their FAQ:

Q: Will Red Hat Linux be sold in retail?

A:The Red Hat Linux releases will not be sold through the retail channel as a shrinkwrapped box; the design of the project, with the potential for short release cycles, less certainty in release date, and so forth make it a poor match for the retail channel. Further information on the retail product line will be forthcoming closer to the product launch plan this fall. Red Hat Linux releases will be available as ISO images for both CDs and DVDs; will be sold online as physical media; will be distributed at Linux User Groups, in magazines, in books, and at trade shows; and will be actively pushed into content sharing networks such as BitTorrent. Not every distribution mechanism will necessarily be used for ever release; for example, not every release will show up at a trade show. However, each of these is a candidate, and some, including online ISO images, will be available for all releases.

If you are a corporation, though, you can still buy their over-priced Enterprise Version and have cess to SLAs and support contracts.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[FattMattP]

If you want to keep with Apache 1.3x, then your only choice is RHES.

Or compile from source.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[ksheff]

Why bother creating a bunch of boxed sets that are obsolete the day they hit the shelves and probably won't be sold? Just create a small number for the trade shows, LUGs, & online sales after the release has been finalized. This number would be based on prior online sales & other give aways and after those run out, the new ones would be made on an on-demand type basis. This should save them money and not have to require a sales people to deal with the retail chains.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[dzym]

Thus negating the entire purpose of having a binary distro ...

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[FattMattP]

Thus negating the entire purpose of having a binary distro ...

That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean?

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[drinkypoo]

If you want to keep with Apache 1.3x, then your only choice is RHES. Goodbye RedHat, it was good while it lasted.

Or, if you actually know something about Unix, you can download and install Apache 1.x.

I'm pretty tired of so-called Systems Administrators who can't seem to actually do anything on their own. If it doesn't come in a RPM, they can't manage to install it. If you're not one of those people, quit your whining about how Apache 1 doesn't come with Redhate, and go download the source and build it yourself. For the only moderately lazy, there's always apacheconf.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[Cyno]

What strikes me as odd is RedHat, of all companies, understand the Linux developement model. I would expect them to work more closely with the community and get more beta testers, etc. I guess maybe they decided that they make their money off the RedHat name and service contracts. No point in developing a Linux distribution when you're making money from support, eh?

Well, they have done a lot of good for Linux, but I'm very curious what they're thinking.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[Derek S]

If a software package doesn't come in RPM form, then I usually end up having to build and test my own RPM spec for it. My homegrown software deployment and auditing system (based off cfengine) depends on package information to determine when to install or upgrade a piece of software.

I do have a couple of pieces of software (RT, in particular) that don't easily lend themselves to binary packaging. In those cases I have to document the exact manual build procedure in case I ever have to recreate the machine. That's considerably more work than saying "install everything you're supposed to be running".

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[FattMattP]

I think he means that the main advantage of Red Hat is that you get pre-compiled packages that are maintained for you. Once you start regularly compiling and maintaining packages on your own, you aren't really gaining anything.

I think that depends on how many packages you'll want to run that aren't in the current distribution. There's always going to be something that isn't available that you'll need to install from source.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[moorg]

I think he means that the main advantage of Red Hat is that you get pre-compiled packages that are maintained for you. Once you start regularly compiling and maintaining packages on your own, you aren't really gaining anything.

I think that depends on how many packages you'll want to run that aren't in the current distribution. There's always going to be something that isn't available that you'll need to install from source.

Exactly. I run RH Linux servers but chose to compile Apache as well as a few other programs.

Apache 1.x is so solid and does exactly what I need. I have no reason to upgrade. If RH wants to package Apache 2 thats fine. I don't need them to take care of all of my files.

I use RH because I don't want to worry about keeping tabs on if there is a new version [insert-system-binary-here].

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[pyrotic]

I'm pretty tired of so-called Systems Administrators who can't seem to actually do anything on their own.

I'm not a sysadmin. I know how to compile apache and related modules and distribute custom rpms to production servers using rsync, but I also know that my time is better spent doing other things.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[jmorris42]

> If it doesn't come in a RPM, they can't manage to install it.

If I wanted to build critical components from scratch I'd run BSD or Gentoo. RedHat was supposed to be about known good stable software.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[jmorris42]

> Redhat has never been stable.

That depends. If you understand the way RedHat works you know to only deploy .2 versions on production machine if at all possible. 4.2, 5.2 and 6.2 were very usable and pretty darned stable. 7.2 was flaky which is why 7.3 was released. Guess they wanted to release one last stable version before switching to a string of eternal .0 releases. :(

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[javamutt]

I think the bottom line here is where a sysadmin's time can spent with a return on investment. I agree that anyone claiming to be beyond junir level sysadmin ought to be able to handle this, but there's no value add (barring the case where a custom feature is req'd).

One of the things Linux, and UNIX in general seems to verlok is that one the Windows side of the world it's pretty easy to install software. On the UNIX side, Rh has historically done a great job of making stable RPMs easy to obtain.

The other scenario to consider is ease of reconstruction. If your system is dependant on multiple custom constructed / compiled packages you need to maintain an additional server as a source repository, and integrate those custom packages into the distribution yourself. This extra overhead is justified in some cases, but a pain in others.

Wherever possible, I prefer to use stock RPMs because they're easy to find, easy to replace, and have gone through someone ELSE's regressioon test plans. Availability has a very high correlation with simplicity.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[juhaz]

That's not true.

RedHat has ALWAYS included lots of reasonably stable but still very cutting edge software, especially on .0 releases. Which is good, not all people want stability at the cost of functionality.

Everyone who wants ten-year release cycle and thus damn well tested and stable software from stone age runs debian.

Re:The end of RedHat as we know it

[dzym]

The issue is that RedHat chooses to package only Apache2.

I like how Debian does things: a set of packages are provided for Apache 1.3.x, and another set of packages are provided for Apache 2.0.x. They cannot be installed at the same time, but at least there are people working on maintaining both.

boost

[marco_craveiro]

hm, boost seems to be there... hopefully things like gtkmm will start making their way in so c++ developers don't need to download half-of-the-world before they can start coding...

soup++

Packaging

[treyb]

They should wrap it in a spandex-skinsuit theme, make it boot WINE by default, and call it release Severn of Nine.

Re:I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to instal

[Exotabe]

Don't try running your system at default runlevel 5 when messing with the video. Use runlevel 3 and startx.

Just a quick addendum for the original poster's sake. The easiest/quickest way to do this in RH9 (I think) is the following:

Open a command terminal
Type 'su' and enter the root password
Type 'cd /sbin'
Type './telinit 3'

This should get you to runlevel 3 (ie. no desktop, just a big command line). When you're finished updating your video drivers, follow the steps listed above but change the last command to './telinit 5' Assuming you didn't break anything, this will bring you back to your graphical login screen w/the new drivers running.

About time

[digidave]

It's about damn time Red Hat came out with a new version. I've been toiling on 9 for several months now and I need that new version of Mozilla. Debian could learn a lot from Red Hat's release cycle because it comes with Mozilla 1.0 and it would suck to be using Debian and stuck with an old browser.

Re:About time

[jwiegley]

But many people use the "unstable" version of Debian as that version has all the latest stuff. I find it almost always more "up to date" than the latest RedHat with patches.

However, Debian could learn volumes of information from RedHat's installation, eye candy and ease of configuring things such as email services.

Presonally I think Debian *forces* the user to be an administrator and *forces* them to be knowledgable about all of the underlying applications before you can get anything configured correctly.

Now you may be saying "good, finally people will know what they're doing." Well you can keep on saying that as Linux continues to lose market share and $$$ to operating systems that are actually *usable* because they are easy to learn and easy to use. Steep learning curves are simply the symptom of a poor design.

I've been an administrator for Linux and Solaris for the past ten years but now I'm a teacher. regardless of how much I dislike Micro$oft's business practices I find that I am *wasting* tons of time handling system setup trying to stay married to a O/S the I fell in love with as an administrator when I could actually be making progress as a teacher by abandoning my old ways and just conforming to Micro$oft's order.

The summary is: I want the ease of use that RedHat provides with the up-to-date nature of Debian. Neither seems likely to be included in the other.

Product --- Project ??

[mnemotronic]

From the release notes:

the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project.

Followed (here) by all kinds of softer,gentler "public forum" and "outside participation" words. I admittedly don't get out from under my bridge very often, but does this signify a fundamental shift in how RH is doing development? Are they becoming a not-for-profit?? Hey, I'm a microsoft masochist, and any kind of altruism just confuses me....

Re:Product --- Project ??

[fishbot]

The front page of www.redhat.com has 'Enterprise' and 'Consulting' splashed all over it. Coupled with the removal of boxed sets, it appears that RedHat Linux itself will become a community project supported by RedHat Enterprise's services company.

Just hope it doesn't go the way of Netscape and Mozilla...

Re:The meaning of (Dan) Severn

[psykocrime]

Dan Severn first made his name as an amateur wrestler, went on to become a fairly well known name in the world of "No Holds Barred" (read: UFC ) fighting. Jumped into pro (read: Fake) wrestling for a while, and last I heard was still fighting intermittently, and training other fighters.

Here is the Complete Bio for anybody who's interested.

Me too

[roystgnr]

I got gimp-1.3 from Matthew Hall's apt/rpm repository (http://people.ecsc.co.uk/~matt/downloads/apt) a couple weeks ago; it's using gtk-2.

Epiphany sucks

[Ender Ryan]

Not to flame, but IMNSHO, Epiphany is a big step in the wrong direction. Galeon was doing great - the gtk2 version is very stable, has nice features, and is completely uncluttered and not in the least confusing. Epiphany has added some really weird bookmark functionality; it basically allows you to put bookmarks in many categories, which is nice in principle, but in practice it really slows down people who use bookmarks a lot. There is no bookmark toolbar functionality, and the bookmarks open in a separate window instead of having a nice quick menu... Bookmarks are a very simple thing, and the Epiphany crew is overengineering it to the extreme.

It's also still rife with bugs, eg. the toolbar does not work correctly using the "text beside icons" setting in GNOME.

Furthermore, it's been dumbed down to a point where it is below the level of complexity most casual web users want - excluding the confusing bookmark functionality. If you like using tabs, Epiphany has made a wreck of them. The options for opening new links in tabs, etc. have all been removed.

Frankly, I don't think they know WTF they're doing...

I invite anyone who knows more about Epiphany than me to correct anything that is factually incorrect.

Re:Epiphany sucks

[hexix]

Your comments on the bookmarks sytem use to be true, but they now have a bookmarks menu item like other browsers. The bookmarks system still works how it use to, categorize bookmarks into topics. This means each topic will show up as a bookmark folder in your bookmark list, and you can't have it deeper than 1 folder.

There is an option to open links in tabs by default. Which I have turned on and clicking the middle mouse button on links opens them in tabs. Not sure if that is what you wanted.

As far as the total idea of your post, I kind of agree. The epiphany developers seem to be going overboard with the less options is better philosophy. I understand it but when they took out the fine-grained popup blocking options and just replaced it with an "Allow Popups" checkbox I got pretty pissed. I mean what does this mean, will all popups be gone, will unrequested onLoad type of popups be gone? This is important stuff that they thumb their nose at.

I do like the interface better than galeon though. I have learned to love the bookmark system which you bashed. The coolest thing about it is that it is integrated with the URL autocomplete so typing a name of a topic, for example "news" would have the autocomplete choices be your bookmarks in the news topic. Very cool. It also allows you to bookmark GET form results, such as google's search page and replace the important part with a "%s". Once you do this all of your autocomplete results will have that bookmark at the bottom and selecting it will replace what you typed with the %s in the url. Hard to explain, but it's damn easy to use.

Re:Epiphany sucks

[StarHeart]

I agree with you, Epiphany sucks. But after investigating the issue closely Red Hat was between a rock and a hard place. On one side they wanted to include Mozilla 1.4 gtk2 and on the other they might have wanted to include Galeon. Galeon 1.3.5 is far from stable. In a matter of 20 minutes I found 2-3 different ways to crash it. They couldn't include Galeon 1.2.11, because it depends on Mozilla 1.4 gtk1. So that left them with Epiphany. Another thing that was part of their motivation is the Gnome project is dumping Galeon in favor of Epiphany.

Personally I have already recompiled Mozilla 1.4 to disable gtk2 and compiled my own Galeon 1.2.11. If you are interested reply with a request.

Re:Epiphany sucks

[Ender Ryan]

Galeon 1.3.6 was just released - I've been using it all day without a crash. I did have 1.3.5 crash a little too requently, but not as much as you indicate.

Re:Epiphany sucks

[StarHeart]

I will give it a try now.

I wasn't saying necessarily how much it crashed at the time, but that I found 2-3 different bugs that caused it to crash within 20 minutes of using it. The most annoying was resizing smart bookmarks boxes. About half the time it would crash.

Re:Epiphany sucks

[tempest303]

I invite anyone who knows more about Epiphany than me to correct anything that is factually incorrect.

Well, I know plenty about it, so I suppose I qualify. All points will be taken in the order they were presented.

1. "Bookmarks system slows people down" - how?
2. There is a bookmarks toolbar. View --> Bookmarks Bar
3. There is now a bookmarks menu
4. I wouldn't consider it "rife with bugs" - anymore than I would say Galeon is, anyhow.
5. Yeah, text beside icons is b0rked. It's a libegg issue.
6. It appears you have never really worked with true "end users". Epiphany includes the only preferences that I've ever seen truly average web users change (if anything!). If it means anything, Ephy's prefs are about equivilant to Safari's, but I don't see any complaints about Safari's lack of prefs...
7. Tabs are wrecked? They work fine for me.

In short, wait till Ephy 1.0 comes out (with GNOME 2.4), and give it some serious use. If you still don't like it, realize that A) it's not designed for geeky Slashdot readers, it's aimed at, among others, people that don't even know what a web browser is, and B) nothing about Epiphany precludes you from installing Galeon.

Have fun...

No, this is the Southern version of Seven, Severn

[Idou]

You know how it works . . . "Shutting Down" becomes "Shutt'n DO'n", "ssh" becomes "pipe-DO'n Bo'", and when KDE (err, bluecurve) starts, you hear a fiddle a play'n in the background.

pine gone?

[tmu]

Crap. The notes page points out several cool new packages (including acpid for power management and the dvd+rw tools for dvd mastering. But several important packages are falling by the wayside.

Among them:

pine (I've just finished, after 8 years or so) getting used to this thing after the migration from elm. Does this mean I finally have to use mutt?

tripwire. I know lots of people didn't actually use this, but it's really important and the fact that redhat integrated it really raised its visibility.

postgresql72. what's going on here? are they running a more recent version and simply removing the old one?

Re:pine gone?

[bzzzt]

postgresql72. what's going on here? are they running a more recent version and simply removing the old one?

Yup. If you took 3 seconds to look you'd see 7.3 is in.

Re:pine gone?

[Plug]

Red Hat have been moving, as part of this big shakeup, to remove everything non-Free from their distribution - including contributing to an open source Java, I believe.

Pine has always had licensing issues, and it's widely accpeted that Pine fans can be appeased with Mutt and something like Pine2Mutt (which is simply an import script or two and the pine.rc that comes with Mutt.)

Re:pine gone?

[KidSock]

Pine and Mutt both suck. I used Mutt for a long time. I could never remember the key neumonics. Then I used Sylpheed for a while but I started using IMAP on the server which was too slow with Sylpheed. That compelled me to switch to Pine because it has good IMAP support. But after using Sylpheed for a while configuration drove me stir crazy. When I set up IMAP on the server I also setup SquirrelMail. I didn't think I would convert entirely because I much prefer to use vi as my editor but I find myself using it more and more. Another user on the same machine converted to it entirely shortly after I installed it. Webmail for Nuts!

Re:pine gone?

[aoliva]

> pine

It's been deprecated for several releases and, AFAIK, it was the only non-free package in the distribution. Non-free in that it didn't allow modified versions to be distributed, mind you. I'm happy to see it go.

> tripwire

You want it? Cool, make sure you get involved with the RHL project and volunteer to maintain the package! It's needed some nice defaults for the distro for a while. The configuration files that shipped weren't useful except for inspiration in creating your own.

> postgresql72

[aoliva@free aoliva]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 9.0.93 (Severn)
[aoliva@free aoliva]$ rpm -q postgresql
postgresql-7.3.3-4

It's the 7.2 compat package that is gone.

Re:I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to instal

[dead_penguin]

Even better, edit /etc/inittab and change id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault: for the time you're working on this.

That way, even an accidental reboot can't set your computer into a long loop of xdm restarting over and over and over and over again.

If that happens, though, most setups kill xdm if it respawns too much/too often. If you're not so lucky, turn off your monitor and ssh in from another box, or use Lilo/Grub to boot into single user mode and fix things from there.

Redhat Linux with OS software only?

[Homology]

From Red Hat Linux Project we have

The goal of the Red Hat Linux project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.

Browsing through Package List for Severn non-free software like Acrobat Reader and Sun Java is not included.

However, Apache Webserver and Tomcat is not included either, so does this imply that Redhat Linux is targeted towards consumer market in order to have less competition for their other commercial products?

Re:Redhat Linux with OS software only?

[eyegone]

AFAIK, Red Hat Linux has never included Tomcat. The apache package was renamed to httpd sometime in the last few releases, and it's still there.

Re:Redhat Linux with OS software only?

[Homology]

AFAIK, Red Hat Linux has never included Tomcat. The apache package was renamed to httpd sometime in the last few releases, and it's still there

I sit corrected, though, why did they rename Apache Webserver to httpd, apart from "historical" reasons? It's not as if it's the only webserver.... Besides, only version 2.0.x is part of the package, and not the more stable amd widely used 1.3.x series.

Re:Redhat Linux with OS software only?

[carwyn]

> However, Apache Webserver is not included either.

Yes it is! it's under the name httpd just like it is on apache.org.

Re:Redhat Linux with OS software only?

[Homology]

I kindly refer you to my reply to the first reply of my post made 2.5 hours before yours.

Actually

[roystgnr]

The UI on gimp-1.3 looks much nicer (at first glance, that is; I haven't used it much yet). I think the new icons have more to do with it than the toolkit change, though.

Ahhh. Peachy. You are forced to use Nautilus

[wowbagger]

We are talking about the same menu, are we not? I am talking about the Gnome (a.k.a. "Foot") menus on the panel.

Assuming that to be the case:
Begin Rant.

Ahhh. Peachy. You are forced to use Nautilus - an overbloated excuse for a program. What every happened to the Unix Way: A small program to manage icons on the desktop, a program to view files and directories, etc.?

And how wonderfully intuitive - rather than doing "something" to the menu, like right-clicking, or dragging, or something, you go to a seemingly unrelated program and type a magic phrase to make changes.

As long as we continue to do things like this, the Mac UI folks will have every right to laugh at us.

And as for the print screen:

Does that save the screen to the clipboard a la Windows, or does it write a file to your home directory?

And again, where is that documented?

Re:Ahhh. Peachy. You are forced to use Nautilus

[Thorizdin]

Well, the docs I found by clicking on the help button and then clicking on Basic Skills, then clicking on Keyboard Shortcuts.

1.2.1. Desktop Shortcut KeysDesktop shortcut keys enable you to use the keyboard to perform desktop tasks. The following table lists some desktop shortcut keys:
Default Shortcut KeysFunctionAlt+F1Opens the GNOME Menu.Alt+F2Displays the Run Program dialog.
Print ScreenTakes a screenshot.
Alt+Print ScreenTakes a screenshot of the window that has focus.

Re:Ahhh. Peachy. You are forced to use Nautilus

[hexix]

I guess the idea behind the menu editing was they wanted it to be as easy as possible, and everyone knows how to move/delete/add files to folders.

The UNIX philosphy is still somewhat alive as it's actually the gnome-vfs doing a lot of the work I think. So you should be able to write a simple stand alone program that plugs in to gnome-vfs and does menu editing.

There is actually a lot of cool stuff you can do with menu system they have now, like merge folders together in to one menu. Just not the most obvious if you're trying to edit the files yourself.

language: redneck

[mikeee]

Considering that an earlier version of Redhat had "Redneck" as a hidden language option for the installer, eg. "Do you want to reparition your hard drive: I reckon [ ] Nosirree [x]", I suspect they'd be amused rather than offended.

you can't rape the willing

[waspleg]

on a side note isn't this fearful post what the RIAA is all about? the protection of their distribution chain? maybe they can learn something from redhat, have a decent product first and then you don't have to worry about how it gets into the hands of consumers cause they will demand it and pave the way.

Re:I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to instal

[Binestar]

If you're not so lucky, turn off your monitor and ssh in from another box, or use Lilo/Grub to boot into single user mode and fix things from there.

Why not just use lilo/grub to boot into runlevel 3? Can be done just as easy as booting into runlevel 1. I don't recommend booting into runlevel 6 from grub though, usually just confuses you. Runlevel 0 can be fun though.

no

[Ender Ryan]

If you got out form under your bridge more often :), you'd know that RedHat is dropping it's boxed Linux distrobution as a product - ie. you will no longer be able to buy RH Linux at Walmart and Best Buy.

They are also opening RedHat Linux up to more community influence.

This move is not based on altruism; RH just wants to focus on the part of their business where they make money, support services for businesses.

Help

[wowbagger]

OK, so IF I know that print-screen is under a hotkey of some sort, THEN I can find the help.

But IF I don't know printscreen is under a hotkey, then where it it listed in the help?

Re:Help

[Thorizdin]

Umm, what did you think it would be under, magic mouse movements? In any case did you try to RTM (F left out intentionally)? I mean at least the section titled Basic Skills, its a whopping 10 pages of about 8 lines of text on each page. I agree that the documentation needs to get better, but RedHat has done better than any other company IMHO at getting docs right. I was disappointed that this wasn't in their Getting Started Guide.

Re:Help

[wowbagger]

Look at it like this:

I've been running Linux since the 0. days. I've been running Redhat since 4.x. I've been running Gnome for years. Why should I look in the "Basic skills" section, which is usually "This is how you click your mouse" level stuff.

In the old days, Gnome had the screen shooter applet, which lived on the menu bar. Logically, an experience person would look there first. There is no screen shooter applet now, nor is there a reference to where that functionality has gone.

OK, perhaps the applet ws confusing to people coming from Windows. Perhaps hotkeys are a better way to implement that. But at least either keep the old method around and mark it deprecated (i.e. have the applet come up and tell you "Hey, you can do this without me by....") or have a simple, easy to find info on the web (which, BTW, I had searched when I first encountered this problem.)

Don't get me wrong: I love the fact that RedHat is taking an interest in cleaning things up. But they've struck out in their own direction with Bluecurve, without trying to win the approval of the UN, so to speak.

Re:Help

[hexix]

Try this, right click on your panel then go:

Add To Panel -> Button -> Screenshot

works on my Gnome (Debian Unstable).

Also, if you have a menubar type of panel it should include an "Actions" menu which has Take a Screenshot.

One annoying thing about this screenshot program is there is no way I can see to take a single window's screenshot. GIMP can do that or just use xwd like someone else suggested.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

A New Graphical Boot

[sharkey]

Hopefully it's red, so it matches their hat. It begs the question though, why not two boots? Are they that strapped for cash that they have to buy footware on an installment plan?

Language

[CoolHnd30]

I've just gotta ask: Have they yet reinstituted the 'Redneck' Language option in the installer that they used to have in the old days? That was my favorite thing about my first Linux install, on RH 5.1.

Re:bittorrent and apt

[krmt]

The thing about apt, at least for Debian users, is that there is a strong and established mirror system already in place that handles the load just fine. I don't know how this applies to aptrpm users and whatnot.

As a sidenote, one of the main dpkg developers was playing around with using bittorrent in conjunction with the mirror system for a while, so the problem has at least been toyed with. I don't know if we'll ever see it in action though, since the need just isn't there right now.

severn: drops pine (pico), added nano.

[moogla]

And good riddance: nano isn't just some clone, nano is about fifty times better than pico. It has regular expression search/replace, color syntax hilight, and multibuffers. If you need anything more, you should be using vim.

install PlanetCCRMA ... its worth it.

[Vitriolix]

while planetccrma might take you an hour or two to install and configure, its AWSOME... i love it. once its up and running its so much slicker than windows or macos for keeping your audio environment up to date.

bascially planetccrma is a multimedia distro on top of redhat (7.3, 8.0 or 9.0). it gives you a new kernel with alsa and the low latency + preemptive patches built in. plus it uses Apt-Rpm so installing and updating all those constantly developing linux audio apps is dead simple.

nando, the guy who puts it all together is really friendly and usually answers any install questions or program requests within a day.

I'm a total convert and this is actually letting move away from windows for my main audio performace OS.

here's the site

Re:install PlanetCCRMA ... its worth it.

[LizardKing]

I tried PlanetCCRMA a couple of months ago. My machine is a dual boot NetBSD/Redhat Linux box, and the PlanetCCRMA stuff installed very smoothly. However, I can't get Linux to recognise my USB MIDI interface. It's a Yamaha UX-96, which is recognised immediately by NetBSD, but Linux is unable to see it. There is definitely ALSA support for the UX-96, so I can only assume I need some magic incantation in my modutils config file.

Chris

Re:Does it come pre-packaged

[RighteousFunby]

with a SCO license agreement ?

NO.

Now, can we please drop this annoying trend? This whole "SCO must give permission" thing is just as bad as Natalie Portman, the underpants/internet services/crackwhore gnomes or Soviet Russia jokes.

Can't we all just make bad Home Star Runner jokes and leave it at that?

Mandatory Transmetropolitan Reference

[Peter Clary]

As in "Vita Severn". So - they're expecting it to be assassainated? By SCO?

Where's Spider Jerusalem when you need him? Probably out slaughtering mutant dogs...

Re:Does it come pre-packaged

[42forty-two42]

Oh, even *I* know how to respwond to this one.
BALLEETED

check out the ... huuuuge tracts of diskspace!

[Tumbleweed]

That would be an inefficient use of the marketing department's time. Besides, perfection has already been achieved in Slackware (version 9, year 10), tertiary adjunct of Linux Kernel 2.4.21. You will comply.

Nice fonts in Release Notes

[BladeMelbourne]

Did anyone notice that the font used for the Release Notes is "bitstream vera sans"?

It's good to see this font being used, it looks really nice. As a web developer, I wish that more people has this font installed.

These true type fonts can be downloaded here:
http://www.gnome.org/fonts/

Mike

a more far-reaching structural change

[iriefrank]

The most important thing that happened today is that the way most popular distro is developed has been heaviliy structurally changed.

I wonder how this new commitment to more frequent releases and more "community involvement" will square with RH's recent RHN strategy, and specifically new releases being released to subscribers first. We now see that the emphasis on "instant isos," embargoed releases, RHN marketing blitz and subsequent discounts were a desperate last try to replace the retail channel-- which was doomed in the long run-- with something that would still leave an end-user revenue stream in place. This pretty obviously didn't work, because if it had this project business probably wouldn't ahve happened. If RH could have turned a profit on the slower development cycle + RHN revenue, there would be no "project."

Perhaps more importantly, it sounds like RedHat, although emphasizing retention of "editorial control," is showing some intent to hand editorial decisions over to outside developers:
In general, you will see much more aggressive change to the distribution. Red Hat will incorporate more external contributions of code and documentation. Some changes we don't yet know -- we can only assume that the community of users and developers will make recommendations for changes we have not yet envisioned or considered.

Along those lines, if others outside of RedHat are to begin working more, and releases are to be more frequent, it stands to reason that RPM-- at least RPM in the absence of apt-- has finally been dealt a body blow. RPM is made for RH's old, slow development cycle. Compatability hell that goes along with a faster development cycle may finally force some significant changes to RPM that people have been requesting for years, maybe even a distributed distribution network that will displace previous efforts of RedHat to emulate something like Debian (see rhn above). No one likes downloading and burning three CDs every nine months, let alone every four.

These are just my first impressions, I'm sure there are many more implications here yet unexplored.

What about RHN?

[MrJones]

I buyed RHN and then downloaded the ISO.
I also recommend my customers to buy RHN.
Also, the 50-150$ segment market is left to other distros. I think RH should have at least one product in that segment.

md5sum

[jroysdon]

As always, be sure to get the md5sum straight from RedHat and use md5sum to compare:
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn /en/iso/i386/MD5SUM

For instance (using RH9 as an example, since I have it handy):

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# pwd
/var/ftp/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i386

[j roysdon@r2 i386]# ls
MD5SUM shrike-i386-app.iso shrike-i386-disc1.iso shrike-i386-disc2.iso shrike-i386-disc3.iso

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# cat MD5SUM
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

400c7fb292c73b793fb722532abd09ad shrike-i386-disc1.iso <--- compare original md5sum
6b8ba42f56b397d536826c78c9679c0a shrike-i386-disc2.iso
af38ac4316ba20df2dec5f99091 3396d shrike-i386-disc3.iso
0727c51ab359dafa9ab31e0c509 58aa6 shrike-SRPMS-disc1.iso
2ddd8e6a8502869cd2e78d4759 0b9be1 shrike-SRPMS-disc2.iso
f378cf68b22c3b9a64c86b5067 511630 shrike-SRPMS-disc3.iso
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE+if+TIZGAzdtCpg4RAj MIAJ0elBUoTiBACMZtAdMgWgMEHsVRuwCdHgVn
9bCHYDdTJ+ 1z4w5EYOWRj+M=
=Pwjy
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# md5sum shrike-i386-disc1.iso
400c7fb292c73b793fb722532ab d09ad shrike-i386-disc1.iso <--- with download md5sum

What's that all mean? The MD5 checksums are supplied by RedHat, and you can run the md5sum text utility to generate the MD5 checksums on the ISO CD images you download to verify that nothing has been changed (for instance a trojan app introduced into the installer, etc.).

Note that /. keeps adding spaces in my text (including in the MD5 checksum, bleh).

Re:I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to instal

[salimma]

In other words, RedHat can't handle it. Don't make excuses for one of the most consistently touchy Linuxes.

Err... in this case they do have a clear reason: binary-only kernel drivers. I have installed recent Red Hat releases (8.0 and 9) on computers with nVidia video cards and the included XFree86 'nv' driver works just fine, just no 3D.

Running at runlevel 3 when editing video settings is just plain common sense. If X bails you immediately see the diagnostic output, instead of having to wait 10 seconds while it tries to restart itself over and over...

Re:I found the nVidia drivers quite easy to instal

[juhaz]

In other words, RedHat can't handle it.

RedHat handles running on runlevel 5 just fine. In some cases it might not handle user manually installing non-approved, non-tested, binary only drivers from another company, usually it works just fine, though, that suggestion was just a suggestion for those rare cases. Exactly same guidelines should be done messing around any other distro and unknown software.

Don't make excuses for one of the most consistently touchy Linuxes. I gave up on redhat because it seems to never autodetect everything properly AND manage to install properly on the first go.

Don't make running five years old release with lousy results an excuse to bash one of the most modern and easiest to use and install distributions you've never even tried. Troll.

It's packaged for commercial use, it should "just work" out of the box.

It does. Commercial desktop users don't have any business installing nvidia opengl drivers themselves, they're supposed to be working, not playing guage.