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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.
Where's the torrent file?
Didn't RedHat 7 get released already? I am so confused.
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
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
From the release notes, it seems Severn uses GCC 3.2.3, not 3.3.
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
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Yes, should work just fine both ways
/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
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
here
Yes, it's GTK2--ironically Gimp is one of the last GTK1 users!
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.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
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!)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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
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!
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
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.
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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?