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Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed

viewstyle writes "eWEEK has got a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta, code named Taroon. It now has the new Red Hat Bluecurve interface. New important stuff includes: logical volume management and access control lists in the file system. The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time. If you're interested, you can download it here."

191 comments

  1. ONE STEP CLOSER by hedrush999 · · Score: 0, Troll

    If only more corporations would actually know about this development, the world would be a happier place...

    1. Re:ONE STEP CLOSER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i just hope that redhat enterprise is better than the standard redhat.

      because the standard redhat is to linux as what kfc is to chickens.

  2. Doo? by rylin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was under the impression you had to buy a support-license to be able to use RH Enterprise?
    Have I been smoking something, or is there another explanation for this?

    1. Re:Doo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Don't forget that you also need to purchase a System V binary runtime licence for each CPU.

    2. Re:Doo? by chill · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, the software is all FOSS. You just don't get support for it.

      Also, don't go buying one copy, installing 10 and wanting support for 10 on the price of 1. THAT is a no-no.

      "The term "Services" as used in this Agreement means, collectively, the Support Services and RHEN, each as defined herein."

      On the other hand, if you install 100 copies and later want tech support for just one then you must buy tech support for all 100 before you get help. :-)

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    3. Re:Doo? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      Then where is the downloads for earlier versions? And will this be available after release?

      I've not seen them available at RH site... All I ever see is the 'workstation' edition ( and the Database iso )

      Or do you mean you have to create it by hand using a bunch of packages?

      Not that I'm trying to get out of paying for support, ( though I'm support in this case ), but I sure as hell wont ask a client to fork out $$ if I cant really show them what they are getting.... ( so I give them FBSD instead.. something they can sample, and come to me for support ).

      But it would be nice to offer something with some brand recognition as well...

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    4. Re:Doo? by chill · · Score: 2, Informative

      I believe the GPL only requires that the sources be available on request. I saw the sources (SRPMs) for the ia64 version of 2.1 AW at ftp.redhat.com.

      Red Hat doesn't have to make binaries available for download.

      However, if you have an RHN account, you can get priority access to most files (200+ Kbps download speed as opposed to 30 Kbps from ftp.redhat.com). Right now I see the following available:

      RHL 6.2 Normal, Power Tools and Enterprise Edition
      RHL 7.0 Normal, Power Tools
      RHL 7.1 Normal, Power Tools
      RHL 7.2 Normal, K-12 LTSP
      RHL 7.3 Normal, K-12 LTSP, Educational Software
      RHL 8.0 Normal, K-12 LTSP
      RHL 9 Normal, K-12 LTSP

      RHL 9.0.93 Beta Normal
      RHL Enterprise 3 AS Beta 1 & Updates
      RHL Enterprise 3 WS Beta 1 & Updates

      Most, if not all, seem to be there as .RPM, .SRPM and .ISO images.

      By looking at "all channels", I also see versions of most of the above for SPARC, Alpha, ia64, pSeries, zSeries, S/390 and the newer ones for x86_64.

      2.1AS for i386 is available at:
      ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AS/en/os/i386/SRPMS

      2.1AS for ia64 is available at:
      ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AS/en/os/ia64/SRPMS

      2.1AW (for ia64) is available at:
      ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AW/en/os/ia64/SRPMS

      However, 2.1ES doesn't seem to have SRPMs online, nor does 2.1WS (i386). Hmmm....you can send a request to RedHat.

      But, if you're looking to eval WS then I suggest 3.0 (based off of RHL 9) and not 2.1 (based off of RHL 7.3). Download yourself some beta .isos. If you can't do that, let me know and I'll burn you a set an send them out. I just d/led binary disks 1,2 & 3 off of RHN.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    5. Re:Doo? by _|()|\| · · Score: 1
      Then where is the downloads for earlier versions?

      Red Hat doesn't make it easy to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without paying for support. You can get source RPMS from the FTP site, but you need Red Hat Enterprise Network with an RHEL entitlement to get ISOs and binary packages.

      Someone with a subscription should be able to give you most of the packages, but possibly not the ISOs. The RHEL subscription agreement is kind of scary, so I haven't been that interested.

      I'm disappointed that Red Hat has only RHEL, for which you must pay every year, and RHL, which only gets a year of updates. I'd consider paying a one-time fee of $100 - $200 for a Red Hat that had more than a year of updates. This may be feasible if you're willing to build the RHEL errata from source, but that means you have to satisfy all the build requirements (e.g., -devel packages).

    6. Re:Doo? by alta · · Score: 1

      What? Are you serious? You mean I can download RHAS just like the regular redhat?? If so, where are they on the mirror? I've never seen them!

      --
      Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
  3. Call that a review? by kiltedtaco · · Score: 5, Informative

    That was just a general list of features! Does anything there actualy even suggest that the author actualy installed the OS?

    This is about as newsworthy as the "Top universities" thing.

    1. Re:Call that a review? by jbottero · · Score: 2, Informative

      From the second paragraph: "The beta we tested, code-named Taroon..."

      And later: "During tests, we were pleased with the feature's usability."

      Sounds like they installed it...

    2. Re:Call that a review? by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Yep, and next review announced on /. will be icon sized picture of some product.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    3. Re:Call that a review? by yobbo · · Score: 1

      Which was probably copy and pasted from the company website's product page...

    4. Re:Call that a review? by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Better not be some SCO product. They are gonna sue them for copy/paste of their IP rights:)

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    5. Re:Call that a review? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As something that was in system V copy and paste functions are hereby claimed as part of SCO's intellectual property. All users with an OS that supports these features will need a system v runtime license, available for $99 per desktop, volume discounts can be negotiated. Darl McBride.

  4. Beta by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's a beta.

    NO HELP FOR YOU!

  5. LVM: article is wrong by menscher · · Score: 5, Informative

    It says "LVM first surfaced in the 8.0 release of Red Hat Linux", but I'm using it under RH7.3, so....

    1. Re:LVM: article is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think it's a little misleading, but not outright wrong. LVM was indeed included in RH7.3 (disc2), but I'm not sure if it was available during the install process.

    2. Re:LVM: article is wrong by justsomebody · · Score: 3, Informative

      If I read it correctly, LVM was present in 7.3, but 8.0 was the first version that introduced autodetecting of LVM volume in booting up

      In 7.3 you had to edit rc.local and add commands to scan volumes, 8.0 contains

      # LVM initialization
      if [ -f /etc/lvmtab -a ! -e /proc/lvm ] ; then
      modprobe lvm-mod >/dev/null 2>&1
      fi
      if [ -e /proc/lvm -a -x /sbin/vgchange -a -f /etc/lvmtab ]; then
      action $"Setting up Logical Volume Management:" /sbin/vgscan && /sbin/vgchange -a y
      fi


      in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, that's difference as much as I see it

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    3. Re:LVM: article is wrong by sudohnim · · Score: 1

      I beg to differ:

      $ grep -A4 LVM /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
      # LVM initialization
      if [ -e /proc/lvm -a -x /sbin/vgchange -a -f /etc/lvmtab ]; then
      action $"Setting up Logical Volume Management:" /sbin/vgscan && /sbin/vgchange -a y
      fi
      $ cat /etc/redhat-release
      Red Hat Linux release 7.2 (Enigma)

      --
      Its pretty sad when a commercial OS ships a debugger with their system but no compiler.
    4. Re:LVM: article is wrong by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      As I said this was what it is in LVM documentation. That means zoure completelz right. No change in support

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
  6. The review by slovin8 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, this review has no screenshots at all for the Bluecurve or anything else! The review didn't also evanglize KDE over Gnome or vice versa!! Now that's rare Anyhow, We demand screenshots!

    1. Re:The review by justsomebody · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah, right. And then you'll probably ask for a review how good is RH Advanced Server for desktop.

      Just like people were reviewing M$ Server 2003

      Server is SERVER, but if you expect some fancy tools, you're wrong. Differences between RH AS and Desktop are mainly for what purpose it was compiled together, and for what services, oh yes and RH AS 2.1 has Java server.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
  7. ACLs by FreeLinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone know if ACLs are included in the Red Hat 10 Severn beta or is it strictly for Enterprise?

    1. Re:ACLs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And the 5.x branch isn't considered production level yet. That's 4.x, which will soon see relase 4.9 next month if all goes according to schedule. So it looks like RedHat Enterprise Edition will win the race in this one (unless 5.2 comes out first and is at last considered safe for production level). FYI, I use FreeBSD 5.1 on my system.

    2. Re:ACLs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I don't know but I assume so since the betas for 8 and 9 included it (removed due to "stability problems").

    3. Re:ACLs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Fact: *BSD is dying

      It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

      OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

      Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

      All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.

      Fact: *BSD is dying

    4. Re:ACLs by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1
      Linux has had it since the kernel 2.2x days. Its just not compiled by default on most distro's. I think SUse has been doing this for awhile but I am not too sure.

      ACL's are really a VMS thing and NT thing. In these operating systems bits for ACL's as well as permissions are stored in the filesystem. I believe ( not to sure ) that ext2/ext3 only has the permissions bits set in atrributes in the filesystem. This makes ACL support in Linux less powerfull. I have not used Linux in awhile but I do remember playing around with ACL's patches in the redhat 5.2 days.

    5. Re:ACLs by __past__ · · Score: 1
      ACL's are really a VMS thing and NT thing.
      Dunno about Linux ACLs, but the FreeBSD ones follow POSIX.1e rather closely, and Solaris seems heavily inspired by them, even if it's not API compatible. Sounds like a Unix thing to me, even if the standardization effort has been canceled (the downloadable versions of POSIX.1e have "Withdrawn Draft" printed all over them).

      It's really not much more than a generalization of the user/group/other read/write/execute matrix. How you implement it, using extended attributes or by extending the "native" permission implementation, doesn't really matter much, from a user perspective.

    6. Re:ACLs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I heard some guy here said nobody uses BSD anymore.

  8. Feature list by cly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's not a review. That's just a list of features copied from the README file or something.

    And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?

    1. Re:Feature list by FreeLinux · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Als, please pay special attention to those "server" apps that were covered in the review, KDE, GNOME, Evolution, Eclipse, OpenOffice. I don't know how my servers have managed without these for so long. The only items they mentioned that are truely important to servers are ACLs and LVM.

      Absolutely no mention was made of Apache, SQL server, SAMBA, mail, performance, reliability, nothing.

    2. Re:Feature list by Li0n · · Score: 1

      It's amazing how sterile and robotic reviews sound lately.
      Hell, even my spam mails sound more compelling.

      --

      ~
      ~
      :wq
    3. Re:Feature list by SoSueMe · · Score: 1

      I really liked the way they spelled out all the acronyms!

    4. Re:Feature list by justMichael · · Score: 1

      Disclaimer: I did NOT RTFA.

      I would venture to guess that they "reviewed" the WS version...

      RedHat has 3 versions of Enterprise:
      AS == Advanced Server
      ES == Enterprise Server
      WS == WorkStation

    5. Re:Feature list by Alien+Being · · Score: 1

      Als, please pay special attention to those "server" apps that were covered in the review, KDE, GNOME, Evolution, Eclipse, OpenOffice.

      They *are* server apps if the environment is full of thin clients.

    6. Re:Feature list by T-Ranger · · Score: 1
      Just look at the file names:

      -rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 140869632 Jul 20 22:03 taroon-i386-as-disc1.iso -rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 666238976 Jul 20 21:58 taroon-i386-disc2.iso -rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 568131584 Jul 20 22:03 taroon-i386-disc3.iso -rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 327122944 Jul 20 22:05 taroon-i386-ws-disc1.iso Different install, and the workstation version haas about 160mb more avialable packages. Makes sense to me.

    7. Re:Feature list by alienhazard · · Score: 1

      out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon

      Thats almost 60%!!!

      --
      > "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
    8. Re:Feature list by Feztaa · · Score: 1

      And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?

      My immediate reaction to this was "You're kidding, right? What the hell kind of word is 'Taroon'?"

      Then I glanced at the article, saw that you were right, and that made me sad.

      I don't care what the rest of the article said, if I wrote an essay for my English course and started 60% of the paragraphs with the same word, my prof would fail me. Period.

    9. Re:Feature list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Thats almost 60%!!!

      Even for VERY small values of 6!!!

  9. Maybe its just me, by Hal+The+Computer · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    but I wouldn't trust any data to an OPERATING SYSTEM that is in beta.

    --

    int main(void){int x=01232;while(malloc(x));return x;}
    1. Re:Maybe its just me, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thats why you replace "beta" with a "98" or some other number. Seems to have worked so far...

    2. Re:Maybe its just me, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And that is just the way it should be... no one with half a brain would. Although you likely wouldn't have much trouble. But I don't think anyone ever said they did or would.. there are many warnings about doing so. The idea is to use a different partition or a secondary computer with nothing of value on it. Betas are fun to muck with and I do it all the time. It doesn't mean I give it any access to mess my data up.

    3. Re:Maybe its just me, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      its just you.

      the word beta means nothing. you have to actaully look at what they mean by beta. cause stability wise, most windows boxes are beta in my opinion. where as the latest 2.6 is not a beta in my opin, because its STABLE

    4. Re:Maybe its just me, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, we have been running a Solaris 8 beta for the last 3 years for a DNS system and the os has not choked or crashed yet.

    5. Re:Maybe its just me, by Nothinman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Noone said you should. This is being released so that people can install it on test machines, put their software on it, see if/how it works and report bugs back so they can be fixed before the final release. I doubt RH would sell you a copy of the beta even if you asked them too.

    6. Re:Maybe its just me, by dollar70 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      but I wouldn't trust any data to an OPERATING SYSTEM that is in beta.

      But I'd trust my data on a beta OS before trusting the worm infested nightmare unleashed by some multi-billion dollar software company. It's a matter of perspective, but the order goes like this:

      1. Alpha - We know it's got problems, but the concept seems sound
      2. Beta - If it has any problems, we haven't been able to find them.
      3. Commercial/Final/Stable - We can't find any problems, and neither could our beta testers, so it must be your fault.
      Many times, beta passes directly into the third stage without modification, but it's a crap-shoot no matter who you trust.
  10. ACLs already in SuSE ... by Marcus+Meissner · · Score: 3, Informative

    ACLs have been in SuSEs Enterprise Server since end of last year, so they are barely news.

    1. Re:ACLs already in SuSE ... by the+uNF+cola · · Score: 1

      Hah, that's nothing. I've had my ACLs all my life. Though mine will break down at some point :(

      --

      --
      "I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo

    2. Re:ACLs already in SuSE ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No one appreciates ligament humor anymore, I guess...

  11. What review?? by Broken_Windows · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We are currently looking at 2.1 vs SuSe enterprise for an upcoming application so I though this would be worth a read, not. Looks like a local review is in order.

  12. ACLs in Linux is new? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haven't the necessary ACL patches been available for a while?

    1. Re:ACLs in Linux is new? by sloanster · · Score: 1

      ACLs for linux have been available for years as an add-on. Just not a lot of demand, since the standard unix ownership/permissions bits work fine for 99.99% of the imaginable needed scenarios.

      Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.

    2. Re:ACLs in Linux is new? by buchanmilne · · Score: 2, Informative

      Just not a lot of demand, since the standard unix ownership/permissions bits work fine for 99.99% of the imaginable needed scenarios.

      I don't quite agree, unless you think that group permissions and a limit of 32 groups total, and 15 over NFS is enough to have sufficiently fine-grained access controls. We don't, so we have been running Mandrake on XFS for 2 years.

      Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.

      s/vendors/Red Hat/

      SuSE and Mandrake have shipped supporting ACLs in an increasing number of filesystems for thier past 3-4 general releases (Mandrake for 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, kernel update for 8.1 supports ACLs).

    3. Re:ACLs in Linux is new? by sloanster · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure what the number of groups has to do with the filesystem ownership/permissions, and in any case you may have some interesting way of doing things that uses a lot of groups.

      I've worked for the past 10 years as a sys admin in university, small business and enterprise settings, and have been able to satisfy every single permissions scenario I've come across by using the ugo and the sticky/setuid bits - plus the occasional ext2 extended attributes.

      Despite your comment, it's not only red hat, but vendors such as suse, who added acl support only after acls had been generally available as an add-on and used by certain folks for some years.

    4. Re:ACLs in Linux is new? by duffbeer703 · · Score: 1

      I guess you haven't worked with HIPAA-sensitive data or other data that must be kept confidential.

      ACLs are also far easier to manage and require less effort to modify.

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  13. ACLs by Plix · · Score: 3, Informative

    The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time.

    FreeBSD has had ACLs (in the 5.x branch) for some time as well.

  14. fair warning by jacquesm · · Score: 2, Informative

    RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release, so don't install this on anything mission critical (as in it's your living or someone will get mad at you if it fails).

    Are you on the grapevine yet ?

    1. Re:fair warning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're talking about the regular Red Hat stuff. Not the Enterprise stuff. Their current version is 2.1. 2.1 is solid.

    2. Re:fair warning by Nighttime · · Score: 2, Informative

      That was the general rule of thumb for the regular RedHat releases but this is the Enterprise edition we're/they're talking about. Besides, RH8 and RH9 have proven themselves to be fairly resiliant.

      --
      I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
    3. Re:fair warning by jacquesm · · Score: 1

      ah, you're absolutely right there, sorry about that. Even so, 'beta' should be enough warning :)

      Are you on the grapevine yet ?

    4. Re:fair warning by fr0z · · Score: 1
      RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release

      Redhat will not be releasing point versions for the consumer versions, not sure about the Enterprise versions though. So home users won't really have a choice but to use RH 10 if they want the latest and greatest from RH...

      --
      Never underestimate the predictability of human stupidity...
    5. Re:fair warning by sloanster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's FUD - red hat's enterprise stuff is 100% supported for mission critical applications.

      You're probably thinking of the unsupported consumer releases, which in the past have been a bit buggy at *.0 releases and shaped up nicely by *.2 releases.

      Having said that, our RH 9 firewalls are holding up nicely after some months of heavy use - but managers love the accountability of having someone to yell at with the "enterprise" editions...

    6. Re:fair warning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But there hasn't been even a .1 in Red Hat standard since 7.3! How can you say that 8 and 9 are not rock solid? Never mind.

    7. Re:fair warning by bogie · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well as others pointed out that doesn't nearly apply to their enterprise offerings. I'd also like to say Red Hat 8.0 also pretty much crushed that myth. Maybe for workstation use 6.0 wasn't that great, but for basic server use I've found Red Hat has serverd me well regardless of the version. So I'd say its basically time to put the Red Hat .0 myth to bed now.

      --
      If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    8. Re:fair warning by Vexalith · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      [quote] Are you on the grapevine yet ? [/quote] Surprisingly not, due to its sad (but not unexpected) lack of support for anything other than Windows and Internet Explorer.

    9. Re:fair warning by jacquesm · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      yep, we're aware of that, and working on it. Unfortunately we are only two (Keir Mierle and myself) and browser plug ins are not exactly easy to make (or debug). Keir will start working on different browser plug ins soon...

    10. Re:fair warning by __past__ · · Score: 1
      RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release
      Redhat will not be releasing point versions for the consumer versions
      Both can be true...
  15. Eclipse + no JVM by maharg · · Score: 2, Informative

    Taroon ships with version 2.1 of the open source Eclipse Development Environment. Eclipse requires a Java virtual machine to run, but Taroon doesn't ship with one.

    Huh ? Eclipse + no JVM seems a bit pointless IMO..
    Eclipse is a cool IDE tho, and it saves a download..

    --

    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
    1. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by Junta · · Score: 1

      I presume they strip out the JVM as they can't restribute them freely. In the commercial, final package, you get a commercial JRE with the whole thing.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I seem to remember RedHat saying that they had compiled Eclipse with gcj.

      Combine this with gij, and there's no need for a Sun JVM, unless you want java 1.4 capabilities...

    3. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by chill · · Score: 2, Informative

      I had this discussion with the reviewer via e-mail earlier today. The website (http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2-1.html) mentions that the IBM JDK is delivered with the product. [Read it again Jason, it *does* refer to WS as well as EA and AS.]

      However, it seems it wasn't either included or installed with the reviewer's beta. Hopefully, this will be fixed before the actual release.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    4. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by rkz · · Score: 2, Informative

      Eclipse no longer needs a JVM to run.
      They are using the GTK version.

    5. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by Plug · · Score: 1

      While the other comments to this post address the issue, it raises hope for the group of Linux sysadmins who don't need Red Hat for their technical support, but want to be able to run a version of Linux that's commercially supported by their application vendor.

      The only 'non GPL' part of RHEL 2.1 was the JVM; if they're leaving it out of 3 entirely, then (pending trademark issues) there should be nothing stopping you copying an entire RHEL 3 CD. And while I'm not saying that you perhaps should, it sure makes the "Debian vs RHEL for servers" argument a bit more interesting.

      If it's just omitted out due to the public redistributability of the beta, then I'm sure the project to rebuild RHEL from source will be able to provide what you want.

      There's also a RHEL rebuild HOWTO.

    6. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by maharg · · Score: 1

      wow.. that's cool - I remember reading about that now. The articles assertion that it does need a JVM must have been what threw me. - thanks rkz :o)

      --

      $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
      @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
    7. Re:Eclipse + no JVM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Huh ? Eclipse + no JVM seems a bit pointless IMO.. Eclipse is a cool IDE tho, and it saves a download..
      I guess you missed this story?
  16. "new bluecurve interface"? whuzzat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *coughs* screenshots?

    1. Re:"new bluecurve interface"? whuzzat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Screenshots? SCREENSHOTS? *Real* admins only use command line...

  17. Coincidence? I think not!!11!! by bad_fx · · Score: 5, Funny

    Taroon.. Hmmm... Taroon.. Aha!!!11

    If you reverse Taroon you get "Noorat", Right?
    Okay, now... tihs is clearly ROT-14 encoded so decoding it you get "Zaadmf" uhuh? stay with me here... Now reversing that gives "Fmdaaz" Yes? Good...

    Now... md clearly stands for "Must Die" and F is clearing code for "SCO". (or "Fuckers" if you prefer) Finally I have also uncovered through unrevealed sources at Red Hat that "aaz" is special inhouse code for "(sponsored by IBM)."

    So Taroon is actually code for.....:

    "SCO must die! (sponsored by IBM)"

    DARL WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!!11!!!11

    ...i'm not cray.. i'm not crazy... *sits in corner twitching*

  18. YOU BIG POMPOUS PUSSY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Real men run the bleeding edge stuff.

  19. duh look at the price by atari2600 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    . Red Hat officials said they plan to ship RHEL 3.0 in October. As with Version 2.1, the new release will come in workstation, departmental server and data center server versions, with the high-end version priced at about $2,500.

    Ummm who thinks this is a little expensive even for big organisations? Also..

    Taroon ships with version 2.1 of the open source Eclipse Development Environment. Eclipse requires a Java virtual machine to run, but Taroon doesn't ship with one.

    HUH!!!

    1. Re:duh look at the price by mindriot · · Score: 0, Troll

      $2,500... maybe that includes $699 for you-know-who, or more, respectively, for more CPUs... ;-)

    2. Re:duh look at the price by jbottero · · Score: 1

      Not really when M$ "enterprise" software can run $10,000 and up.

    3. Re:duh look at the price by stoolpigeon · · Score: 3, Informative

      No - I work at a small business. My boss priced a low end dell server (like $6k) - then he had to pay the license for win2k and SQL server- I think it ran somewhere around $10k- four thousand dollars more than the server.

      We went with PostgreSQL on Red Hat. It doesn't do everything SQL Server does out of the box- but we didn't need everything SQL server does. $25,000 is peanuts.

      --
      It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    4. Re:duh look at the price by guacamole · · Score: 1

      The RH ES and WS are more reasonable prices (the list price is something like $400 and $200 per year per machine if all you want is right to use license and the updates)

    5. Re:duh look at the price by yem · · Score: 1

      "As with Version 2.1, the new release will come in workstation, departmental server and data center server versions.."

      The beta dir linked to in this story only has downloads for WS and AS - no ES. Why is there no beta of the one version that will probably be the most popular (due to price/features tradeoff)?

      --
      No, I did not read the f***ing article!
    6. Re:duh look at the price by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 1

      Given that the beta is free, just install AS.

    7. Re:duh look at the price by owlstead · · Score: 1

      25,000 is peanuts? You probably meant 2.500 but you can do a lot of things with that kinda money, even in IT. It depends on your requirements.

      Warper

      You send me $25,000 and I will send not one but _two_ sachets of peanuts!

    8. Re:duh look at the price by _|()|\| · · Score: 1
      who thinks [$2,500] is a little expensive

      You have several options, ranging from $180 to $2,500. $2,500 gets you RHEL AS with premium support, which includes 24/7 phone support for critical problems. Most users will want RHEL ES with basic ($350) or standard ($700) support.

  20. Red Hat ES license Issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You have to pay for support even if you don't need it on a development server:

    4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.
    http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2- 1.html

    You have to abide by the above agreement if you buy a server. So this means if you install it on additional servers, you have to buy support even if you don't need support for a development box.

    That sucks. This is even ok with GPL

    1. Re:Red Hat ES license Issue by Kjella · · Score: 1

      I assume it's a way to try to make it more fair. It wouldn't be fair that a company running one server and a company running 100 servers woulc be purchasing support for one each (and the one that's supported has all the problems and need all the patches, right? Which would then happen to end up on the 99 others.)

      Yes is sucks if you just want to have a test installation. But trying to put down "fair" in a non-ambigious service contract is very difficult, so a flat out "We support all or no installations, make the choice" is fair enough. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to go with that distro nor get support from them.

      Kjella

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:Red Hat ES license Issue by T-Ranger · · Score: 1
      Redhat Enterprise == Support Contract

    3. Re:Red Hat ES license Issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hah! And to think of all the stones that were hurled at Caldera when they were charging for support for each sold Caldera Linux! And now, all of a sudden, all of Slashdot is in support of the same thing - when done by their beloved RedHat!

    4. Re:Red Hat ES license Issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some people need RHEL (because they have software which will not run on regular RHL) but they don't need support.

  21. I've been using this for a couple weeks. by j1mmy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Stable enough, though pretty haphazardly put together, even for a beta release. The distro is missing stuff like postgresql's server and pine. You can build these from source rpms or download them from up2date, but they're not available as binary rpms anywhere on redhat's ftp. Other than that, it seems to be pretty solid on my dual opterons.

    1. Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. by fearlessrogue · · Score: 2, Funny

      on my dual opterons. Lucky bastard.

      --

      Everything Zen;
      Everything Zen;
      I don't think so!!!
    2. Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No pine? pfft... screw this distro. First fortunes, now pine? Have they no shame?

    3. Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. by ComputerSlicer23 · · Score: 1
      Resonable surprised that postgres is missing. However, pine is most intentional. Pine is going by the wayside due to the licensing by Washington University (I think they wrong it). It's not free software, so RedHat won't ship it. That was explained in the RH 8 or 9 README.

      Kirby

    4. Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. by fo0bar · · Score: 4, Informative

      [Pine's] not free software, so RedHat won't ship it.

      Close, but the reason is this: Red Hat CANNOT ship pine, techically. This is because Red Hat includes its own patches in nearly every RPM it releases. (This is usually to fix a bug in hardware X with glibc Y that only occurs Z minutes each year... you get the idea.) While Pine's license allows for the creation of patches against the product, it does not allow for distributing patches binaries, without prior approval from UofW. Whether those patches are available to the end user is irrelevant, Pine's authors don't like "modified" binaries to be released.

      Of course, source-based ports systems like Gentoo or *BSD are fine, due to their nature, but distros like Red Hat don't want to go through the hoops involved with Pine, so they just choose not to.

    5. Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. by pyrotic · · Score: 1

      It's not just Pine. All University of Washinton stuff is on the way out. Pico (basic text editor) is replaced by GNU Nano. UW-IMAP will be replaced by dovecot, but not till next release (already happened in RH10 beta, but not AS), WU-FTP will be replaced by vsftpd (happened as of v9 AFAIK). Means I'll need to learn some new config tricks/have to rewrite cron jobs/work out new chroot setup. Hopefully it will be painless, but you never know. I'm looking at the glacial pace of change of Solaris, and almost feeling envious.

  22. Downloads of non-beta? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am curious as to whether Redhat Enterprise is downloadable without paying for the service that goes with it?

    It IS GPL after all...

    1. Re:Downloads of non-beta? by Gonoff · · Score: 1

      I think that if a RH distro is available for download it is free to use but may have had some stuff removed.

      This is a beta and support is done in the more traditional way. You ask people - email, NNTP forums and so on.

      --
      I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
    2. Re:Downloads of non-beta? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 1

      It's not available for download; some parts are not open source.

  23. RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by MmmmAqua · · Score: 5, Informative

    For anyone who's interested...

    I run Oracle 9iR2 on RHAS 2.1 machines at my work. Generally, I have been very happy overall with the performance and stability of Oracle on Linux (though, for home use, certainly not - Oracle costs an arm, a leg, and both of their respective prosthetic replacements). There are a couple of things that RHAS 3.0 does much better than 2.1 (that I've noticed, and these only relate to Oracle on Linux, so this may be completely irrelevant to you). All tests were done on a Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual 2.8Gz Xeon, 6GB RAM, a PERC3Di RAID controller driving a five-disk RAID 5, and dual gigabit ethernet controllers.

    First, the inclusion of the hyperthreaded scheduler. I run dual Xeon machines, and enabling HT on the 3.0 beta allowed the machine to handle 10-12% more load than with HT disabled. Enabling HT on 2.1 incurred a performance penalty, as the scheduler would tend to starve one CPU.

    Second, you can now use bigpages with a shmfs large SGA (SGA > 1.7Gb). My production servers have a 3Gb SGA, and using 4kb pages is painful. I don't know what the problem was with 2.1, but this is a big fix for me, as it means I don't have to lower the mapped base address for all of my Oracle binaries anymore. Woohoo!

    Third, LVM is nice. You can use LVM with 2.1, with a little doing, but in general it is a pain. Being able to create volumes at boot time is nice, and then later on, when I decide to hang a PowerVault enclosure off the PowerEdge, being able to just toss that large pool of extra storage into the volume is nice, too.

    Lastly, if you are using Java in your Oracle database at all, then you will see a big benefit from NPTL. At least, I am assuming it's NPTL, but my Java stored procedures which spawn threads to parallelize some heavy lifting are executing much faster. I'm probably jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I don't care. Some of my extproc .so's are threaded, and they're running better, too.

    I don't really care about Bluecurve, because I never use X on the Oracle servers. The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the installs. That's Oracle's fault, though, so no digs on Red Hat for that. I also really, really wish that Red Hat would include some more filesystems. Ext3 is okay, but for larger database files, I would much rather be using XFS.

    All in all, I think RHAS 3 beta is a significant step forward for Red Hat, at least for Oracle users. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the hanic (High-Availability NIC) daemon from Oracle runs better on 3.0 beta than 2.1. It's cool to be able to yank one of the ethernet cables out of your machine during heavy traffic and have everything keep running.

    --
    Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    1. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by ortholattice · · Score: 1
      The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the installs.

      How the world seems to regress. To me, this was a big advantage of installing (and using) Oracle on Linux, vs. the pointy-clicky Windows version. I could write a script to automate the install and just let it run, vs. a painful morning's worth of click-and-wait on Windows. I could easily experiment with different installation options. And a script lets you painlessly rebuild a system from scratch, if need be, whereas it's always "did I click this, or click that the last time I did this?" with Windows, trying to recover from hand-written scribbles.

      Fortunately we're moving to PostgreSQL for some things (noncritical ones that don't scare the PHBs) - I find PG to be cleaner, simpler, and more pleasant to use. It's actually not that hard to convert the database, even stored procedures.

    2. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      You forgot one little detail.

      RH AS 3.0 will be faster. Everything goes in favour of disk-access. I can't really speak for SCSI but for extra large LVM Volumes on IDE drives it will make a great difference.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    3. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by madhippy · · Score: 1

      Isn't oracle available as a free download for non-production use (ie. you could use it at home as a dev/learning system ? or is it only an eval version ?

    4. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm, even though X is required, you can still do a silent install. Works great for doing the same install on multiple machines.

      Of course, you can stil ljust TAR up the whole damn $ORACLE_HOME and copy it to another machine. Requires a bit of config, but it's no big deal to a competent Oracle DBA.

    5. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by BigGerman · · Score: 1

      very true - I have been tarring moving and untarring the same $ORACLE_HOME for some three years now!

    6. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      You can buy a development-only license for Oracle9i for $200, but the Personal version of Oracle is not available for Linux. Only Enterprise and Standard. Both of which run into the thousands of dollars.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    7. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      There are few, if any, changes in the driver for Dell PERC RAID controllers. I have both the PERC3/Di and PERC4/DC controllers in my test machine, and have noticed no improvement in IO performance. These devices were plenty fast in 2.1, anyway; I have a PowerVault 220 with 14 U160 disks in it in a split backplane configuration, and with 2.1 I could easily saturate the PowerVault's SCSI channel.

      I cannot speak to improvements in the IDE layer, as the only IDE device in any of my servers is the DVD-ROM.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    8. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      Thanks for casting doubt on my competence. However, tarring up $ORACLE_HOME is only useful if you are replicating an install for the exact same use on a different machine. In my experience, this happens rarely, unless you are installing several machines for RAC. There are big differences in which Oracle software you should install for a DSS machine, an OLTP machine, or a hybrid machine.

      As for the silent install, you are correct: this is an option - but only if you've gone through it once before and created an answers file for the install process. And it's really only useful for replicating machines for RAC.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    9. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by killmister · · Score: 1

      >That's Oracle's fault, though, so no digs on Red >Hat for that. I also really, really wish that >Red Hat would include some more filesystems. >Ext3 is okay, but for larger database files, I >would much rather be using XFS. I think you should put Oracle on raw devices rather than to filesystems.

      --
      MySQL Error 1040: Can't return sig, Too many connections!
    10. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Yep. SCSI change will be affected in 2.6 due to new scheduler, which includes simultaneous device write/read improvements.

      But as I tested (on SCSI), it does make a little difference, when there are simultaneous connections over network to different files

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    11. Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      Oracle performance on raw devices is abysmal. Even Oracle admits so: http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2003/techa rticles/scalzo_linux02.html

      This evaluation is only applicable to Linux, of course, but we're talking about Oracle on Linux.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
  24. Its things like this.... by windex82 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost add-ons such as Java virtual machine and Flash Player remains unclear; on the desktop, lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.

    Please correct me if im wrong but the Red Hat Enterprise releases are ment to be used in the server environments, I couldnt see but a very few cases were a workstation might need an enterprise version.

    Assumming im correct its statements like this that really get to me --

    CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost add-ons such as Java virtual machine and Flash Player remains unclear; on the desktop, lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.


    As a server it dosnt NEED this range of application, i would wager that if theres some kind of strange deamon you need that linux dosnt have available, windows definatly wont have one available.

    1. Re:Its things like this.... by MmmmAqua · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, RHAS is pitched to enterprise applications, and one of the biggest enterprise applications is Oracle. You are supposed to have installed both Sun's 1.3.1 JVM, and Blackdown's 1.1.8 JRE on RHAS machines which are intended to run 9i.

      So, at least as far as a JVM goes, the author has a valid bitch.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    2. Re:Its things like this.... by windex82 · · Score: 1

      Its more this part that gets to me:

      lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.

      To a non-techinal PHB this translates to 'it cant do as much as windows so it cant possibly be as good'.

    3. Re:Its things like this.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are three versions of RedHat Enterprise Linux:

      Workstation
      Server
      Advanced Server

    4. Re:Its things like this.... by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      I can't help but concede that point. Of course, if you're buying Oracle, you can always tell your boss that Oracle itself has switched its infrastructure to Linux. That's a pretty big selling point to PHBs.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
  25. Useless Review.... by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is not so much a review as a rehash of the feature list. I don't care about bluecureve or the wonderful interface on an advanced server product.

    As they're not shipping a JDK with it, it's hard to know if their kernel modifications will break whatever JDK they do ship with (like the last RHAS did). Or if they only let you install to ext3, unless you feel like playing with command line install options.

    That java thing was a horrible mess, and was why we ultimately went with SuSE. Don't bill yourself as an OS for running those java application servers unless you test. Hopefully RH has fixed their issues this time around.

    1. Re:Useless Review.... by Kynes · · Score: 1

      Virtually every major JDK (Sun, IBM, et. al.) breaks when you move to an NPTL system because all of them pulled tricks with low level hooks into glibc and libpthread to try to up performance. This is the case with AS3 and with anyone else trying to implement NPTL at the moment. To my knowledge, neither Sun nor IBM have working JVMs yet, so none are in the beta.

    2. Re:Useless Review.... by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 1

      I don't know if that's what RH did in their last AS, but Sun's JDK worked just fine. RH just didn't support it, just the broken IBM JDK.

      Further, why bother? If you can't run java, and let's be realistic, a lot of their enterprise customers are going to want to do just that very thing (be it an application server, or oracle), what's the point of the product?

    3. Re:Useless Review.... by Mathetes · · Score: 1

      According to this, Red Hat will ship Sun's Java with RHEL:

      http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-05/su nf lash.20030519.4.html

    4. Re:Useless Review.... by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 1

      Is RHEL the same as RHAS?

    5. Re:Useless Review.... by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 1

      Yes; RHAS is the old name.

  26. RHAT by Subnirvana337 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Kind of offtoppic, but if anyone tries this out and discovers its relatively stable, let me know, i only have discone's iso...

    thanks

  27. Logical Volume Management by Yonder+Way · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's been shameful that RHEL customers have had to do without official LVM support while the retail users have had it for some time.

    I'm using it presently on RH 9 and found that Red Hat's implementation of LVM prevents snapshots from working properly. That is, you can create a logical snapshot, but you can't mount it. I downloaded the latest kernel source from kernel.org, copied the .config file over from the RH kernel, but didn't apply the Red Hat patches. Not only does the system work precisely as expected, but LVM snapshotting actually works just fine. I'm now able to properly back up my desktop machine.

    That Red Hat has known about this problem for ages and neglected to fix it is shameful. LVM should have been a priority all along for RHEL.

    1. Re:Logical Volume Management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Would you, or someone else, explain to me the benefit of LVM to a home user.

      I've been a Red Hat user (dumped windows) since the 6.x days, and have just kept upgrading. I have one partition for the system, and one for the home directories. This setup has run for a few years now (not counting a bit of shifting around for new hard discs)... so there doesn't seem to be any LVM system running on here. It's now running Red Hat 9...what do I have to do to use LVM, and is it worth it for me.

      My disk structure: First IDE channel: Two HDs, 1x4Gb with windows and GRUB booter installed, 1x30Gb with RH linux on it. Second IDE channel: 1 dvd, 1 CDR.

    2. Re:Logical Volume Management by Oggust · · Score: 2, Informative
      Well, as I see it, the two main advantages for running at home is:

      One. You don't have to allocate your storage at install-time. I always screw up and make some filesystem too small, and end up wth a maze of symlinks after a while. With LVM, just make some volumes, add enough space to install and then some, and grow them as you need more space.

      Two. One day, you're going to run out of space on your disk. So you buy more. For old-style installs, moving all the data around is a problem, but with LVM you just add the new disk, tell the system to use it for Physical Partitions, and grow your old volumes.

      And if you have hot-swap disks and a growable filesystem, you don't even need any downtime! (Note: RH9 does not support growing ext3 filesystems online, so you need to umount the volume to grow it.)

      Also, I like to tell it to allocate some of the volumes (the ones I really care about) on both disks, so they get mirrored.

      /August.

      --
      "An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1." -- 6.1.2.5, C99 standard.
    3. Re:Logical Volume Management by random_static · · Score: 2, Informative
      maintainability. granted it's not as big a deal as it is with production servers, but with your home system, you probably don't want to spend any time dicking around maintaining it if you don't really have to, do you? there's beer to drink and late shows to watch, after all - i know that's what i'd rather be doing...

      as a home user, you're probably not finding yourself having to expand suddenly-too-small filesystems very often. (although if you are, you want LVM.) but you might occasionally find yourself wanting to move all your filesystems over to that brand-spanking-new harddisk you bought, no? easy enough with LVM, just migrate the LVs to the newly-added PV, then delete the old one.

      snapshots might be useful, too, if you do backups like we all really ought to. no worries about files changing on you in the middle of the backup process when you're backing up a static snapshot.

      my only gripe with LVM: if you've got a configured and running "regular" setup with (say) three or four partitions, and migrate it the "easy" way to LVM, you'll be left with three or four unused partitions "in front" of your LVM PV, and deleting them is a minor PITA because your next boot is gonna choke on the VG activation so you'll have to fix it by hand. that's life for ya, i guess, i'm just hoping the device mapper in 2.6-to-be is gonna fix that...

    4. Re:Logical Volume Management by _|()|\| · · Score: 2, Informative
      explain to me the benefit of LVM to a home user

      LVM makes it practical to use separate file systems, and it supports snapshots. Since you've already got a separate /home file system, you may not want to bother migrating to LVM until your next full install.

      Before LVM, I would just make /boot and / for maximum flexibility. With LVM, I can make /boot, /, /home, /opt, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /usr/local.

      • /usr and /boot are mounted ro
      • /var and /tmp are mounted noatime
      • everything but / is mounted nodev
      • everything but / and /usr (and possibly /opt and /usr/local) are mounted nosuid, for what it's worth
      If one of the file systems gets too full, I can resize it. Ext3 has a nice tool called e2fsadm, but without on-line resize you may have to drop to single-user mode. XFS and JFS support on-line resize, I think, but can only grow. ReiserFS supports on-line resize (although the journal is a bit big for /tmp and /boot).

      Snapshots make backups easier. It's not a cure all, but it beats backing up an active file system. Unfortunately, Red Hat has scarcely acknowledged a critical snapshot bug. To get a clean snapshot, you need to temporarily lock the file system. Red Hat's LVM doesn't do this, so you can't mount the snapshot. (Snapshots are read only, so you can't replay the journal when the snapshot is dirty.) You may be able to dump or dd the snapshot, but you can't mount it to use tar or cpio.

      LVM makes me a little nervous, because it's one more thing that can go (and has gone) wrong. All in all, though, I'd hate to do without it.

  28. Exactly what is beta? by uberdave · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Aren't the file systems long out of the beta stage? It's not like their using newfs0.0.1b to format the disks. I'm sure that a *huge* portion of the OS, is in the "it's been stable for years" end of the spectrum.

  29. Possible Workaround by justMichael · · Score: 1

    If don't rely on their included servers... you can do your development on the Basic WS version for $179.00 a box.

    As explained to me by RedHat, the only difference between ES and WS is the server software in the install.

  30. Access Control Lists suck by briancollins · · Score: 1, Insightful

    When will people stop thinking about Access Control Lists? They're stupid, and overcomplicate things, plus they add bloat to the filesystem. Hello? User groups.

    idiots.

    1. Re:Access Control Lists suck by heff · · Score: 1

      The traditional owner / group / other (UGO) permission scheme is useful for surprisingly many scenarios. There are also some situations in which it is not appropriate. The solution is to use ACLs.

      --

      --

      |-_-| . o O ( bEef!)

    2. Re:Access Control Lists suck by crmartin · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Never actually worked in an environment with confidentiality requirements, have you, bubba?

      Let's assume that you want to eliminate ACLs but still need to implement fine-grained access control (like, you want to give Ann access to payroll records, but not to bank records, while giving Barry access to the bank records but keeping him out of the payroll.) You can do it in Linux without using ACLs: you simply set up a bunch of groups for things like 'payroll' and put Ann in payroll, but not Barry, etc. If you want to make it finer-grained, you could give Ann access to payroll for hourly and Amy could have access to payroll for exempt -- you now need groups 'payroll-hourly' and 'payroll-exempt'.

      Pretty quick, you have something like

      file group user

      pay-hr.xls payroll-hourly Ann
      pay-ex.xls payroll-exempt Amy
      bank.xls banking Barry
      ...
      in which every file has with it a group, and each group has the name of the user permitted access. In fact, since it's usually a few people, not just one, who has access, you will end up with a list of people who have controlled access.

      And all without access control lists. Except for the lists of people who are allowed access.

      What an advantage!

    3. Re:Access Control Lists suck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What if GROUP A needs READ access to a certain directory and GROUP B write access ? This is often needed in large environments !

    4. Re:Access Control Lists suck by crmartin · · Score: 1

      Absolutely correct. You can still simulate this by having a group of "readers" and "writers" -- in fact, you can simulate any ACL by making a group for each possible combination of read, write and execute access to each file being managed -- but pretty quickly you're down to a group for each person in the project... which is the limiting case of using groups to simulate ACLs.

    5. Re:Access Control Lists suck by penguin7of9 · · Score: 1

      Let me second this. I did an analysis of the actual access controls that existed on an AFS system after about two years of use. The ACLs made no sense and created big potential security holes.

      Yes, setting up UNIX-style groups is a pain for administrators. But giving users the ability to put arbitrary combinations of permissions onto their files is worse, at least in large, multi-user environments.

  31. Re:Coincidence? I think not!!11!! by deKernel · · Score: 1

    Hold on please....I need to get the pee out of my pants....

    Thanks for the laugh!

  32. God I wish... by Accipiter · · Score: 1

    It'd be so great if McBride reads Slashdot, takes your comment, and sticks it in a press release as "proof" of IBM's puppetmastery.

    I would laugh and laugh...

    --

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
    (If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

  33. Doesn't look compatible by etymxris · · Score: 2, Informative
    From the GPL FAQ:
    Does the GPL allow me to require that anyone who receives the software must pay me a fee and/or notify me?

    No. In fact, a requirement like that would make the program non-free. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the definition of free software.

    The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required to pay anyone a fee for doing so.
    So if customers of Red Hat are not allowed to redistribute the GPL portions of ES to either themselves (additional servers) or others without additional restrictions, then Red Hat is violating the GPL.

    Basically, it seems that Red Hat is selling their ES software only if it is coincident with a support contract. That is fine. But to restrict in any way redistribution of the software is not allowed. So the support contract cannot say anything about "additional servers", if it is to be compatible with the GPL. Of course, if the support contract was not tied to the distribution of ES, then I think it would be fine, since they would not be sold as a single product.
    1. Re:Doesn't look compatible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, you can of course install as many as you want w/o cost. But, they will refuse any support if any boxes aren't covered. Large customers can probably negotiate this point though.

    2. Re:Doesn't look compatible by etymxris · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Yes, you can of course install as many as you want w/o cost. But, they will refuse any support if any boxes aren't covered. Large customers can probably negotiate this point though.
      Well, if that's true, then it's fine. Then it's simply a matter of "the support contract is nullified if such-and-such or so-and-so." But the quoted language of the license is different, it says the customer will buy additional support contracts if the software is installed on additional machines. That is placing restrictions on redistribution, which is a big GPL no-no. I think they should revisit the language of their license.
    3. Re:Doesn't look compatible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just because the distribution contains GPLed software does not mean that the whole distribution is GPLed. If you read through the rest of the license the distribution contains IBM software under differing licensing terms. I suppose that there is also RedHat non-GPL code included in the distribution. You are free to take all the GPL code from the ES 3.0 package and install it on as many machines as you want. You can't however do that with any propriatary software.

    4. Re:Doesn't look compatible by GigsVT · · Score: 1

      Then it's simply a matter of "the support contract is nullified if such-and-such or so-and-so."

      Would that even be GPL compatible? I think that that would be a de facto restriction on distribution, since few companies would be willing to lose all support after they paid all that money for it. Is taking something away from someone if they exercise their rights under the GPL permissible?

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    5. Re:Doesn't look compatible by GigsVT · · Score: 1

      Yes, you can of course install as many as you want w/o cost. But, they will refuse any support if any boxes aren't covered.

      That's not what the license says. It says in plain english, if you install it on more servers, you will buy more licenses. They reserve the right to audit you for compliance also.

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    6. Re:Doesn't look compatible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You misunderstand. They are still free to redistribute as much as they want. The Support License restricts their USE of the software (you have to agree to buy support for every computer you use RH[AEW]S to be able to get support under this contract).

    7. Re:Doesn't look compatible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The RH does NOT have an non-GPL "RedHat code" in their distro.

  34. Missed something obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think you missed something obvious.

    Taroon is reversed for Noorat which is anyone LEET programmer will recognize as being identical to No*rat.

    Rat is code for SCO.
    * is short for "F***ing way".

    So what they're really saying is:
    No F***ing way SCO.

    SCO doesn't need IBM to screw them. They're doing a good job of it to themselves.

    ----
    SCO lawyers are weenies!

  35. ...and the moderators get fooled... by Anonymous+Commando · · Score: 1
    Taroon became available for free download from Red Hat's ftp site in late July. Red Hat officials said they plan to ship RHEL 3.0 in October. "Oddly enough, we had to delete a large, hidden directory of ghey child porn which belonged to Michael Sims" said the head of Red Hate, "but we've alered the appropriate authorities".

    While I have not read the actual article, I sincerely doubt that the preceding quote was actually in the article.

    --
    Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
  36. WS, AS.. hey where's ES? by yem · · Score: 1

    What happened to ES? Has this been dropped for 3.x?

    WS is Work Station - for desktop machines.
    AS is Advanced Server - comes with failover and other HA features.
    ES was the in-between one - the one that's almost affordable.

    Anyone know?

    --
    No, I did not read the f***ing article!
    1. Re:WS, AS.. hey where's ES? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Informative

      ES is not included in the beta but will be in the final release.

    2. Re:WS, AS.. hey where's ES? by yem · · Score: 1

      Ok. I would have liked a beta of ES though.

      At work we're looking at deploying several new Redhat ES servers and it'd be nice to test ES 3.0 before purchasing.

      --
      No, I did not read the f***ing article!
  37. Moderators: Troll Troll Troll!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    [...] Red Hat officials said they plan to ship RHEL 3.0 in October. "Oddly enough, we had to delete a large, hidden directory of ghey child porn which belonged to Michael Sims" said the head of Red Hate, "but we've alered the appropriate authorities".
    This is in the text, just search for it if you don't believe me. See it fifth paragraph down.
  38. WTF! No Alpha branch? No Sparc branch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now comes

    Index of ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/taroon/ en/iso

    Up to higher level directory

    AMD64 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM
    i386 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM
    ia64 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM
    ppc 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM
    s390 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM
    s390x 7/23/03 7:59:00 PM


    This is teh sh1t! There are m0re combined Alpha and Sparc users than there are Power(PC)Feaces. Truly, a sad day in RedHat history in-deed. Alpha and Sparc support will be soarly missed.

    UPDATE: RedHat Survey says: "RTFM and comp1le y0ur 0wnz! -RedHat Tech"

  39. Man this is slow by jkusar · · Score: 1

    Anyone know of a bittorrent download anywhere?

  40. Upgrade path by guacamole · · Score: 1

    Does anyone know if it would be possible to upgrade a retail RedHat Linux version (say 7.2 or 9) to RHEL ES 3.0?

  41. Beta is relative by msobkow · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Mandrake's cooker was more stable than my WinNT or Win2K boxen when I was keeping in sync with the dev trees.

    Even the older libraries I rely on like libwww are under constant development, with bug fixes and enhancements showing up regularly.

    The question is not whether an OS needs to be patched, but whether you're willing to wait for the patches and want to pay another 50% to get them with the "upgrade".

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  42. Screenshot of FVWM! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Ok, here is a screenshot.
    No, its not KDE, or Gnome, and it's on *Cough* Mandrake, not Redhat, and it's FVWM (whew).

    But, IMHO it's better than KDE (or Gnome), and you can get all the free support you need in the fully commented file shown in MozillaFirebird's url area in the screenshot.


    Now for the fun part: Run this screenshot at 800x600 fullscreen on Opera (F11) and then tell your roommate that You've Just Installed Linux! See!

    Of course the jig's up when the buttons don't work...

    Yes, I know, don't actually run this thing as "root". Well, then here's your "user" .fvwm2rc

  43. Reviewed? by subsoniq · · Score: 1

    It's more like "blurbed", this article is really thin. I'm about to attempt to install this beta using vmware (can you say fun?) so maybe I can come up with a real review, assuming my computer doesn't eat itself.

  44. Hardly off-topic! by msobkow · · Score: 1

    The parent post discussed the stability of beta OS releases. All software is in a perpetual state of beta as new features are added -- a "release" is just a sometimes-more-stable snapshot.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  45. Re:Coincidence? I think not!!11!! by rjch · · Score: 1

    Have you been taking lessons from SCO in constructing arguments again?

  46. Red Hat is Headed for Extinction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    On our campus, Red Hat is the most common Linux distribution in use. Hardware is currently being certified to run it as a production platform within the main data center.

    However, everything has been roiled by their pricing and End Of Life announcement to the point that an exit strategy is being crafted.

    The problem is the 1 year End Of Life for desktop products. Production systems cannot be built on a platform that will lose support within a year -- it takes 4 months just to certify that the build is good, leaving only 8 months of production. Turning over the OS every year is a non-starter.

    The $2,500 price tag is also a non-starter. The data center is manned by UNIX professionals, several with RHCE certifications. Yes they need support, but they don't need $2,500 of support for every machine. The entire Solaris support contract for the data center covering dozens of machines, running "free" Solaris, is $3,000.

    The allied agency, NCSA, has already abandoned Red Hat because they couldn't get a reasonable price for their Beauwolf cluster.

    The problem is exemplified by one UNIX group that supports Departmental and Faculty machines on a contract basis. Red hat has been, and is, the most installed version. However, this customer base won't install $400 to $2,500 Red Hat to get the longer support life-time, they'll only go for the free/cheaper version with a 1 year EOL. The problem is Departments and Faculty also don't want their machines turning over every year (worse than Microsoft). To ameliorate this problem for the short-term, this group is getting ready to take over creating security patches (i.e., making RPM's) for 2 years after the official EOL for desktop versions. This will allow them to service existing and new customers. To solve this problem for the long-term, this support group is actively working to find another distribution that can offer a better EOL and pricing point. Currently, SUSE, with all of it's weaknesses, is the favorite candidate. This Fall, the group plans to learn SUSE, then shift the Linux Administrators course they teach from Red Hat to another distribution (possibly SUSE).

    Unless Red Hat realizes they need to site license to Educational institutions, this will be the year they lose most of the Educational market. They'll still have a few contracts here and there for data center installs, but the vast masses (Computer Science Departments, etc.) will be encouraged to move to another distribution that can be supported for a reasonable cost.

    Two years from now, unless Red Hat wakes up, they won't have significant penetration in the Educational market.

    Folks aren't necessarily asking for "free," but they are asking for some reality in pricing. Currently, Red Hat turns a deaf ear to any criticism that their pricing structure is not appropriate. They can can continue to turn a deaf ear, but soon they'll find no one is bugging them anymore because we'll all be running another distribution.

    1. Re:Red Hat is Headed for Extinction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe I'm missing something, but SuSE's YaST2 installer and configuration tool isn't free software. Maybe SuSE is cheaper than RHEL, but it certainly isn't free.

    2. Re:Red Hat is Headed for Extinction by ewwhite · · Score: 1
      UIUC, eh? I'm having the same problem at the corporate level. See my post here.

      I'm lucky because I don't have to worry about the desktop user, but having 70+ servers around the country with RH7.0->8.0 is going to be a pain when the security updates and bug fixes for RH7.3 and RH8.0 end. These systems are stable otherwise, so I may look at hand-rolling security updates. Sigh, what a mess.

      --
      Edmund White
      http://flickr.com/ewwhite
    3. Re:Red Hat is Headed for Extinction by kip3f · · Score: 1
      I recently evaluated several linux distros for our beowulf cluster, and we chose Rocks Linux. This OS is designed specifically to make it dead easy to setup clusters. Rocks is built on top of stock redhat. They do some magic with the kickstart installer to automatically setup the compute nodes. All the information about the nodes (MAC, ip address, hostname) goes into a mysql DB.

      We are actually using a derivative of rocks, called BioBrew. BioBrew also comes with software for biologists:

      the NCBI toolkit, BLAST, mpiBLAST, HMMER, ClustalW, GROMACS, PHYLIP, WISE, FASTA, and EMBOSS.

      --
      ****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
    4. Re:Red Hat is Headed for Extinction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't say they're headed for extinction but they've severely handicapped themselves and priced themselves out of a nice mid-range market. I work in the K-12 education range and our data center is a mix of Red Hat Linux (7.3 and one 2.1 AS install) on Dell PowerEdge servers and proprietary UNIX on much more expensive hardware (not because I want them but because thats what the software runs on - supposedly, there aren't significant requests for a Linux version). Red Hat 2.1 AS isn't worth it for us but 7.3 doesn't cut it either because of their EOL timelines. Their QA has gone down hill too - there have been a number of errata releases in the past year that have broken things in a big way (php and apache compiled with mm leaked semaphores, a glibc update broke remote mysql connection, and the latest openssh errata introduces a failed login message and 2 second login delay). Filing bugzilla posts does diddly squat - in some cases it takes weeks or months to get a Red Hat response and with the openssh issue, their official line is the patch does what it should (duh!!), but in my opinion, the patch is worse than the problem its supposed to fix.

      Where they might be headed is to become a niche player, much like Apple. Red Hat could take off and really take on Windows but Red Hat's current pricing scheme and support EOL cycle ensures that they won't be the company that becomes the next Microsoft (not that that is a bad thing) - I think they could become next bigger though if they played their cards right.

      I guess in my opinion, there's more a of a market for moderate priced "enterprise" Linux than overpriced Linux - you only need to sell a few overpriced Linux support contracts to make the same amount of money as a bunch of moderate priced contracts but I think they'd sell a LOT more moderate priced contracts if they'd drop their prices some, which would have a net result of more revenue. Of course, I'm not privvy to Red Hat revenue streams or support contracts sold but...thats my $0.02

  47. Re:Coincidence? I think not!!11!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nice to see idiotic posts like this shit can get modded to +5 funny. So fucking funny does anybody have any ace bandages? I have to wrap my torso before I bust my gut.

    U R LAME.

  48. Thats what i thought. by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    That is what i was thinking, until the other post said you 'could get RHAS'..

    Just wanted to verify things hadnt changed..

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----