Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Released
OrenWolf writes "CNET is running an article on the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which is Red Hat's shiny new 'enterprise' version of Linux. Major changes include more IBM Mainframe support, support for AMD64 (x86_64) processors (aka Opteron, Athlon64 and AthlonFX), changes to support options, integration of Stronghold Apache, and much more."
How about some Sparc/Solaris vs Opteron/Solaris vs Opteron/RH3.0 benchmarks for server, database etc.
Since a discussion about RH's licenses with these seem to pop up every time they are mentioned on /., I thought I'd point out that source RPMs for RHEL 3 are located on Red Hat's FTP server. .iso images are not available.
No one said they had to make it EASY...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"The scalability of the threading has gone from being able to support 1,200 to 32,000 threads. The impact on Java is just amazing," said Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development at Red Hat. "That was probably the most significant engineering effort and the most profound impact on customers."
Excellent. Multiple concurrent downloads of lots and lots of pictures, if you know what I mean....
I don't mean to sound like some astroturfer, but RedHat has definitely brought Linux to the fore of server operating systems.
With the rapid decline of AIX and Solaris, Win2K and RedHat Linux are making steady gains in the server market.
What's more, with Linux you don't need to have a server farm like NT requires, so in the long run you save your company money by choosing to go with RedHat.
Let me tell you; I own stock in Red Hat, I've researched their business strategies fervently...and these people know what they are doing with open source software. Red Hat posted a profit of 240,000 for the last quarter, the first profit EVER for a company mainly based on open-source software. Red Hat is moving forward, and fast, and there is no denying that soon, very soon, they could destroy Microsoft's server market share, and possibly kill poor ol' Sun Micrososystems(who I also own stock in). Red Hat, by the way, is a steal at its current 12.81 price, but I got in at 10.70. ;-)
Linux is and has always been a server OS. Why? Because it is patterned around UNIX which is designed as a scaled down version of Multics which is a server OS.
You can train the OS all you like with fancy window managers and scalable fonts and all the rest of the eye candy that desktop users want, but at its heart the OS is still yearning to be driven by the commandline. That's why most GUI programs are usually thin wrappers around sophisticated commandline applications.
This isn't to say that Linux couldn't be ready to overtake Windows on the desktop one day. Take a look at where Linux is today. It is the fastest growing server operating system out there. Windows couldn't hope to beat it there.
I didn't realize how cheap WS is. I was all set to give up on my RH after my trusty 7.3 w/up2date was end-of-lifed. But for $179 to get a distro with that much spit and polish.. I might just get it for my home gateway/webserver/etc box.
which is Red Hat's shiny new 'enterprise' version of Linux
Actually, there are three versions of Red Hat Enterprise, WS, ES, and AS, WS is supposed to be a desktop OS, while AS is the most advanced version, WS price starts at 179$, and AS price at 1499$ for the Intel x86 platform.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Apple has already released a Windoze killer, its just that nobody in the Linux community will admit to this :/
In its current form there are no Linux distros anywhere near good enough for the home desktop market. Why dont we turn our attention to beating the enemy first and then sort out our differences later. Red Hat have a great server OS, Apple have one for the desktop. Combine the 2 and it is impossible to beat. (Well, possibly by a farm of G5's ;) )
Just my $0.95 worth.
I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
True, it's not free (as in beer), but it is Free (as in speech), and that is what is important. As for support, that depends on which product you're buying - the AS version always comes with support, the ES and WS versions have support as "optional", depending on whether you want to pay more or not. Sounds like a good deal to me...
The Free desktop that Just Works
A company offering an honest assessment of their new product offerings? What's going on? Is it April already?
;^)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"Free as in speech" doesn't mean "download an iso".
The source RPMs are available on ftp.redhat.com for you to peruse, modify and compile at will.
Nothing says they have to hand it to you on a silver platter.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The source RPMS are available from their servers (though I can't check right now...server is too busy), so you can build it yourself. They're charging for the packaging (which is the .iso as well since it all has to work together), the support, and for any non-free software, but not the free software, which is the right thing to do.
Go RedHat!
I can guarantee you that you won't get support but it will be interesting to see how Red Hat goes about publishing updates since I somehow don't see some of their larger customers downloading and compiling source code and then rdisting the non-RPM, binary updates to their Red Hat systems. I'm guessing Red Hat won't really care since the people who would go to the trouble of figuring out how to make this work probably wouldn't cough up $1,499 or whatever it is anyway. There's always Mandrake, Debian, Slack, Red Hat's own Fedora, etc. for us cheap bastards.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Ok so Redhat is charging $149 for their spiffy new version of Linux. Fine. Unlike some I'm not under the influence of mind-altering ideologies. But that doesn't mean that I want to pay $149 for EVERY system I install it on. I'm THE Linux support for ASU's Fulton school of engineering, and we've got almost two hundred systems (that I know of) running one version of Linux or another. I'm the person who has to keep these systems running, and that means it's my job to keep them up to date and make sure they're running a version of Linux that we can expect to see vendor supplied patches and security fixes for. Lets just say I'm not happy about the fact that after the end of the year I'll have to create my own update RPM's whenever a remote vulnerability is found in some package or another. And now I find that even updates to RH 9 are going to end in April of 2004. What does this mean for the school? Either we move over to the new enterprise version, or we start looking real hard at Mandrake, SuSe, etc.
Which brings me back to my original question. Does anyone know if there are non-GPL'd components included in the new Enterprise version and if so what they are? I'm not going to go around installing proprietary for $$$$ software on people's system illegally, and I'm not going to be able to ask them to pony up $149 per copy when the copy of Redhat the system is already running didn't cost them a dime. So if anyone knows anything, even rumors, I'd really like to know. If I can surgically remove the proprietary components from the system I will as long as they are not critical to its operation. Of course if Redhat is simply charging $149 for the service of being able to download their distro and aren't looking to prevent you from installing it on as many systems as you'd like (sans support obviously), then I'll be more than happy to pay the money to get those ISO images. I've never contacted them for support yet, so why should I need to start?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Ouch!
And that's for their workstation configuration...
$179 for the x86 version.
-dameron
The prices on the AMD64 versions are nutty. I understand they have to recoup development costs for the new architecture and that they only expect rich businesses to use it on expensive servers, but I'm testing Opteron for research purposes at a university. There's no way we can afford that in the long haul.
Anyone know if AMD64 support is expected for Fedora? Or what cheaper AMD64 distributions are around? Do they work? The actual details on AMD64 support on distributions' sites are very sketchy.
*That would be a problem in a different sort of way (and of course would not work), but doesn't detract to the point I'm making, which is that there is a difference between offering software which is licensed under terms considered free, and offering services using free software, which can be licesnsed any which way, modulo some restrictions with some licenses.
More crack, anyone? I've got a great patent-vs-trademark discussion over here...
I forget what 8 was for.
Hah! Debian has been on version 3 for ages! ;-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Why dont we turn our attention to beating the enemy first and then sort out our differences later.
Why trade one for another? In all seriousness. If Apple was in Microsoft's position, do you honestly think that they'd act any differently? Do you think that Red Hat would behave much differently?
Business is always that, business. Businesses are out to make money. You don't maximize your profits by sharing your market. You do every legal thing within your power to dominate it.
If Pepsi could figure out a way to take 50% of Coke's sales in the next 5 years do you doubt that they would do it? If McDonalds could woo a substantial portion of Burger King's customers, do you think that they would hesitate even for a second?
There is no question that Apple is more innovative than Microsoft. There is no doubt that Apple is more willing to cooperate with others than Microsoft is. That is what they have to do because of the position that they're in. There is also no doubt that Apple is a business. When you have shareholders to answer to, being a nice guy isn't always the top priority.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
We're using RH ES 2.1 for a few servers at work (a big hospital in Sweden).. Most servers are still HPUX and NT4 but we're slowly (too slowly IMHO) migrating to Linux. I had been praising Linux for a LONG time when we finally got our first copy of RH ES to install on a production-server. It was a big surprise for me.. I have been using Linux since 1996. Started with RH 4.2, then Debian and have been running Gentoo for little more than 2 years now.
:) We now have 3 production servers running RH ES2.1 (two running webservices with apache+tomcat, one running Sybase).
RH ES 2.1 was like a time warp back to the 90s. Only ext2/3 filesystems. Where the hell is LVM?? It was hard to convince my fellow coworkers (HPUX and Solaris fanatics) how a Unix without LVM can be considered "enterprise"... But eventually I convinced then.
We've had a lot of problems with them though.. They start to become SLOOOOW after a few days of uptime under load.. Load avg is 0.0 to 0.1, cpu is 99% idle, but they are so slow it takes a good minute or two just to start "top". I think I tracked the problem down to the cciss-driver and upgrading to the latest kernel (e.27) seemed to fix the problem somewhat (still slow but not nearly as slow as when running e.16).
I really hope ES3.0 will fix our problems! Otherwise my dream of someday running Linux on all of our servers just went down the drain because I don't think that neither management or my fellow coworkers will let me install another distribution (oh no! not ANOTHER set of commands/configfile-system to learn!)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
You can download the ISOs from Red Hat Network if you have purchased an earlier version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
So this means we will get even more lamers in IRC asking for "Linux version 3". I wonder how they plan to explain moving from Linux 9 to Linux 3, shrug.
(troll? yes ma'am)
I remember, does anyone else remember, when Microsoft stopped supporting windows 95 in 2000? That caused a big stir in the slashdot community about all those millions of computers out there still running windows 95 who are going to have no support! Well, I advise you to take a look at the end-of-the-line dates [redhat.com] for RedHat. Redhat 8 was release, what, about a year ago? Mabey 14 months? And it's end of the line is December 31st of this year?
You are confused. RH Advanced Server does not have a short end-of-life like the rapidly updating RH 7/8/9 series - if I remember correctly it's about 5 years from initial release. I also suspect that you can extend that support further should you be willing to pay for it. Just don't expect support beyond the EOL of a product line to be cheap - you (and whomever else around also wants that support) will have to pay to retain that department in RedHat active.
See, another problem that's going to hit redhat is that, until now, they had planned on releasing a free product called redhat and a pay-for-support-in-order-to-get-the-CD's product, also called redhat (enterprise). But, the way I understand it now, it's looking like the enterprise product is going to be called redhat and the free one is going to be called something else (fedora?). Well, that's just great for redhat, but what about me? I'm in the webhosting business. What do I say when customers call and ask about the $119/month dedicated server? Does it come with redhat? And I have to tell them No, becuase it quite simply costs too much. In fact, sir, it's more expensive that windows server 2003, if all you want to do is webhosting.
Excellent. Well done. You are going to pass on your own confusion to your customers.
If your customers want a Redhat QA'd linux distribution, you can give them Fedora. RH is still overseeing the core packaging and quality of the Fedora release, and will probably cut stable releases from the development set as a distro every 6 months.
If your customers want Redhat Advanced Server with support, then let them pay for it. You still have options. Your customer still has options. If your customer is confused over the choices available, it is up to you to explain what is available, what is suitable and needed for their requirements. That is good business sense - know your own market.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Last I checked, every last line of code in RHEL 3.0 was GPLed, and the SRPMs are downloadable from redhat.com.
Don't want to pay RedHat's support prices? Download the SRPMs, compile them, roll your own distro. (CheapBytes or someone like them will inevitably do this for you, for a nominal cost.) Or hell, just borrow the ISO from someone with a RHEL license and make a copy: it's quite legal.
If you really are running a webhosting business, stop bitching and start calling your redhat salesrep. There's these things called "volume discounts" that have been all the vogue since, ah, the industrial revolution.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Look, mate.
There are a couple of different sorts of people that might use Linux. The first are the developers, the techies. They're the ones that built GNU/Linux. A Linux company that offends these as a group does so at their own peril. A couple of companies tried cashing in on these. No good. Not enough money here, too much resistance, and it's like biting the hand that feeds you. Red Hat hasn't irritated these at all. As a matter of fact, it tends to coddle them. RH expanded the range of packages they offer by adding Fedora to their lineup (hopefully adopting yum as well) with frequent updates. RH has traditionally been extremely pro-open source, and anal about getting rid of non-free source packages in their distribution. Xv went away, xanim went away, netscape navigator went away (probably before it was a good idea to do so, as a matter of fact). They're less so than Debian, but more so than almost any of the other "corporatish" types. RH donates lots of money and developer time into core Linux products, so that all the hackers benefit. Gcc owes a lot to RH.
The second group are the mom-and-pop types. Joe Sixpack. Ordinary old home users. These generally haven't had much interest in Linux so far. RH has put a lot of money into developing GNOME to make things more palatable, but there's a long ways to go. RH hasn't really hurt this group at all.
The third group are business desktop users. This is a potentially growing market. I don't know exactly why Red Hat isn't as interested as they could be -- presumably because users tend to resist change a bit, and because businesses have balked at retrainting costs. However, RH (and Mandrake and SuSE) have all put a lot of resources into projects that will benefit these folks. They're slowly but steadily trickling into the fold -- there are migrations to Linux, but not away.
Last of all, there are the server folks. These are the ones that want Red Hat Enterprise Server. All they care about is supported servers. They want support contracts and someone to call if things break. They want very occasional updates, and don't care about the latest-and-greatest browser plugin. They want very heavy QA. For them, $699 is very attractive, especially if it lets them migrate from Solaris and AIX and the associated (expensive) hardware. If you don't fall into this group, you don't want RH Enterprise. Incidently, Debian Stable is probably a good alternative for techie admins that don't want support contracts. There are IT managers that just aren't *comfortable* dealing with most Linux companies, and want a familiar old contract and guarantees -- just with less vendor lock-in and cheaper prices.
The problem is that you're thinking that RH is trying to get you on RHE. Nope. RH doesn't market RHE to you and doesn't have an interest in doing so. Maybe one day, when they absorb enough generic suits and drop enough of the Linux folks, they'll do something unutterably stupid like trying to sock techies up for cash, but not today. About the only way they get money from you is if you want pressed CDs (worth it if you're installing on a bunch of machines at work and don't want to worry about a burned CD going bad) or if you want to buy their up2date service (frankly, not worth it -- even aside from being free, yum blows up2date out of the water).
So don't bash RH. This isn't a case of Red Hat going evil. They aren't transitioning you to give you a worse deal. They're just expanding into the server market as fast as possible.
You're talking about RH not including a web server. Ridiculous. RH still has a boxed version that it sells. It still has a web server. It comes with *installation support*, same as it always has. You can buy a support contract if you want for usage support.
Fedora is a group of developers that got together and packaged a lot more software for Red Hat than Red Hat did themselves. Red Hat realized that a lot of RH users really liked Fedora. Now, Fedora is becoming an officia
May we never see th