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First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the reinvention dept.

Susie D writes "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released today, and Linux Format has an in-depth first look (with screenshots aplenty). With RHEL 5, Red Hat aims to become even more 'open', by using a shorter and clearer SLA, improving community involvement through its Knowledge Base, and providing the new Red Hat Exchange. But what you really want to know is, yes, it does include XGL for fancy 3D desktop effects."

4 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Screenshots, who cares? by jfroot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I always wondered why these articles focus on screenshots. I would assume most people who are running RHEL don't ever use any graphical interface at all. Servers don't need to run any graphical applications really and it is a waste of system resources to have any of that left on IMHO.

    First thing I do to a shiny new Redhat install is:

    perl -i -p -e s/id\:6\:in/id\:3\:in/ /etc/inittab

    To disable X11 completely. You should to.

  2. Let's look at it this way . . . by mmell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If it's a server, your default init state should be runlevel 3, right? Doesn't matter if you've installed all the XGL stuff in the world if it never gets run (for the most part; carrying unnecessary executables/packages/services around on your system does potentially open vulnerabilities in your system).

    You should never take a server to runlevel 5 unless it's been taken out of service for maintenance - and not even then! Just because a GUI may make you able to more quickly or more simply maintain your server doesn't mean that it's okay to run X on a server. GUI's tend to "dumb down" user tasks (that is their function, after all). GUI's have progressed over the last decade, but they still carry their penalties in system load, "dumb-down" factor and increased vulnerability to exploitation.

    As for using RHEL as a desktop, I agree wholeheartedly. Everyone knows that Gnome under OpenSuSE 10.2 is the ultimate XGL desktop experience!

  3. Re:$349.99? by dustwun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While this may come across as sucking up, RedHat deserves LARGE kudos for releasing the src.rpms so readily. Most other commercial vendors don't do this (Look at suse for example). While redhat has made some missteps in the linux business(if you believe ESR), they have stuck to the open source ideals more than most other vendors and still managed to be successful.

  4. Re:XGL? by Wdomburg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    'What's the benefit, support?

    A stable platform that will continue receiving security updates until 2014.