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First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat
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."
Let the recompile begin!
Fedora Core is free, Redhat ENTERPRISE Linux is aimed at companies who want to pay for it.
They payment fee goes in part for tech support that is provided, and potentially software that is not freely distributed.
I can't remember if RHEL has a free download or not, but last I saw, several of the software packages were not free.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
/. Kills.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Red Hat kindly makes SRPM's available, so yes you could download RHEL for free. You would have to build the system yourself.
Thankfully, others have already done that and made the results available, for instance CentOS
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You must be thinking of Fedora.
I wish they'd have done a torrent. I've been trying to download it for three hours and it keeps dropping.
So, start the timer... how long until CentOS 5.0 rolls out based on the RHEL SRPMS?
BlackNova Traders
I have a bad feeling about this... that poor server.
And amusingly enough, the image text for passing this through is IMMINENT. No kidding...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Now, I don't see any reason not to have XGL on the desktop - in fact it's a huge boon. But is it actually necessary on a server? Or more to the point, isn't it a horribly bad idea on a server? You should be running as little as possible on any critical machine... And if you have so many windows open on your server that you need a 3D desktop to manage them, perhaps you should be running all that shit somewhere else. And if you're using RHEL for a desktop system, for any reason other than being able to test things before deployment, you should have your head examined.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I used Redhat back in the day, just before I became a die hard Debian user. I'm wondering what exactly should drive me to want to switch to Redhat at this point? They seem very fractured to me and the whole "Enterprise" setup with a "free version where we develop everything" or whatever doesn't strike me as very appealing.
But I'll grant, I'm somewhat ignorant of the whole Redhat thing these days. Anything I should be enthralled by and jump into Redhat for? Not trying to bait or troll. Would seriously love to hear what people with more recent experience of RH have to say (especially if they're also familiar with Debian and others so they know where I'm coming from).
Wait a minute . . . that was a Windows bug - Win95, Win98 and (IIRC) NT4.0SP2. Boot yer box and let it do nothing, some kernel pointer associated with timekeeping would overflow at 49.7 days. Hellfire, MicroSoft squashed that one years ago!
So the only question that's left is: are you a Luddite or a Fudite?
Fedora Core (what Red Hat is based on; I also believe released by the same group) is free, for the exception of the wopping five CDs it needs for installation.
http://fedora.redhat.com/
You can download Fedora from there.
I'm sure there are 'ways' to get this version free, however I 3 the company so much I wouldn't have the heart to do it.
You will want to look at CentOS for a (nearly?) exact free version. Alternatively, Fedora Core is a similar flavor that is intended for end-users.
"RHEL used to come in four main strands: ES, AS, WS and Desktop, although the Desktop product was sold as a pack of ten clients along with a copy of RHEL ES, the server version. With RHEL 5, Red Hat has swept all of that away in favour of a simpler structure. Instead of distributing the four sets independently, Red Hat will provide only two main sets, referred to as Server and Client. Subscribers are issued with installation keys that pre-define package manifests depending on the subscription level."
There is something about a Linux distributor telling me that I am limited as to how many clients I can install based on how much money I pay that just rubs be the wrong way. How can they do this and not go afoul of the GPL?
I have not used Red Hat for a number of years. Do they even have a free as in beer download of their client? If I pay am I not allowed to distribute the GPL'd product as I see fit?? Do they prevent redistribution by bundling in non-GPL stuff?
Like I said, it has been years since I used Red Hat so I really don't know what they're like now.
It is Free. You need a capital F there, bub. Doesn't that make you feel better?
You get to test and develop it for free, and they get to sell it to you for Free.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This
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.
/etc/inittab
First thing I do to a shiny new Redhat install is:
perl -i -p -e s/id\:6\:in/id\:3\:in/
To disable X11 completely. You should to.
Okay, someone look at the official announcement... er, official "thank you" page for RHEL 5, and watch the embedded video.
Then tell me someone at Red Hat hasn't been playing too much Katamari Damacy.
(now if'n you can get Vista to install w/o a GUI, well - that I've gotta see...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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!
You can download the source and compile it for free if you want. You would be better off looking at CentOS or Vector linux. That is basically what they do. I wonder when CentOS will release their clone of RHEL5.
One major question for me is: What is the state of KDE support in RHEL5? Redhat has always shown a preference to gnome over kde, but nevertheless included KDE as an option in RHEL4. Do they still?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Of course it is, that's rubbish, you can download the source right off their servers.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Or use the System Administration Tool (YaST?) to explicitly set a default runlevel of 3.
Or edit /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel to 3.
Other solutions (and I can think of two right off the top of my head) are left as an exercise for the reader.
But Don't Download from their web page, it only allow two ISO downloads at a time, it will disconnect you, and it's SLOW.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
RHEL (like Fedora) does NOT include or support XGL. They support AIGLX, another accelerated desktop mechanism. They do support and ship compiz (the Window Manager that does the cube thingy), though. (compiz works on both AIGLX and XGL)
Only requires a moment to stop by the "Software Selection" portion of the initial installation and remove X11 et. al. from the list. I guess that puts me in the top 1.00%, eh?
Well, now that we the Fedora legacy users have been left alone in the cold, and even though I know this is just a Redhat Enterprise post, let me throw this out:
:)
How easy is switching from one of the "legacy" Fedora editions (4,5) to the latest Redhat Enterprise or CentOS? Anyone has switched already?
I wonder if all the packages and their configurations would be upgraded correctly. I have been using Redhat/Fedora for quite a while, and never got any major problems.
'Switch to Debian/Ubuntu/other' is not accepted as an valid answer
Yes. You do know there's been no actual DOS for the last two versions of Windows at least, right?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
People running mission-critical systems that require rapid, on-demand support where a newsgroup just won't suffice rely on Red Hat (or Sun, who is in a similar position) to provide defined support.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
Why, of course, here you have a link to Red Hat RHEL 5 sources.
They don't give you the compiled iso image, but the sources and modifications are there. But notice that even then it's NOT freely redistributable - you've to remove the redhat copyrighted contents (ie: red hat logos/name in the desktop background, installer, etc). The source code is there though, hence the comply the GPL, and the contribute back to the community (fe., red hat is the main contributor to linux kernel - glibc - gcc)
> But who's actually foolish enough to use RHEL for a desktop OS?
.deb packages finally gained support for gpg signing and the rpm world got higher level package management sorted out by giving a choice of either apt-get OR yum/pup/etc.
Anyone who needs a SUPPORTED system, say anyone deploying in Corporate America. Anyone who wants to run a commercial application. Remember, Free/Open hasn't conquered the world yet. World Domination IS coming... but it is just taking a little longer than some of us had hoped.
> You can get support for less retarded distributions (those, for example, which eschew rpm.)
You see folks, this is why Debian hasn't taken over, the OS is just fine; but the users/fanboys seem to be Team Amiga rejects. This package format flaming is just so 20th Century, these days there really isn't any practical advantage between them since
> Unless you're getting the licenses for free, using RHEL on your desktops is a huge mistake.
Unless you are setting up an Animation studio and your preferred app is supported on RHEL. Or you are rolling out a CRM solution that is supported on RHEL. Or you are developing an application you intend to deploy on RHEL. Etc. Or in other words, if the desktops are making you money and you need supported software you should evaluate the cost/benefit of buying a RHEL support contract, exactly like any other product a vendor offers you.
But if you are a student living in mom's basement, you are quite correct that RHEL isn't for you. Keep right on with the server in the corner running Sid and your desktop on Gentoo.
Democrat delenda est
If you work with Red Hat Linux servers, it makes perfect sense to run Red Hat on the desktop. For instance, people want to develop applications on your desktop, create RPMS, or simply run a set of desktops that can be managed remotely via Red Hat Network.
Your are correct that there are other offerings for a home or casual Linux user. However, for people working in shops using RHEL servers, RHEL desktop makes perfect sense.
XGl was first a closed source technology developed by Novell. It was then open sourced, but even if for all people out there, it does 'the 3d cube', the inner details are different. AIXGL is completely opensourced from the start, and fully integrated into Xorg 7.1 where Xgl was a complete rewrite of the X server which was _then_ open sourced. AIXGL is what is shipped in RHEL 5. not Xgl. Get the facts right.
The above seems to imply that there would be something wrong with that. It isn't. Red Hat releases the complete distribution for free download in source RPM form. You'll have to build it yourself to be able to run it though. Fortunately, there are already projects that do this, such as CentOS and ScientificLinux.
If you had read the article, you would have found out that they asked CentOS about this. In 14 days is the answer i386 and x86_64, while other architectures such as ia64 have separate release schedules and their release dates were not specified.
XLibs and X are two seperate things. Check the package selections in your install options carefully.
Yes, you need Xlibs because you need java to do anything with Oracle and the Oracle installer, and that is a given. So you access the server (running without X) remotely using ssh -X or some other method and fire up the installer and it uses your local workstation's X server as God intended.
THE END
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Heh, this once lets just ignore ESR. Red Hat are cool. At least when Linux seems under attack they seem willing to defend us.
Or they actually hire their own support staff instead of relying on Red Hat Technical Support, which is why huge businesses (such as Dell's corprate servers, i.e. the ones they use, not the ones they sell) run CentOS and not RHEL.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
CentOS 5 Beta is out already: CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64 is released http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/ 2007-March/013617.html
Getting modded up for feeding the troll was just bonus.
CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64 is released:/ 2007-March/013617.html
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce
RHEL is not free, for a couple reasons. Sure the OS itself is all based on free software, and you can download the SRPM's for it from Redhat's site. In fact, the actual OS is pretty much indistinguishable from Fedora. However, RHEL also includes some proprietary software (there is proprietary software for free OS's too, look at stuff like Oracle), plus you're also paying for a support contract. This is not targeted at home users, it's targeted at businesses that want the "peace of mind" support contract and also want the proprietary software that's included with it. All of the free software that RHEL uses is available for download on their site if you want to build it yourself.
Dell can afford those specialized techs. Not everyone can, especially if the critical systems number only one or two out of a couple dozen servers, thereby making an on-site Linux guru an expensive luxury.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
FTFA: “RHEL 5 now includes Pirut and Yum, two packages direct from Fedora.”
It's good that it has yum, but I'd advise against installing this package called “pirut”. Must be a troijan designed to corrupt your RPM DB and slipped through Red Hat QA, as in Finnish “pirut” is plural form for “devil”.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Especially because Windows support is limited to the 3R rule: restart, reboot, reinstall. That's all there is to MS support... you might even script it, if you were smart enough (or the scripting language good enough...) ;-)
e
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
'ways' != compiling
And they most certainly accelerated. Two things can happen:
1. Their output is redirected to an offscreen buffer (either a framebuffer object or an older pbuffer)
2. There's an option to pass fullscreen unobstructed windows straight to the card.
Furthermore the reason why AIGLX doesn't work with the ATI binary drivers is because they don't yet implement GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap GL extension. The composite extension is handled by X itself - not the graphics driver - and thus is a non-issue.
You are right that XGL doesn't expose all the extensions/features of regular X though. The usual place where you see this is in video as XGL is forced to use a card's 3D support for everything and if you don't have pixel shaders not being able to use the accelerated Xv that the regular X provides tends to be slow.
Finally what's this about about compiz not being GPL'd? Where did you get that from - please quote your source. Given Beryl is not (yet) a complete rewrite of compiz, that basically means compiz must have had a BSD/MIT or GPL style licence in the first place...
Where I work, we set up some test servers with CentOS. We go into production mode, nobody wants to spend money, so we deploy CentOS. Time passes, our main vendor (obscure, proprietary database/appserver platform) is no longer supporting Windows anymore, so those servers must be migrated to Linux. Of course vendor only supports RHEL. Yes, this is a perfect example of the risk of propritary systems--getting hung out to dry by your vendor. Yes, we should switch to a different technology platform, I've been arguing that for years now. Nevermind why not (it's not so we can stay on Windows...), it's besides the point. We're migrating Windows servers to RHEL, and regardless of past experience with CentOS, official support is now required.
Anyway, we haven't actually done the new RHEL servers, but when we do, we want to "convert" all of our CentOS servers to RHEL. Anybody have experience with this? Do we just add the Red Hat Network or whatever to our yum repositories and update, or are there subtle package differences that make this problematic? We're running Java, so we have a number of things from 3rd party repositories, and I don't want to fall into some weird dependency hell due to subtle changes in base packages.
As an aside, I think that releasing RHEL 5 without the full open source Java stack is brain dead. Having OOTB Java support has got to be the biggest reason to buy a Linux distro ever. I guess they'll just release RHEL 5, Java Edition or some such in a few months.
Fedora core is also evolving rapidly, while RHEL has had its feed nailed to the floor. Check your closet; tie-dye and combat boots, Fedora. Blue suit and wingtips, RHEL. A sewing machine, bolt of cloth, and a box of fasteners, Gentoo.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"The fact that Microsoft and Novell have agreed to work together has changed nothing for us. In fact, Red Hat have hired the remaining members of the Samba from Novell."
I could have sworn Novell said their Samba folks were happy. I wonder how many left?
I think I'm not alone on this, I would like to see that Fedora merged back into RedHat EL, rename it something like RedHat EL Beta, at least it will give new users (kids that Ubuntu is attracting now) a name recognition right away.
Currently it's confusing, when people speak about Fedora they rarely mention RedHat, the next guy who hears Fedora conversation for the 1st time would think of it as just another distro, and would go with distros which currently has more buzz.
And what about CentOS?, I am sure RedHat can-get (and it needs and deserves) better karma by distributing RHEL for free, instead of CentOS doing that for them.
So how do I get a trial version of their software to learn on and update my skills? Oh, I can't. Sun will give me trials of all of their new software.
How do I get trial versions of their Satellite products so that I can update my skills on that to the newest versions? Oh, I can't. But Microsoft will give me trial versions of their server management solutions.
Sad to say, but Red Hat are often less open than Microsoft. Big corporations can get anything they want from them, but even after contributing numerous bug fixes to Satellite, and identifying a design flaw in RHN Proxy and supplying a fix with proof of concept code, I STILL can't get a trial version to keep my own skills up to date. Red Hat are very happy to take from people, but not at all happy to give back.
They'll lie and hide behind Oracle, saying that they can't give out Satellite trials because of the closed source, proprietary database they based it on, and yet Oracle are more than happy for me to download and use their database in test and development environments.
And Fedora is worthless to anyone who wants to run a server because each release is only supported for a year.
Incompetent windows people aren't a luxury... Competent ones are, just the same as competent unix people.
Those same incompetent windows people, often don't know unix exists, or have ever tried using it, or else they would be incompetent unix people too.
People actually capable of setting windows up properly are few and far between, and much harder to find among the crowds of incompetent people.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I've been ignoring ESR since I first saw this. (Warning: Knowledge of that particular writing will scar the psyche, go here to detox)
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Walking around their site and bumped into the docs section. https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHE L-5-manual/release-notes/RELEASE-NOTES-x86-en.html
A good support license from Microsoft costs a fortune. So you're left to hire Windows technicians and hope they know what they're doing... which is no different from in the Linux world.
Now, if you have a big company with a large existing Microsoft infrastructure, you need one hell of a business case to transition everything to Linux. But for a small company, or a new site for a large company, Red Hat is worth considering.
"If RedHat regarded CentOS as a part of its family, it wouldn't be so adamant about the RedHat trademark issue."
Sigh. This again. Under US law, you have to protect your trademark against use by others, or you risk loosing ownership of the trademark. That's the way the law works, so that's the way the lawyers enforce it. (Not coincidentally, the lawyers also heavily influence how the law works, but that's not Red Hat's fault.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
And they're paing several thousand dollars a year for the various consusingly named "server" licenses. The turn-around time of their more complex support questions has not impressed me over the years, even where I've identified a verifiable bug and sent them the patch in the process of getting help.
Oddly, for typical users, the CentOS community which uses a RHEL OS rebuilt from source code actually works better for support. I've actually watched a data center manager on the phone with RedHat sales saying "No, I'm using CentOS because they have longer licenses and the community is more responsive: these are the trouble tickets I called RedHat about and which the CentOS community helped me solve before I even reached a real RedHat engineer to discuss it. And here's the fix."
The main problem seems to be that RedHat took way, way, way too long for its next RHEL release, and the world evolved under them.
We tried RHEL support. Paid good money for several advanced server licenses. Turnaround time on problems was abysmal, and they weren't that much help. (This was about a year ago.) We use Scientific Linux on everything now. Support is somewhat minimal, but it's better than RedHat's and free.
We need to upgrade soon. We'll re-evaluate with SL, CentOS and RHEL (and perhaps "Unbreakable" Linux). But even with allegedly lower pricing (I haven't looked into what their new model would charge for 100 desktop workstations, 200 compute servers and a couple dozen infrastructure servers) RH will have a hard time getting our vote after the poor support we received before. We paid, IIRC, $700 - $800 per license, and it took them between two and three weeks to be sure that they were "fairly sure" a specific chipset probably wasn't supported on a motherboard. The SL response was "check the source and kernel logs", but at least it was fast (and free!) We pay for tool licenses. If we get good support we'll pay reasonable fees for OS licenses. Absent said support, we won't pay a penny if we don't have to.
We have a couple of dozen Linux systems for infrastructure, in a variety of roles. We run them all level 3. If we really need to, we can start X on them by typing "startx" at a console. Same thing for our compute servers. Even most desktops run this way. But especially on the non-desktops there are many reasons not to run in level 5, and none to run there.
At home, sure, level 5. There's no reason for X NOT to be up unless I'm doing certain types of maintenance, and my wife doesn't want to know any more about computers than she has to.
At work, run level 3 unless a user wants to change that on his or her desktop.
Our company uses a lot of EDA tools. The tool vendors only support their tools on certain OSes. RHEL is one of the few, and everyone supports it.
At home I used the Scientific Linux rebuild of RHEL since we use that at work and I knew it, plus that way I became more intimate with all of its parts. Now, I still have one system at home running that but all the others are (or soon will be) Fedora Core 6. They could as easily be anything else; I just figured FC6 would upgrade easily from older RH and it did (even an RH8 system, which is supposedly not a good idea).
Waste of resources? Can you even buy a disk smaller than 80GB for a server these days? The GUI RPMs take up less than 1GB of space. Sometimes there are annoying dependencies, so we just do the full install. We do find, from time to time, that running a GUI tool on a server (core or compute) has its uses. And our workstations have to run X. So we just install everything (well, inside the firewall 8^), set to runlevel 3, and that's that. Which wastes no resources other than a bit of disk space that's in the noise range from my vantage point.
I am a RHCE, and I know for sure a certification lasts for 2 releases. That means that my RHCE certification (obtained while RHEL 4 was the latest version) is valid until Red Hat releases a RHEL 6.
Oh, they did? I've been using GNU/Linux. How's that for a troll?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I haven't had a chance to read a complete list of RHEL packages...however they did have some sort of notice that Oracle was included. So I believe that's one of them. I haven't used Redhat since version 6 or so (it's been awhile)...but they've always had some proprietary software. Netscape, OSS (the "commercial" version), etc. Proprietary software is a very small percentage of the overall package but there are pieces of it here and there, at least in Redhat.