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."

Comments

CentOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the recompile begin!

Re:$349.99?

[qwijibo]

Fedora Core is free, Redhat ENTERPRISE Linux is aimed at companies who want to pay for it.

Re:$349.99?

[0racle]

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

CentOS...

[Ron Harwood]

So, start the timer... how long until CentOS 5.0 rolls out based on the RHEL SRPMS?

Re:CentOS...

[0racle]

CentOS 5 beta is out. If past performance is any indicator, final should be done in about 2 weeks. Unless something goes wrong of course.

Re:CentOS...

[spevack]

And that's a good thing. Red Hat likes CentOS. Between CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora, there are three "Red Hat Family" distributions that meet three very different sets of needs.

Every CentOS install is an install that is within the Red Hat family. For people who don't need to be able to call up Red Hat and ask support questions (but who still need an enterprise distro), CentOS is a great choice.

XGL?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:XGL?

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Red Hat Enterprise also has a "Workstation" flavor. They are not all Server centric OSes. For one, I don't see many people using Red Hat as a workstation, but then again, my company left them for Novell SUSE a year ago. We are happy in the change.

Re:XGL?

[Wdomburg]

'What's the benefit, support?

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

Re:XGL?

[Wdomburg]

Erm, RHEL didn't even have a desktop variant until 2004. It's a server distribution first and foremost.

If shipping X11 as an option invalidates something as a server distribution, you can write off "OpenBSD, Debian, Slackware, Solaris, etc" as well.

Any reason to switch?

[Seumas]

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).

Re:Any reason to switch?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Things are different these days. The main thing you get from being a paying customer of Red Hat is long-term stability (i.e., packages stay relatively the same for years, aside from bugfixes), patch rollout, and support from both Red Hat and other vendors. You're probably not in their ideal audience anymore, since general users who want a good free desktop were pointed to Fedora when that project was created from RH9 a few years ago. Now the company's audience consists almost exclusively of corporate types who want support from Red Hat, or who run software that is certified to run on Red Hat but is not guaranteed to work on much else (such as Oracle). Your distro of choice, righteous though it may be, wouldn't suit that audience very well because if there were problems, there would be no one to blame.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[KiltedKnight]

Well, RedHat's business model is centered around providing support for a version of the Linux operating system and its programs. Businesses don't want to deal with a large cloud of people anywhere and everywhere in the world when it comes to requesting improvements, fixes, etc. They want to go to one place and point a finger and say, "You! Fix this!" That's what RedHat, Inc., is. The people you point the finger at. They build, package, and distribute a specific version of Linux and its programs and utilities. They make them work together. They provide security and bug fixes.

You can argue which distro is better until the cows come home. But when it comes to a corporate adoption, you'll need a RedHat, SuSE, or some other company like that to provide the target for finger pointing.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[rubycodez]

yeah, we have that production server & desktop vs. "free/bleeding edge/risky where we develop everything" version in the Ubuntu world, too

we call that one Debian

Red Hat rubs be the wrong way...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Red Hat rubs be the wrong way...

[CustomDesigned]

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?

There is no limit on downloading the source. When you buy RHEL, you buy the *binaries* and you buy support. The GPL explicitly allows charging for binaries. You are even allowed to charge "reasonable" media fees for source, but Red Hat very kindly makes the source free as in beer. You can compile the source yourself, or let http://centos.org/ do it for you.

The GPL is about *freedom*, not price. RHEL gives you full freedom. And while you can't get official RHEL binaries for free, derivatives based on the source are available that are free as in beer.

While an individual or small business has little reason to buy RHEL, an enterprise has good reasons. You get a highly stable platform with security patches for a long period of time. You get support. You get someone to blame when things go wrong. As an individual, you might want to try Centos and get familiar with it. You never know when you might want to work for an enterprise that uses RHEL. As a small business, you can start out with Centos, and if your business takes off, scale right up to RHEL with minimal hassle.

Re:$349.99?

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:$349.99?

[goddidit]

Can this be downloaded for free? I though Red Hat was free? Red Hat isn't free as in beer, but it will be in available for free in few days... http://centos.org/

Screenshots, who cares?

[jfroot]

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.

Re:Screenshots, who cares?

[daves]

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

You really should install vim. It doesn't take that much room.

Re:Screenshots, who cares?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

1) the command actually is wrong. It should be
perl -i -p -e s/id\:5\:in/id\:3\:in/ /etc/inittab
Just a minor typo, as written, would miss the current default and wouldnt do anything at all to your files.

That's a pretty obscure command. There's no simpler way to not boot X11? I've never run RH.

2) unfortunately no. This is where xdm is spawned, by init, as directed by /etc/inittab. It actually makes more sense when you edit by hand. What you're really doing is switching the default runlevel, from 5 (not 6 as GP post) to 3. xdm is spawned in runlevel 5.

Re:Screenshots, who cares?

[Rheingold]

If you're doing that many installs, you should be using kickstart anyway, in which case you can skip X configuration with 'skipx' or if configuring X, do not include the '--startxonboot' option.

Re:Screenshots, who cares?

[fimbulvetr]

Well you just gotta look at it the right way.

He's running perl with three options, right? -p -i -e (I like them in that order because "It's easy as pie to replace strings in files with perl")

then he's giving a regex, followed by a file name.

If he had a file with the contents "foo" and wanted to replace the word "foo" with "bar", he'd do:

perl -p -i -e s/foo/bar/ file

The command he gave just looks ugly because it needs the \s to escape the colons. It'd be easier to not escape the colons and wrap the command in quotes, like so:

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

Six one way, one half dozen the other.

Na naaaa, na na na na na naaaa....

[sammy baby]

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.

Eh?

[Penguinisto]

...just install it w/o Runlevel 5 coming on by default, just like 99.00000% of sysadmins do w/ RHEL.

(now if'n you can get Vista to install w/o a GUI, well - that I've gotta see...)

/P

Let's look at it this way . . .

[mmell]

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!

*NOT* XGL!

[r_cerq]

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)

Re:*NOT* XGL!

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'll direct everyone to the Wikipedia page.

Short comparison: XGL is an X server implemented in OpenGL, which currently means (at least on Linux) that it must be run on top of a traditional X server. You cannot run accelerated OpenGL apps on top of XGL -- you would have to find a way to run them inside the "real" X server, and they could not be composited. Since ATI has done nothing to support the compositing extensions, modern ATI cards require XGL to do any sort of compositing.

AIGLX is a way to allow a window manager running under the "real" X server to implement compositing stuff. I don't know what's supported, but I imagine it's similar to nVidia, which I'll describe below. It would generally be supported if you have a fully open source stack -- so, the Intel cards, for example.

nVidia implements the main things that AIGLX implements, but without actually using AIGLX to do it. While you can run XGL on an nVidia or Intel card, there's no point. This is what I'm running right now. It seems to support doing just about anything you want to any window, including actual OpenGL-accelerated windows -- I can drag World of Warcraft around and watch it warp out of control. Beryl can automatically disable the indirect rendering on fullscreen windows, meaning fullscreen games run pretty much at the speed they do without any compositing. I've also heard that the SVN version (which I can't get to run properly, myself) is capable of disabling indirection on any given window, meaning you can composite everything except your windowed OpenGL game.

With my nVidia, the only windows which cannot be warped any way I like are XvMC windows, but normal xv windows are fine. (You only use XvMC if you're deliberately doing hardware mpeg2 decoding -- and you would know if you are.)

And it does make sense that they would ship compiz, though I do wonder where this is going. Beryl is a fork of compiz, but Beryl is GPL'd and compiz is not, so code from compiz can go into Beryl, but not vice versa. Beryl tends to have more features, and compiz tends to be more stable and better written, but that's overly generalizing and may have changed.

Re:*NOT* XGL!

[init100]

Many people do not understand the difference between Compiz/Beryl and XGL/AIGLX. They think that the cube is XGL, and are not aware of that the cube is actually created by Compiz or Beryl, with XGL or AIGLX being the framework that makes this possible.

Re:Meh

[Martin Blank]

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.

Re:$349.99?

[dustwun]

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.

Re:$349.99?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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)

Can we curb the flaming and OS bigotry?

[jmorris42]

> But who's actually foolish enough to use RHEL for a desktop OS?

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 .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.

> 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.

Hold on now...

[Ayanami Rei]

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

Re:Meh

[The Warlock]

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.

Re:$349.99?

[pajama]

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

CentOS 5 Beta is out

[pajama]

CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64 is released:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/ 2007-March/013617.html

Re:XGL != AIXGL

[miro f]

it's AIGLX...

get the facts right...

Re:Doing more with less

[curious.corn]

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

You *can* run OpenGL apps on XGL...

[Sits]

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...

Re:There's got to be a simpler way . . .

[essdodson]

Add "skipx" to your kickstart and it will then default to runlevel 3.