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?

[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

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.

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:$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.

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.

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.