Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Red Hat Releases RHEL 6 Public Beta 1

Posted by samzenpus on from the how-about-a-test-drive dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It was way back on 2006-09-07 when Red Hat released its first public beta of Enterprise Linux 5. Today, after more than three years, Red Hat finally releases its first public beta of its next-generation OS: RHEL 6 public beta 1. From the news release: 'We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today's Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners, and members of the public to install, test, and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.'"

26 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad they gave up on XEN by d3vi1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have an environment with AMD Opteron 270 based servers where we use virtualization heavily. We either have to give up on the servers or on RHEL 6. I think that we'll stick with EL5 until we go into a server refresh cycle.

    --
    UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
    1. Re:Too bad they gave up on XEN by Pecisk · · Score: 2, Informative

      They replaced it with KVM, but it still bears some stigmata in Xen community.

      --
      user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
    2. Re:Too bad they gave up on XEN by shinzawai · · Score: 2, Informative

      This was announced about a year ago...old news. They were always going to give up on Xen when they purchased Qumranet...makers of KVM and the SPICE protocol.

    3. Re:Too bad they gave up on XEN by slashmojo · · Score: 2, Funny

      I use xen extensively too so its a good job EL5 will still be supported for many more years (until 2014 they say but all bets are off after 2012 ;) ).

    4. Re:Too bad they gave up on XEN by d3vi1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Don't really care about Xen vs. KVM from a product perspective, but for the Opteron 270, Xen is the only one that works since that Opteron doesn't have hardware virtualization instructions. KVM doesn't (to my knowledge) support software based paravirtualization like Xen.

      --
      UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
    5. Re:Too bad they gave up on XEN by greg1104 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While I've been a fan of VirtualBox for a while too, with the Oracle acquisition I wonder if adopting it now isn't just asking to take a ride onto another abandoned VM platform. Oracle already has Oracle VM, which is Xen based. At this point it looks like Oracle is going to turn VirtualBox into a gateway product used to hook people used to upsell onto Oracle VM. I'm not sure what that bodes for the future of VirtualBox development. I'm guessing that Oracle shifting development focus toward Oracle product compatibility concerns, so that it's easier to move paying customer to their more serious product, isn't a good sign for people who have been expecting VirtualBox to move further toward being more suitable for larger scale business deployments.

  2. Re:Showing its age by 6031769 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hmmm. Would you care to explain what you think it is that CentOS would give you that RHEL doesn't?

    --
    Burns: We're building a casino!
    McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
  3. Direct download links by fearlezz · · Score: 3, Informative

    ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/

    Or torrent it:
    http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/5568298/RHEL-6-Beta-64-Bit
    Don't forget to check the sha1sum, which can be verified on the first address:
    e0a3a906d7bbbc57b411a213bd5d6ad44d851689 RHEL6.0-20100414.0-AP-x86_64-DVD1.iso

    --
    .sig: No such file or directory
  4. Re:Showing its age by backwardMechanic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    True. But Redhat put a lot of work into Linux, and I'm happy for my company to help fund those coders, so I buy RHEL licences.

  5. which fedora? by Kludge · · Score: 3, Funny

    On which fedora is this based?

    1. Re:which fedora? by greg1104 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The packages mostly match those in Fedora 12, which makes sense as that came out in November and FC13 isn't released yet. However, they have bumped some things. Most notably, the FC12 kernel was 2.6.31, while RHEL6 uses 2.6.32. That's not surprising given a fair number of virtualization and performance features, as well as bug fixes, happened for 2.6.32.

    2. Re:which fedora? by Macka · · Score: 2, Informative

      I can confirm that. I was told by a guy from Red Hat recently that it's based on FC12 with some things from FC13 included.

    3. Re:which fedora? by greg1104 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's not even quite that simple unfortunately. I highlighted the kernel example because FC12 is based on 2.6.31, RHEL6 on 2.6.32, and FC13 on 2.6.33. So in that particular case, they're picking a version that doesn't match any Fedora release.

    4. Re:which fedora? by mowall · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's not even quite that simple unfortunately. I highlighted the kernel example because FC12 is based on 2.6.31, RHEL6 on 2.6.32, and FC13 on 2.6.33. So in that particular case, they're picking a version that doesn't match any Fedora release.

      FC12 was released with 2.6.31 but is now running 2.6.32, so I guess RHEL6 is closest to FC12.

  6. centos tracker! WAS Re:Direct download links by nfsilkey · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Erm, why not try a more legit-smelling tracker? ;)

    The CentOS project is serving the beta ISOs from their tracker, but Ill be damned if I can find the .torrent files served via CentOS. $random_blog_guy is serving some which link you up to the CentOS tracker.

    http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-i386-beta-dvd.torrent
    http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-ppc64-beta-dvd.torrent
    http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-x86_64-beta-dvd.torrent
    http://torrent.centos.org:6969/

    Sums check out. Waaaay faster than the smoldering ftp.redhat heap that were all machine-gunning. ;)

  7. Re:centos tracker! WAS Re:Direct download links by blitzkrieg3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know, ibiblio is kind of legit. Red Hat didn't feel like releasing a torrent, since they don't have a tracker lying around.

  8. Too many Linux-incompatible-with-Linux distros by h00manist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It would be quite wonderful if someone could figure out a way to make packages installable easily on all linux distros, or at least create a few "compatibility profiles". This whole repository ubuntu-vs-debian-vs-redhat-vs-mandriva-vs-older-versions-of-same is a nightmare for newbie users.

    --
    Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
    1. Re:Too many Linux-incompatible-with-Linux distros by greg1104 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why do newbie users even need to care about that? If you pick a distribution that has a good set of packages, they should rarely have to leave the ones provided with it. Run whatever front-end for package management you've got, make sure all the optional repositories are enabled, and there should be so many packages there the hard part is sorting through them all--not finding even more. Particularly given that so many things that used to be run as local apps have moved onto web applications nowadays, the main headaches for Linux newbies I see is getting their hardware working and making Flash work.

  9. Re:Why the KVM vs XEN dispute? by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Citrix stuff had little to do with it. Th Linux kernel developers favor code that is easy for them to integrate and maintain, and KVM fit better into that model than Xen. There are some situations where it performs quite a bit better too, and frankly few people care about those stuck with processors that don't have the right extensions to use KVM. Some good reading on the background here includes Discover the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine, Linux: KVM Paravirtualization, and The truth about KVM and Xen.

  10. Re:Why the KVM vs XEN dispute? by 1s44c · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually I didn't quite understand if the favored linux virtualization code switched from xen to kvm because of Citrix buying xen and messing with the project, or some other reason.

    KVM is Linux, XEN isn't Linux. Redhat is a Linux vendor so prefers Linux over things that are not Linux.

    It's not a matter of one being better than the other but a matter of picking one that's closer to what you already know.

  11. Re:Showing its age by backwardMechanic · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is the attitude that makes commercial open-source so difficult. Until Redhat employ every developer whose code is used in their distro, you can accuse them of freeloading. Redhat contribute to a variety of core packages, including the kernel. That's enough to keep me happy. I'm not saying they're perfect, but they're not bad. The very existence of CentOS should show that they're sticking to the GPL. But you also have to remember is all those patches that go back upstream, and appear in Debian, SuSE and the rest.

  12. Re:Showing its age by nicolas.kassis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thank you backwardMechanic. Calling RedHat freeloaders is completely ignoring all the contributions they made to OpenSource. They did not write 100% of the code that RHEL runs on but they did fix a lot of issues that would never be taken cared off by the upstream project for lack of coolness. The reality today is that the Kernel is mostly developed by programmers paid by large corporations such as RedHat. Same goes for Novell who employs a lot of opensource hackers.

  13. Re:Showing its age by X0563511 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/
    https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/

    They stopped?

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  14. Re:Showing its age by gilboad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    (I use CentOS on development machines, RHEL for production)

    1. Releases: Please compare the release date of say, RHEL 4.8 (19/5/09) to CentOS 4.8 (21/8/09).
    Or better yet, compare RHEL 5.5 (30/3/10) to CentOS 5.5 (will be ready when its ready).
    Now, CentOS devs tend to follow RedHat security updates fairly closely, and I usually see the CentOS updates ~12-48h after their RHEL parents.
    However: A. In production environment, I rather not wait 12-48h. B. Given the complexity of major updates (E.g. RHEL 5.5), CentOS tends to lag RedHat by a considerable margin.

    2. Support: We once had a RHEL kernel fix, specifically tailored to our issue, within 24h. CentOS devs simply cannot compete with RedHat. Period.

    Make no mistakes, I bow before the CentOS devs for maintaining a great distribution, but when my job is on the line, I rather put RHEL. Period.
    Nobody gets fired for using RHEL.

    - Gilboa

  15. Re:Showing its age by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't use RHEL, but I occasionally get complaints from people who do because it ships with a really ancient glibc that is missing features that I use in my code (you know, really new stuff from the 1999 version of the POSIX spec). For Linux-specific features, I don't believe that the glibc included with RHEL includes timerfd() support, which means that implementing an efficient event-driven application is difficult (you have to mess around with timeouts on epoll() and keep track of them yourself, rather than just adding a timer event source to your file descriptors).

    The included version of GCC is pretty old too, so it doesn't support some of the newer extensions. The most obvious of these is atomic ops. I have to fall back to using some inline asm if I want to support RHEL which means, if I can be bothered, it's only on a couple of architectures that I have access to for testing.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  16. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion