Red Hat 6.1 Officially Announced

Niklas Paulsson was the first to tell us that Red Hat now has a press release on their website Announcing v6.1 of their distribution. It was on the FTP servers last week, but now its official.

Comments

Re:Ouch

[teg]

Actually, it looks a bit better - the new GNOME release has gotten much better icons, and far more gtk-themes are included.

Red Hat could use Debian's "pseudo-image" system.

[Paul Crowley]

Perhaps Red Hat could take up Debian's "psuedo-CD-image" system, which allows the bulk of the work of providing CD images to be done by servers that have the distribution as a bunch of files, not as a CD image.

This is one of the best ideas I've ever come across. This program fetches all the files that will appear on the CD and simply concatenates them all. It then uses the "rsync" incremental-update protocol with the CD image servers to convert this concatenated file into a CD image: since much of the data that appears in the image is already on the client's machine the load on the CD image server is only 6% of what it was.

With this system in place, we can all start burning official CD images without slashdotting the mirrors too badly. I think it's a piece of bloody genius!
--

Nice . . . sort of

[slag187]

This release has lots of nice features:
1) Interactive startup of init scripts
2) Some new and interesting packages (LDAP, lots of new PostgreSQL modules and Apache Modules, kuydzu hardware detection utility)
3) Of course all of the security updates
4) Installation! The new install is NICE.

But, I can't get a custom kernel to boot!? I keep getting all of these unresolved kernel symbol errors. I haven't delved very deeply into the problem yet, but this should be a no brainer in my opinion . . . Any one know what's up with this?

So far that's the only problem I've run into.

Re:Nice . . . sort of

[bmetzler]

I saw one of the textbooks for the OS class, and this thing stated that NT5.0 was coming out at the end of the year, and that since it was one of the newest OS's around, it was functionally better than Unix.

Hahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!

Thanks, I needed that. I don't know whether to feel sorry for those people or just consider that that's the highest pinnacle they'll ever reach in their lives. Of course, if they really have a brain, but aren't able to develop it because they are fed that type of garbage, then yes, I guess I feel sorry for them. Microsoft has probably mentally destroyed more people then all the casualties of every war combined.

These are the people who when they get to the real world are clueless enough to believe that the project they were hired to develop will be complete, featureful, and bug free in 2 months. Now what will they say? "Why should we keep working on this application that's already been released. If we start all over it will be functionally better then the old program. Oh, and it'll only take 2 weeks to rewrite it anyways."

-Brent
--

List of changes?

[Bartmoss]

Is there a detailed list of changes anywhere?

And.. "Pentium III optimized" - please nobody start the serial id war again, thanks. ;-)

Re:List of changes?

[Unknwn]

I can repost the list of stuff I did on Saturday :) Also, a great way to see what's changed is to look through the rpm changelogs... but that's a time consuming process :)

I've been beating pretty hard on the 6.1 beta (lorax) since it's release.

To say that at first there weren't any bugs would be a lie of course, but I've seen _great_ leaps ahead over the course of it. At the beginning,
it took some work to get it to work.

But, through lots of beta testing, and lots of late night hacking by Matt Wilson, it's now to the point that it's the easiest installer I've seen.
Much easier than Caldera's graphical, in large part, because it gives you a lot more freedom in the install. The GUI install works for CDROM
installs, NFS installs, and (untested, but should work I believe) hard drive installs. If the GUI installer doesn't work for you (or you don't want it even), never fear. There's still a text-based installer for low-ram machines, and ftp or http installs.

Other nice neat things in 6.1 (for those wondering)
- kudzu: kudzu does hardware detection and will start the appropriate configuration tool. Very neat
- an interactive startup option (disable-able) ala choose what you want to start during startup for Windows 9x and DOS; so for when you screw up your sendmail config, you can still start without taking ages :)
- up2date: service to give access to a priority server upon registration and then will give you the new rpms in updates and give you the
opportunity to install them, just download them, few other options
- fsck has a progress bar :)
- rp3: an easy-to-use ppp configuration tool. I haven't actually completely tested this one being on ethernet and all, but it appeared to work
- XFree 3.3.5, 2.2.12 (+fixes), GNOME 1.0.40 stuff (newest when it mastered...), KDE 1.1.2, glibc 2.1.2
- One of the boxed versions is the US version, which contains 128bit Netscape, GnuPG, and a few other things that are export controlled.

Think that's most of the good interesting stuff. As I said, it's shaping up to be _really_ solid from what I can tell.

As to the PIII optimizations, I think they're kernel and potentially binutils.

--
Jeremy Katz

386 compatability?

[kip3f]

"Red Hat's new release of the Linux operating system has been optimized for the Pentium III Xeon processor and this combination offers customers the performance that is required in today's Internet economy." Does this mean that it doesn't run on a 386?
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Re:386 compatability?

[Root Moose]

Don't know.

It doesn't run on a TRS-80 or a Vic 20 either...

Re:386 compatability?

[mattc]

A lot of people are still using old 386s and 486s for routers, cheap servers, cheap home machines. This is why it is important to preserve backwards compatibility. In fact, I am typing this on a Cyrix 5x86/100 mhz (a 486 clone).

Re:386 compatability?

[Hall]

It's nothing more than having multiple kernels to select from... At some point during the installation, it checks what processor you're using and installs a kernel optimized for that. I think they had this option with v6.0, so the Pentium III i just the newest cpu option available.

Unlike Mandrake, all the other packages/software is still compiled for a 386 (or 486) for backward-compatibility. Mandrake recompiles *all* of their packages for Pentiums.

Re:SPARC IPC...are you insane?

[Tet]

Is Linux *really* that slow on an IPC? Although I haven't checked recently, Linux used to be marginally faster than SunOS and blew Solaris out of the water on low end hardware. Linux also works great on my HyperSPARC upgraded SS20, but that's another kettle of fish...

Re:Whats on the 2 Application CD's?

[Chilli]

There is a page with the details.

Chilli

Even more reasonable

[Booker]

Actually, the cheapest version is $29.99 - I think that's a pretty interesting move.

I imagine that a lot of people who bought 6.0 from cheapbytes for $4 instead of from Red Hat for $80 may actually consider buying 6.1 from Red Hat. $30 is quite reasonable, considering you even get some support.

Fine!

[Booker]

Here you go.

Re:Proprietary Open Source?!?

[Arandir]

If Lizard is proprietary, then it is not Open Source. And if it is Open Source, then is is not proprietary.

I haven't looked at lizard, but if the source code is available, and I can modify and distribute those modifications, then it is Open Source and not proprietary. However, If I can't distribute my modifications, then it is not Open Source. Simple. I do recall that Caldera was going to release it as QPL, and if so, not only is it Open Source, it is also Free Software (since all Open Source is Free, and vice versa).

Problems with XF86_SVGA...

[rdm]

I've an HP Kayak with Matrox G200 8MB. After starting the X server the monitor looses signal. This happened the first time in the install process when doing "Test X Configuration". Could not even switch to virtual consoles. Had to reboot and reinstall. During second install avoided to test the X config but I was unfortunate to select as timezone UTC+1:00. Now the postinstall could not find the time zone file for UTC+1:00 and the install hung at this point (python error mentioning that file UTC+1:00 did not exist). Re-installed again (since not sure where in post install the things were stopped), setting timezone to a European city and not testing the X config. After booting I could not access the network. It turned out that /etc/sysconfig/network did not contain the gateway and gateway dev. Also /etc/resolv.conf had not the default search correctly set. This was easy to fix. However, the XF86_SVGA server still doesn't work. Under 6.0 it works fine and I use the same XF86Config. Anybody else seeing the same problems.

Sloppy, very sloppy.....

-- Fons

Re:What RH software is proprietary?

[bmetzler]

for example, try to get linuxconf to work on a non-RH distro... Good luck

I use Linuxconf on Debian 2.1. It appears to work fine...

-Brent
--

Re:60Hz keeps the magic smoke in the monitor...

[Michael K. Johnson]

Actually, we do use DDC to query the monitor, and we do use extended refresh rate ranges when the monitor supports them. However, many monitors do not. sigh...

Pedantic I know...

[anthonyclark]

I'd agree that this is being pedantic but:

The graphical setup runs at 60Hz. This is murder on my eyes. By the time I finished the installation (see below) I had a migraine from the flickering. Yes, I know that VGA@60Hz is the lowest common denominator. Personally I would have preferred the choice of installing using the old setup application.

The graphical setup. I wanted to customise which packages got installed. It took ages, even longer than my other pet hate custom installation, SUSE. I didn't figure out a way to select more than one package or directory for installation at a time, so I had to click through each folder and package manually. I hope next time RHAT add alphabetical listing of packages, proper key navigation and multi select of packages. I'd also like the package installation to show how much space I'm going to use on each drive I have if I've spread my partitions across drives.

Disclaimer I am NOT flaming or trolling here. These are my opinions, not incontrovertible fact.

I suppose I'm p*ssed of that I forgot to select the WindowMaker package :-(

Re:REST !!!!

[13th seer]

try this one.

Smooth upgrade for me!

[DrSpoo]

After the initial /. announcement this weekend I was able to download and upgrade my existing 6.0 install with very little hassle. Very painless upgrade compared to 5.2 -> 6.0, which you might expect.

However I didn't get to use the graphical install tool they mentioned in the press release. I had the plain old text mode that all the previous versions of RedHat used. Not that I needed the GUI installer, but what did I do wrong?

60Hz keeps the magic smoke in the monitor...

[Michael K. Johnson]

We experimented with higher refresh rates, and thus reduced the number of working monitors in our test lab by one. While 60Hz hurts (no pun intended) your eyes, it should not kill even older fixed-pitch monitors.

Fortunately, you do have the option of text-mode installation. When you boot the install disk, read the text that shows up -- it tells you to type "text" if you want a text-mode install. While graphical mode is naturally the default, text mode is faster for those of us who know the procedure and prefer typing to mousing. Take your pick!

Pricing more reasonable

[Shin Dig]

I am happy that they changed the official box pricing to $40 for OS and StarOffice, leaving the $80 version with two more CDs of fun extras. I think that the $80 v6.0 was a little much for a lot of people who did want to help out redhat and buy a "real" version.

I am definitely into buying an official product from RedHat once and a while, as they do pay people to write GPL code.