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."

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.org]

Are you stoned or stupid?

[mmell]

Or are you just making this up? Even clear back to the 1.0.25 kernel, I can recall seeing uptimes in excess of 200 days. If some specific Linux distro ever had such a bug, it was almost certainly short-lived.

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?

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: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:$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/ [centos.org]

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.

*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:You mean DOS?

[pembo13]

Yes. You do know there's been no actual DOS for the last two versions of Windows at least, right?

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: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?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Why, of course, here you have a link to Red Hat RHEL 5 sources [redhat.com].

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)

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/ [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: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:*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.

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:Screenshots, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is, he's just using perl as sed there. It's actually a very simple command. What it really says as spoken in vi is:

s/id:5:in/id:3:in/

Which, for those non sed/vi users out there, just means

global-replace id:5:in with id:3:in

It's not a big deal, it's just the escaping that makes it all look confusing. There are many good reasons to learn perl, and many good reasons not to learn perl. Sed commands in perl are not members of either set.

Basically, everyone has the tool that their comfortable with. I probably would've loaded vim to do this, but I often use echo/cat/grap/sed/cut
etc. to edit files in certain situations. The great thing about a Unix system is that there are a hundred ways to do something like this, and as long as you know one of them then you can get the job done. Freedom is a wonderful thing.

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: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.

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.org]

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 [centos.org]

Re:XGL != AIXGL

[miro f]

it's AIGLX...

get the facts right...

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 [freedesktop.org]...

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

[essdodson]

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

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.