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Red Hat Software Businesses

RedHat 7.2 Beta: Roswell 321

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-all-you-mad-hatters dept.
LinuxNews.pl writes: "Few days ago RedHat uploaded new Beta release of their distro - Roswell. If you want to find out more about it just go to the LinuxNews.pl" And I won't even make a snide comment about how I haven't run Red Hat in 2 years!
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RedHat 7.2Beta - Roswell More

RedHat 7.2Beta - Roswell

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  • Snidey lies... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05, 2001 @02:29PM (#2111585)
    And I won't even make a snide comment about how I haven't run Red Hat in 2 years!

    Yeah apart from on the Slashdot SQL server [slashdot.org]...

  • Do other Slashdot readers care to comment on why Redhat didn't include Reiser as a default partition type? My impression, at least, is that Reiser is 'more mainstream' that ext3. (I can't put ext3 down by any means. I've never used it. But I believe that Reiser has been production quality longer.) To be honest, I'm rather disappointed, as are other Suse aficionados at work who have been waiting for Redhat to get a journaling FS in place.

    By the way, how many Code Red hits have you all been seeing? I'm up to 309.
    • I have done a few sudden power-off tests with XFS-SGI/RedHat and Reiser/Mandrake. I had disk corruption with Reiser once, but once is all it takes to ruin your weekend. XFS has been rock solid. My employer has been using XFS on SGI servers for years without problems. The XFS for Linux site is here: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ I have only done one power-off test with ext3 and it performed as it should. I have not done any speed benchmarking between the different types yet.
    • Frankly, ext3 is the better thought out of the journalling filesystems for Linux, simply because you can turn it on or off, just like logging on Solaris.
    • According to RedHat, ReiserFS still has one or two known data corruption problems, so they won't put it in the installer.

    • May I assume that many of you are talking about running a journaling filesystem on your workstation? If so, why? It only slows you down. Unless you're talking about a server with 100G+ of disk space you're not going to speed up the boot process that much and I have been running without one for years without loosing any data (actually I do recall loosing files with 2.0 ext2 but I never have lost data with 2.2 ext2 and power has kicked off a few times).

  • Holy smokes! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Denial of Service ( 199335 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @02:41PM (#2113339)
    The hypocrisy is flying around this place like shit from howler monkeys today. You're all bashing Taco for his outwardly elitist commentary when the exact same thing flows from most of you on a daily basis. Read virtually any thread around here with as must objectivity as you can muster and it's difficult to miss. God forbid anyone suggest that non-OSS software is better for a certain task or ask a seemingly obvious question.

    Personally, I congratulate Rob for having the balls to at least be blunt about it instead of the thinly veiled digs routinely employed by the vast majority of you.

    Now, whip out the -1, Troll or Offtopic marking for this as fast as possible and sit back satisfied that another dissenting opinion has been eliminated. It's your duty, isn't it?

    • 1- The 'declared-not-but-actually-so' snide comment in the 'article' is probably just a way to generate more hits in a dead summer day, and then make more money with ads. And it worked. I have noticed an increase of flame-generating remarks & topics in the headlines, lately. Probably a sign of poor ads revenue for ./ editors and owners.

      2- The moderation system in ./ obviously favors the opinion of the majority of its readers ... but better this than having a few selected ones to decide what is good ant what is evil.
      OTOH, I have noticed a sensible shift of the 'average opinion' lately on ./, in favor of non-free e MSish ideas : maybe the Linux/Free Software/Open Source thing is looking less cool for some. Or maybe BG has his employees routinely post on ./ and then acquiring moderation points and moderating up each others (and maybe big Linux players are doing exactly the same for years). Conspiration theories are always in fashion.

      3- Saying 'go on and moderate me down' is one of the most successful karma-woring tricks on ./ ... as you probably know. This worked, too.

  • If you look in the relesase notes, it states that they although the XFree86 version has been boosted to 4.10, they no longer support DRI :( Does anyone know why they would possibly do this? One of the features of 7.0, was that you could get DRI working out of the box. They even back ported it to a 2.2 kernel so they could do this. Seems odd to me.

  • Journaling File System (Score:3, Interesting)

    by luguvalium2 ( 466022 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @02:14PM (#2118544) Homepage
    I installed it on a spare box a few days ago. The default filesystem is ext3. It also has migrations tools to convert existing ext2 partitions.
    • Why ext3? I thought the only advantage of ext3 over other JFSs available for Linux was that it was easy to convert an ext2 partition to it. Does it provide an option to use ReiserFS, JFS, or XFS? I thought that all three of these offered better performance and more features than ext3.

      • Re:Journaling File System (Score:2, Informative)

        by rodgerd ( 402 )

        Well, if the current discussions taking place in linux-kernel are anything to go by, it provides a journalling FS that doesn't corrupt your data, which can't be said of Rieser at the moment.

        The ability to get a journaling FS trivially is actually a very useful one. One incentive to use journalling is to avoid long recovery times for big partitions. If you have big partitions, say 100GB, which is easier - finding a spare 100GB while you do a mkfs for resierfs, or simply poking ext2 a bit and magically aquiring ext3 in place?

        Moreover, ext3 provides some more journalling choices than Rieser.

        RedHat do provide Rieser as an option, and have since 7 as an install-time FS. But there's no way to convert an extisting ext2 partition to RieserFS.

      • Also probably because they couldn't switch the default file system to something incompatible with the old except in a .0 release. I suppose they *could* have gotten XFS in though, had they really wanted to. I do hope to see it in 8.0.
      • I thought that all three of these offered better performance and more features than ext3.

        Actually, the last benchmarks I saw showed ext3 coming out pretty much on top overall, closely followed by XFS. Each of the four options has their strong points (ReiserFS is particularly fast at deleting files, for example). However, on balance, it's looking like ext3 could well prove to be up there with the best of them. I'm curious to know what features you think the others provide that ext3 doesn't.

    • What exactly is a "journaling" filesystem?
      • Basically, it's one that doesn't need to be fsck'ed. This is a vast simplification, but basically, it keeps track of the changes that are made (not the actual data, just the fact that files were created/modified/deleted), and if the system should crash/power go out/etc, you won't have to worry about the filesystem being corrupted, not to mention the fact that it doesn't take ages to check the filesystem.

        I use reiserfs (a JFS) on all but one partition, and if my system crashes (I run a lot of unstable stuff), the reiserfs partitions take about 2 seconds each to check, whereas ext2 takes ages...

        Having built-in journaling filesystems is a very good thing. And just so you know, Mandrake has had support for more than a year, so redhat is really just catching up.

    • I know that SUSE is using the new LVM subsystem. It's amazing in that it's just like HP-UX - I just keep wondering where VxFS is.

      Really, Red Hat's insistance upon ext3 has cost them dearly - Oracle going exclusively with SUSE, and SUSE using Reiser, really puts Red Hat's Reiser instability claims to the fire. I've used the XFS version from SGI, and the file system is just great. Why Red Hat didn't go with this, I will never be able to understand.

      Because of the Oracle issue, I'm probably heading towards SUSE - just haven't had the time to research it and start the migrations. Red Hat has drug their feet on WAY too many issues for FAR too long.

  • Damn. Still no KDE 2.2 beta, just a CVS snapshot (although the snapshot is more recent than the beta). Does anyone else find it a little odd that there are no Redhat packages of KDE 2.2 beta, after ONE MONTH from launch?
    • Oh my god, a month? What is the world coming to?? Nobody should run software more than a few days old, at the very most .

      Please RedHat, if you're reading, please make your distributions from the very latest alpha and beta versions, preferrably from developer snapshots done the day of the release. In the past your releases based on beta-quality code were wonderful and I'd hate to see you become another SuSE or Mandrake.

      -Kevin

    • KDE only releases source packages. Check the KDE Package Policy [kde.org] for more info. So bitch to whoever is doing the RedHat packages, or to RedHat itself to start doing packages. It's not KDE's problem.

    • The explanation for this (Score:5, Informative)

      by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero AT redhat DOT com> on Sunday August 05, 2001 @03:52PM (#2156348) Homepage
      This happens to be my fault.
      Or rather, it's because I didn't have the time to build the packages when the beta was current (if you've ever worked for a linux distributor, you know there are more important things to do a couple of days before a feature freeze...), and I don't think it makes much sense to build them now (now that the beta is pretty much obsolete).

      That's precisely why I chose to put a recent CVS snapshot that should be pretty close to the 2.2 release in Roswell.

      If you don't like it, send some of your spare time to bero@redhat.com. ;) We haven't come up with a way to work more than 24 hours a day, but I'll keep trying. ;)

      • Bero: We haven't come up with a way to work more than 24 hours a day

        No! Take it easy. Take your time and make a good product. If you rush it will come out crappy. Keep up the great work but have fun!

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by itp ( 6424 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @01:46PM (#2119724)
    I guess I won't even make a snide comment about whan an asshole Rob is, then.
    • So he has to run Red Hat Linux to be taken seriously? I forgot that Open Source, /., News for Nerds, etc was synonymous with "Red Hat Linux".

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LinuxHam ( 52232 )
      I guess I won't even make a snide comment about whan an asshole Rob is, then

      Seriously, that was pretty fuckin' uncalled for. I don't care how insecure RH may be out of the box compared to some other distros, but shit, Linux is Linux, right? You have to secure every distro, and AFAIK, none of them ship with a chrooted apache, bind, and sendmail (or better yet, qmail or postfix). Gimme a break.

      Granted, I haven't used it yet, but I have yet to see or hear any evidence as to why apt-get is so much better than rpm -Fvh. Particularly when no commercial apps ship as .deb's. (And yes, some of us have *jobs* where we're well-regarded for specifying closed-source commercial apps [ibm.com] for Linux.)

      Some people will always find someting to bitch about. Case in point.
      • Applixware office ships as RPMS but includes debs of all the required libraries it needs. If it detects Debian it will attempt to install the libraries (if you already have them installed, it uses those). It then uses rpm --nodeps to install itself (or it might not, IIRC there are also tgzs on the disc, it has been a while since I last looked on the disc). So, I would change that from "no" to "only a few" (Corel uses debs too, right?).

        Also, can you rpm -Fvh dist-upgrade to upgrade your distro? How about building a source package and automatically getting its build dependencies? Anyway, apt-get is a lot better than rpm (apt-get is also superior to dpkg). Apt is usesless on its own...it needs a package manager like to dpkg to the work of installing packages. So, it would be better to say that rpm -Fvh is better than dpkg -i or something.
    • Ladies and Gentlemen, I have said it before and I will say it again. Free discussion is what Slashdot is all about, but if you think this site is so terrible or that Taco and the other editors are such idiots/snobs/nazis/whatever, either keep it to yourself or just leave. Questioning their opinions is fine, and to be encourage, but personal comments are not. It's unprofessional, it takes away from the main topic of the discussion, and it's irritating. If Malda is being arrogant, there's no need to post that fact - we see it, and calling him an "asshole" is just childish.

      Many of us are respected IT professionals, and many others like to think of ourselves as being intelligent, mature people. Let's try to act like it, eh?

  • looks pretty nice.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @02:18PM (#2121324) Journal
    ext3 support built into the kernel...(as well as other journling file systems)

    GNOME 1.4.x.. ... XFree 4.1.x.. nautulus(sp).. mozilla.. new config tools eventually phazing out linuxconf... easy GUI ISP dial tool..

    I am running 7.1 right now and except for a few setup issues it is actually pretty good.

    Hopefully they'll put mozill 9.3 in or the latest version of mozilla at the time of release...

  • RedHat denies! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @01:46PM (#2122440) Journal
    RedHat now denies that they have released another beta of their distro - Roswell. They say: "In reality it was just another one of our disaster recovery backups that we place offsite every month. There is no evidence that points to that this should have been a distro".
    Meanwhile RedHat believers rush to FTP sites, trying to gather evidence that it indeed was a real distro that had entered these servers.

    Another coverup? Only time will tell.
    • Red Hat also denies that alien technology not recovered from a ship that didn't crash not in Roswell was not used in the non-production of the non-existing non-software non-release. Ever!
  • This is really cool, I love open betas! Great way to try some newer versions of kde and gnome!

    Most of my machines are running (patched) 7.1, but I do have a few still on 7.0. I'm really looking forward to 7.2 final, but I'll sure use the beta right away. One of my friends is still using 6.2, heh.

  • Hey! (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    Don't make us RedHat share holders have to come over there and kick you square in the nuts!

    Yeah yeah, I bought a few at today's low-low prices because I'm not out a whole lot if they go under and I think that of the Linux companies, they have a pretty good chance of success. I pity the people who got in at the IPO price and didn't sell when they went over $100, though...

  • And that was what kind of comment? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SimplyCosmic ( 15296 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @01:48PM (#2127406) Homepage
    And I won't even make a snide comment about how I haven't run Red Hat in 2 years!
    Gee ... That certainly looks to be a snide comment to me. Kind of like the guy who insults your entire family, and then thinks a "just kidding" at the end makes up for it.

    Normally I try to ignore the biased comments that creep up in the stories here, but the snippy little comments, regardless of the topic, have become a bit much lately.

    • "Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, 'I was only joking!'" -- Proverbs 26:18-19

      Sometimes the Bible is surprisingly relevant.

      (BTW, this comment is not intended as a troll; it's just that few people know the Bible has anything to say about the whole "just kidding" thing. Though I fear I may spark a long offtopic thread anyway. Apologies in advance if such a thread ensues.)

    • Gee ... That certainly looks to be a snide comment to me. Kind of like the guy who insults your entire family, and then thinks a "just kidding" at the end makes up for it.

      Jeez... I can't believe how many people fell for this. It was obviously a deliberately snide comment intended to produce posts exactly like yours. I've never seen a more obvious attempt to "rattle some cages" than this and /. editors routinely post flamebait on purpose!! You and 50,000 other /.ers seem to have fallen for it yet again.

      Next time you see some ridiculously inflammatory comment by an editor (Apple and one button mice anyone?)... stop before you flame back and wonder if they aren't all laughing their asses off at the lot of you. I know I am. :)

    • "And I won't even make a snide comment about how I haven't run Red Hat in 2 years!"

      I agree, this IS horriblly elitist. Yes, Debian is the most "ideologically pure" Linux distro (which I admire), but it's the HARDEST for any non-expert to get any use out of. As a systems engineer, my job is not to impose ideology, but to impliment the best solution, which in the Linux world is Red Hat.

      Red Hat is in my experience the best distro for a server, which is what I use 7.1 for. However, I do use Mandrake on my desktop machine, but then that is what Mandrake is INTENDED for.

      The press release was REALLY cool, and the name "Roswell" is way cool. Too bad they didn't save that for the final...
      • Way harder. Which is (possibly ironically) what makes it a really good distrobution.

        With these lightweight distrobutions, you never get your hands dirty, expect when fighting with the package manager.

        Slack does not have package dependencies. I guess pat is either too slack or too wise to start messing with dependencies. You're just supposed to read the prerequisites and deal with it yourself. No fancy, smancy automation. Just what you need for a nice, stable server.

        My slack server has been up straight about 8 months, going on 9.
    • Perhaps Taco should read this section of the FAQ [slashdot.org]. According to the FAQ [slashdot.org], he used RedHat 6.2 store this story and all its attached comments.

  • Taco, (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by shaunak ( 304231 )
    "And I won't even make a snide comment about how I haven't run Red Hat in 2 years! "

    Snide: Expressive of contempt

    You almost did. And besides, we don't give a flying fuck what you do, and do not use. Get over it.

  • There is no Roswell! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @01:51PM (#2136026) Journal
    They even say so in plain english, on this "East European" news site.

    ;-)

    I love the style of the writing of the press release:

    Trust no one!

    It has come to our attention that rumors are floating regardingthe appearance of a Red Hat Linux beta release, named ROSWELL. We would like to reassure you that there is nothing of the sort. No other object has been misidentified as a Red Hat Linux beta release more often than Rawhide. Rawhide was updated just recently. Reporters probably thought they saw something on an FTP site other than Rawhide, but we assure you, it was Rawhide.

    Reports cite that this supposed ROSWELL beta included 4 CDs of software, with such things as a 2.4.6 Linux kernel, XFree86 4.1.0, KDE 2.2pre, GNOME 1.4, and journaling file system support, and included support for both x86 and ia64.

    Were any such Red Hat Linux beta release to exist, it would not be recommended for use on mission-critical hardware, and any casualties due to data loss, mutation, swamp gas, radiation, or strange glowing lights with such a release would be scoffed at. Any problems or bugs with such a release would most likely be the effect of passing weather balloons.

    These problems would be reported at:

    http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/

    However, there is no evidence to suggest the actual presence of a ROSWELL beta release. Those who claim otherwise would best not flaunt their naivete by telling anyone that they saw anything other than Rawhide.

    Etc.

    Too bad we can't say the same about XP

    • Okay, here's the explanation - they said there's no 'ROSWELL'. Strictly-speaking, this is true, but only in the 'stupid UNIX-style filesystem' sense. Since uppercase characters are different from lowercase ones, 'ROSWELL' does not equal 'Roswell', therefore, while there may, indeed be no 'ROSWELL', they've certainly not addressed 'Roswell'.

      Also, I heard when you bootup the new beta, it plays a Dido .mp3. Sweet.

  • Comments like this (Score:2, Insightful)

    by re-Verse ( 121709 )
    Its comments like that that hinder the growth of the linux community. Joe newbie finally gets on to an IRC linux help channel, asks about something he thinks is redhat related. He gets replies of "lamer, rtfm, redhat is gay." or, more in line with Taco's "Redhat, um, no comment, Redhat *snicker*"
    The newbie feels dejected, sees the community as a bunch of arrogant geeks (i guess we mainly are?) and goes back to windows where Everyone is willing to help him.

    While it seems most of the linux community is realizing this, and is starting to work together to make linux a more newbie friendly place, less distro fanaticism and more helping hands, its quite suprising to see /. post something so utterly condescending on what is probably the most popular linux distro for newbies, and The Best Known linux outside of the linux community.
    • There are also quite a few people out there who are willing to go far out of the way to help you. I remember having problems with ppp when I first installed linux, and I got some very high-quality help from a linux newsgroup (far better tech support than I've ever had from for-profit software corporations).

      The only way linux's user base will spread is through the tolerance of newbies. Yes, that means some people will have to put up with some dumb questions (RTFM!), but it pays off in the end.

  • .2 Redhat releases (Score:2, Informative)

    by mz001b ( 122709 )

    The X.2 releases of Redhat are usually pretty refined. There is not much ground breaking stuff in here, just evolution of the existing packages (gcc 3.0 is not used by default, just included in addition to 2.96).

    2.4.6 is now included, as is Xfree 4.1.0 and Gnome 1.4

    RH 7.1 is already a pretty nice distribution. It will be interesting to see what the installer changes look like.

    • 2.4.6 is now included

      I am a little worried about that. Kernel 2.4.6 still has some "issues" regarding virtual memory.

      The 2.4.7 pre-releases seems to fix that. Do anyone know if theres a chance RedHat will upgrade to 2.4.7 before the final release of 7.2 ?

    • ... is that X+1.0 will be around the corner! RedHat 8.0 probably won't be 100% stable, but it should be a cool new bit of software! I'll be installing 7.2 beta tonight, but what I'm really looking forward to will be the schweeet Red Hat 8.0 later this year!
      • "RedHat 8.0 probably won't be 100% stable, but it should be a cool new bit of software! "

        How is that cool? Most linux users use it as a server OS, where stability is everything and coolness matters not a whit. Myself, I use Red Hat in "embedded-type" applications such as MP3 jukeboxes, really cheap pc-based DVD players, etc. And the big advantage Linux has over windows on the desktop is its improved stability. What is the point of unstable linux in the name of coolness?

    • Re:.2 Redhat releases (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tet ( 2721 )
      gcc 3.0 is not used by default, just included in addition to 2.96

      They didn't have an option on this. Red Hat have always maintained binary compatibility throughout major version numbers, so shipping with anything other than 2.96-RH as the default compiler just wasn't an option. Naturally, they've supplied 3.0 for those that want to use it. I can't really fault RH about this -- they've done exactly as they said they would. Can you imagine the uproar if they'd broken their promises on binary compatibility?

  • Can anyone running the beta comment on whether any enhancements have been made to the usability of the distribution?

    Obviously, there are some new things, like filesystems, that frankly, won't affect me in the least.

    My concerns lie more with some interface things that are holding me back from using Linux. Not having come from a Unix background, I have no experience compiling software, understanding file permissions, etc. Does 7.2 do anything to address the needs of newer users?

    • Re:usability? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bero-rh ( 98815 )
      7.2 includes KDE 2.2 and GNOME 1.4 - both of them make life easier for new users.

      7.2 includes more packages than any of the previous releases, so chances you'll actually have to compile something on your own are lower.

      File permissions etc. are still there (and will stay) - but they're not really complicated once you've understood them. Basically, a file can be read, written and executed (think of the third as renaming a file from test to test.exe on that other operating system - it's done differently, but the effect is pretty much the same) - each of the operations can be allowed or denied. The file managers in KDE and GNOME give you a GUI frontend to changing permissions, so you don't need to remember commands like "chmod o+rw test" or "chmod 4777 /bin/sh".

      Try it, and let me know if you're seeing any usability problems - I'd like to fix them, but noticing them after you've used Linux for 10 years is quite tricky. ;)
      • Try it, and let me know if you're seeing any usability problems - I'd like to fix them, but noticing them after you've used Linux for 10 years is quite tricky. ;)

        Bernard, first, let me thank you for replying to my original question.

        I feel I must address your comment above, however. Consider this from a total newbie user perspective: perhaps they are an intermediate level Windows or Mac user, but have never tried Linux. There is NO way you can honestly believe that Linux doesn't have usability problems.

        I think after using Linux for 10 years, you are experiencing the "can't see the forest for the trees" phenomenon. I don't know how you get around this. I've spent a lot of time trying to convince geeks that Linux is too hard, and most of them don't believe you.

        I see alot of this in my job where I work with database developers building web applications. Frequently I will say "why did you put this button here?" or "why does this component work this way?". Almost always, their response is that "the user will understand that". Well, the problem is that the user DOES NOT understand! The developers are capable of fixing it, but they don't even see the problem in the first place!

        Does RedHat even HAVE any usability testers? If not, you should have a Vice President of Usability, along with a staff to assist them. I can assure you that Microsoft and Apple do, and it shows.

        • Re:usability? (Score:3, Informative)

          by HeUnique ( 187 )
          ok, I'll answer this...

          If you are coming from Windows with zero knowledge of Linux - them you might try Mandrake at first. Mandrake is much better suited to people who don't know linux and don't want to mess with the command line...

          Now - in terms of usability tests - both GNOME and KDE are doing usability tests. Sun did it for GNOME and the KDE team did look at the Sun results and they did their own on LinuxTag in europe and keep doing so in shows - if you're going to LinuxWorld - then you're welcome to visit the KDE booth and make your remarks - comments are always welcome.

          As for your comment "can't see the forest for the trees" - I know exactly what you mean, been there before - and I know lots of others did - and they give advice here and there about usability.

          You are of course always welcome to join KDE or GNOME team and give advice or a hint or participate in the desktop enviroment development - people that can point out some wrong GUI decision are always welcome - as long as they are willing to EXPLAIN what is wrong and suggest an alternative (programming knowledge is not necessary)
          • Exactly - KDE has set up usability.kde.org and the kde-usability@kde.org mailing list (subscribe by sending a message to kde-usability-request@kde.org with "subscribe" in the subject) just for that purpose.

            You're all very welcome to join.
          • Hetz, my comments went more toward the interface and usability of Linux as a whole, rather than just the interface of KDE or Gnome.

            To be honest, once Linux has been installed, setup, accounts assigned, etc... I find something like KDE entirely usable. My problems with the system are more like this - Sound card not detected at install, 'oh, that's easy to fix, run sndconfig at the shell' (what's a shell?), sound card gets detected and finally works (if it can detect it, why didn't it do it when I installed?) That kind of thing.

            Or bad x configuration (user error, whatever) that results in the GUI not working. Now you have newbie trying to fix it on a command line! That kind of stuff. It needs to be more foolproof.

            • Sound card not detected at install, 'oh, that's easy to fix, run sndconfig at the shell' (what's a shell?), sound card gets detected and finally works (if it can detect it, why didn't it do it when I installed?)

              We do autodetect PCI soundcards these days - ISA probing is always dangerous (can crash the machine), that's why we aren't doing that at installation time.

              If you're using RHL >= 7.1 with KDE, you have the "kontrol-panel" link on the desktop (if you're not using KDE, install the kdeadmin package and run kontrol-panel manually) - it provides a link to all system configuration tools (including sndconfig).

              Or bad x configuration (user error, whatever) that results in the GUI not working.

              This is true - but it's all but easy to fix.
              The fix that immediately comes to mind is using a framebuffer kernel and running X with the framebuffer driver only - that would get rid of this issue, but it would also get rid of nice features like XAA or DRI - so it's definitely not the right thing to do.
              If you have a better suggestion to fix this, please let me know.
              • Provide a fail-safe mode on boot that uses framebuffer?
                • You should usually not run a "normal" X server on top of a framebuffer-enabled kernel (check the READMEs in the kernel source).
                  If you do, a lot of odd things can happen, especially when switching back and forth between X and text mode.
              • A Kwick Kwestion:

                Where, O where, is the source to kontrol-panel? I was building my own KDE from source the other day (yeah, before rawhide updated to 2.2-cvs) and I couldn't find the kontrol-panel source code anywhere for the life of me!

  • God give me the strength to survive the rantings of distro wars!

    I have been running Linux since November or December of 1991. I've seen just about every distro that's ever been out starting with HJ Lu's boot/root floppies. Why myst people waste so much time an effors on distro bashing? It's Linux! That's all that matters. I have tried all of the "big 7" (see LWN's Distro page [lwn.net]) from their early releases to date. When it comes down to what counts there is no significent difference between them! They all work and work well. They will do the job that needs to be done if you have a resonably compitent SysAdmin to run them. Just like any other *NIX. I've also used Free/Net/OpenBSD and Solaris any they also work. If all the energy that is currentlly used to rant about Distros/OS/Licenses was put towards constructive things the world would be saying "Micro-WHO?" right now.

    I know no one is going to actually listen to me. But I'll keep tilting at windmills till I can't ride any more.

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