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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat 7.3 Coming Along 290

Posted by CmdrTaco from the your-headgear-is-so-stylish dept.
EyesWideOpen writes "I just read a review of a beta version of Red Hat 7.3 (code named Skipjack) over at Linux Journal. It's not the most complete review (being a little KDE heavy and GNOME shy, as well as focusing mainly on the install and desktop components) but it's a decent read. From the article: '...if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software...'. If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site."
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Red Hat 7.3 Coming Along More

Red Hat 7.3 Coming Along

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  • Downloading.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Totonic ( 549615 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:28AM (#3415694)
    "If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site.".....in a couple of days when you can finally login.

  • full text (Score:5, Informative)

    by trollercoaster ( 250101 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:28AM (#3415700) Homepage Journal
    Red Hat 7.3 beta: A Product Review
    Date: Monday, April 15, 2002
    Topic: Product Reviews

    New beta distribution includes many of the recent releases from KDE, XFree86, Mozilla and other projects, making it easy, stable and powerful on your desktop.

    The Linux community has remained active, developing improved software, and the desktop environment also continues to improve. Both the KDE and GNOME projects have added functionality, improved performance and made the desktop environment more fun and usable. The XFree86 project has continued to improve hardware support. The overall appearance, quality and selection of fonts continues to improve.

    Red Hat has been working to incorporate many of these improvements into their next release of software. While Red Hat is probably best known for their Linux server systems, their desktop systems have undergone considerable improvement. Their latest development effort, code named "Skipjack", incorporates a number of these improvements.

    My personal interest in Skipjack arose mainly because this release includes a test version of KDE 2.99, which is really KDE 3.0 Release Candidate 3. I was so excited about this release because there have been claims of great performance improvements. In fact, the final version of KDE 3.0 was announced on April 3.

    So, how well does Skipjack, Red Hat 7.3 Beta Release 2, meet my expectations? Very well, indeed.

    I installed Red Hat 7.2 on my Dell Dimension 4100 desktop computer a few weeks ago. Then I ordered a copy of Skipjack from Tech Broker. The unsupported download release came in a five CD package. Tech Broker CDs usually cost $4 per CD, so ordering Red Hat's Skipjack test release from Tech Broker cost $20. (You can download Skipjack during the testing period from ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/skipjack.) I decided to install Skipjack as an update to the 7.2 distribution to see how well that would work.

    I was very impressed with the results. It took between 30 and 40 minutes to complete the installation. Most of that time was spent detecting the existing software and determining which packages needed to be upgraded. On my system, I used the Workstation configuration (Red Hat installations provide a choice of Workstation, Server or Custom package selections). In addition to the Workstation packaging category, I also selected the option to modify the selection group and install any other software that I'm interested in. (I tend to install extra text editors, web browsers, and e-mail programs; these are the tools that interest me most).

    The installation was flawless. Every menu was clear and concise. Every screen provided an explanation of the choices to make, so it is not even necessary to read a manual in order to install the software (if you are at least somewhat familiar with software installations). The appearance of the Red Hat software installation program is familiar; if anything, the graphics, explanations on each screen and mechanics of performing the installation are more streamlined than ever.

    For those who have not installed or upgraded Red Hat software in a while, GRUB is now the default boot loader, though LILO remains available. The default GRUB boot loader now offers optional password security. If the system you're using is located in a public place where you have a need to secure the system loading process, this is a much-needed improvement (though it does not address the issue of physical system security, nor does it prevent someone from booting the system from a floppy disk). Still, this touch is a good idea, and it's not found on many other Linux distributions.

    What about the desktop? I mentioned that I was interested in trying out KDE. How well does it work? It is incredible! I'd heard that there might be as much as a 40% improvement in the overall memory usage and performance of KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2.2. While I did not confirm those numbers, I can attest that the Skipjack implementation of KDE is both solid and fast.

    The Konqueror file manager and web browser and the KMail e-mail application are two core KDE applications, and like the KDE infrastructure, they have undergone appearance, functionality and performance improvements. Konqueror has much improved JavaScript support, major improvements in DHTML capability and fast loading times, to the point that Konqueror is worth considering as my main web browser.

    KMail is KDE's full-featured and user-friendly e-mail client and supports both the popular IMAP and POP3 mail standards. Users can have multiple accounts and multiple identities. (Previous versions allowed multiple accounts to a limited degree, allowing you to read from multiple POP3 and IMAP4 servers but not allowing you to send to multiple SMTP destinations). Its address book is based on the vCard address book standard and is shared with the rest of KDE.

    I don't personally use all of the KDE applications and tools, but it bears mentioning that the Personal Information Management (PIM) tools provided in KDE have also undergone considerable improvement. The list of PIM components in the Skipjack implementation of KDE 3.0 include:

    * KMail, the e-mail client
    * KAddressBook, an address book viewer/frontend for the K Desktop Environment
    * KOrganizer, the calendar and scheduling program for the K Desktop Environment
    * KPilot, a replacement for the Palm Desktop software from Palm Inc, which makes your Palm/Palm Pilot/Visor computer capable of exchanging information with your Linux-powered computer
    * Kandy, a tool to provide synchronization of phonebook, organizer and other data on your mobile phone with the data stored on the desktop
    * KArm, a tool that tracks time spent on various tasks. It is useful for tracking hours to be billed to different clients or to find out what percentage of your day is spent playing Doom or reading Slashdot.
    * KNotes, a small tool to scribble down some notes
    * KAlarm, a quick way of setting up personal alarm/reminder messages. The messages pop up on the screen at the time you specify.

    In addition to the core desktop functionality and PIM capabilities outlined above, KDE also has a growing office suite called KOffice.

    The following parts of the KOffice suite are being developed:

    * KWord, a frame-based word processor capable of professional standard documents
    * KSpread, a powerful spreadsheet application
    * KPresenter, a full-featured presentation program
    * Kivio, a Visio-style flowcharting application
    * Kontour,a vector drawing application
    * Krita, a raster-based image manipulation program like The GIMP or Adobe Photoshop
    * Kugar, a tool for generating business quality reports
    * KChart, an integrated graph and chart drawing tool

    I don't use the KOffice suite often, but I can tell you that KWord is quite capable of reading basic Word documents. Advanced features, such as embedding Active X controls, cannot be handled by the KOffice tools, but in fairness, few if any competing office suites can accurately render all of the features found in Microsoft's latest arsenal of office applications. IF you're looking for a functional office suite that is bundled with a system, however, this suite is worth a look.

    So far, I've mentioned that Skipjack installs effortlessly, contains a new boot loader that works well and has security improvements, incorporates most of what will be found in the final KDE 3.0 desktop and runs well. What about the other features?

    Another thing I use my system for frequently is web browsing. Red Hat delivers here, too. As part of the available software, Red Hat includes not only the browsers that are integral components of the desktop managers, it also includes recent releases of the Netscape and Mozilla suites. You can choose between the "old style" version 4 Netscape browser, Netscape Communicator 4.79 and the most current release of the Mozilla browser, 0.99. Both browsers have web browser and e-mail client components.

    Speaking of browsers, I have to mention the Galeon Web browser, which is included in the Skipjack release as part of the GNOME desktop environment. While Galeon requires both Mozilla and GNOME libraries in order to function, other than the obvious disk overhead, Galeon is a very effective and efficient web browser. Skipjack comes with the newest and best version of Galeon I've seen yet, version 1.2.0. Galeon is arguably one of the leading standards compliant web browsers currently available. So Skipjack gets my nod for including a very up-to-date and usable version of Galeon.

    What about GNOME, the default desktop environment included in Red Hat distributions? The Skipjack release, as far as I can tell, does not incorporate any upcoming test releases of GNOME software. The good news, however, is that the Nautilus File Manager, which is a core component of the overall GNOME, seems more stable than I've seen in the past. Perhaps this is because the image rendering engine used with Nautilus is the Gecko engine that's part of the latest release of Mozilla. Since Mozilla 0.99 comes with the Skipjack release, Nautilus benefits from recent, significant improvements in Mozilla's functionality and reliability.

    I have not touched on any of the server features found in Red Hat; that is beyond the scope of this review. During the installation, however, I did notice that Red Hat has continued to work on integrity, security and stability issues, and it really shows. Whether Red Hat decides to produce this software as an incremental update to it's existing release and calls the next release 7.3, or if they decide to create a new major release, from my perspective as a desktop user this is without question their best release ever. Even in beta form, it is solid.

    I wrote this article using the Gvim text editor. I wrote the first part of the article while running the desktop using KDE, and I wrote the second part using GNOME. I tried out Konqueror, Konsole, KWord, Vim/Gvim, Netscape, Mozilla, Galeon, Nautilus, GNU Emacs, XEmacs, NEdit and GNOME Terminal, and I experimented with the GRUB boot loader. During my testing (while admittedly not exhaustive but representative of the kinds of daily tasks I perform) I did not encounter a single application or system failure. There probably are still some bugs out there, but this is great beta software, among the best that I've ever seen from anyone.

    Was it worthwhile to run this release? Absolutely. While Red Hat explicitly recommends not running beta software in a production environment, if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software (at least until the other vendors incorporate this software into their release).

    • Seems at last there's a Linux distro easy enough for even complete newbies to set up!

  • tv... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by digitalsushi ( 137809 )
    i wonder if it will have the option of setting up those hacked X windows libs so I can continue being lazy and still use my tv card. i love being lazy, and i love watching tv. i'd do anything to watch tv instead of learning how to install the drives to watch my tv with x windows and linux. quite the paradox no?

  • Beta Cycle (Score:4, Informative)

    by NewbieSpaz ( 172080 ) <nofx_punkguy&linuxmail,org> on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:33AM (#3415735) Homepage
    Skipjack is actually in its 2nd iteration, the first was also called Skipjack. If you do download it, make sure to use up2date, the RedHat Network's updating tool. It's a free registration for the beta channel.
    • And, in an even more confusing set of circumstances, Skipjack beta 1 was actually 7.3 beta 3 (there were two unnamed beta releases prior to Skipjack). So, in effect, Skipjack 2 (the current release) is 7.3 beta 4. Make sense?
    • If you do download it, make sure to use up2date, the RedHat Network's updating tool.

      Note that the up2date server is about 10-20 times faster than ftp. ftp.redhat.com gets me 20k/sec whereas I've seen 300-400k/sec using up2date.

      If you're brave you can even update your 7.2 box to 7.3 using up2date. Just upgrade the redhat-release, and up2date RPMs and start downloading! (note you'll probably have to manually work around some rpm name changes, but it's not hard..)

      • Being on the short end of a 28.8 modem, how does this information help me at all? :)

        Seriously, I've been trying to get all the up2date packages for a couple of months now. Is there somewhere I can just order a CD? I'm willing to pay money at this point.

  • RE: KDE heavy and GNOME shy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BRock97 ( 17460 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:33AM (#3415740) Homepage
    And this is a problem because? Gnome 1.4 has been around for quite some time and has been hashed over in so many reviews, why bother to cover it again? Meanwhile, KDE is at a new version 3.0 and is on the tips of everyone's lips at the moment. I am all for equal representation of a desktop environment, but could you blame the reviewer for wanting to cover something new? Sheesh....

    As for desktops, I have recently discovered Sorcery Linux [sorcerylinux.org]. This has been a blast, and the best part is I only get those programs I want. There. My own mini-review of a Linux distro. Check it out, you won't be sorry.
    • I would also highly recommend Sorcerer Linux, I have been running it for about 3 months now. I upgrade to KDE3 about a week ago and it has been great. The value of running a stripped down system cannot be overstated, overall system response is better, and running Moz1.0rc1 the day after it comes out can't be beat.

      All of that said, now may not be the time to jump in. There was a big shake up in march and things are only now settling down. After a new install ISO is released however, I would give an enthusiastic go ahead.

  • Just a stupid question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by famazza ( 398147 ) <fabio.mazzarino@ ... com minus distro> on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:40AM (#3415795) Homepage Journal

    Ok, I know that if I'm going to install in a empty machine it's very useful to have the latest version of your favorit distro.

    But what about this upgrade stuff? I've heard a lot of people saying that they'll buy RH7.3 (or another brand-new version of any distro) to upgrade their current version.

    Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

    Please, don't take this as a troll of a flamebait, I just want to understand.

    • Re:Just a stupid question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ZaMoose ( 24734 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:53AM (#3415912)
      Upgrading is all well and good and it works, in theory. However, newly-released versions of distros tend to bundle all relevant new software into easily -installable packages, meaning that you won't bork your system with a faulty upgrade attempt. For example, I've had a devil of a time getting KDE 3 to work on my 7.1 desktop at work. We're skipping 7.2 and waiting for 7.3 to upgrade everyone's desktops. 7.3 is supposed to have a newly-revised kickstart process which will make our upgrades of everyone's boxes peachy.

      Also, it's highly convenient for the bandwidth-impaired. Similar to the axiom "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes driving 65 down the highway".
      • Upgrading is a lot easier with a source based distro. Versions ( of the distro ) almost don't matter. Its more like a continuous flow of up to date software.
      • I was still using old XFree86 (4.0.3-5) and compiled Kernel 2.4.9 (didn't want to upgrade Kernel and X yet). Anyways, I wanted to install KDE3 from scratch so I uninstalled KDE2.2.1(?) packages. I installed most of the RPMs needed for KDE3.

        I managed to get it to work, but some things crashes like Control Center's Fonts. Someone told me to compile qt libraries from source, and it took abou six hours. Eventually, this works. KDE3 appears to be working when I used it for ten minutes.

    • Re:Just a stupid question (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:59AM (#3415960) Journal
      Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.

      Given that I am reading this thread specifically because I'm interested in upgrading a few existing boxes, I may be able to explain.

      I suspect I'm lazy.

      Can't get more "Occam's razor" than that. There's one box in pariticular that I'd like to have KDE3 on, but to do that I'd also need to update Qt to 3.something, and lib-this.so and dev-that.so.what and I don't really feel like it. I don't need KDE3 on the box, and, as I concluded the other night when I started to think about upgrading, I'm lazy. Or to put a (slightly) more charitable face on it, I'd rather code, and play with my kid, and web-surf, and read, and doodle arround on the piano. Not all at the same time of course.

      The point of OSS (to me at least) isn't that I always do things myself, but that I have that option, and at varrious levels of granularity. I eat out most meals, but I'd be annoyed if I didn't have a stove in the house, or some unpaved dirt in the back where I could plant things. But I'm still willing to let the folks at RedHat, etc. cook for me if they want to.

      -- MarkusQ

    • I wanted to have OpenLDAP use sleepycat's BerkeleyDB instead of GDBM in hopes to fix a problem.

      RedHat by default uses GDBM. So, even if I upgraded just that one part of my OS to the latest OpenLDAP, I would still not have what I wanted.

      So, I decided I'm a big boy - I can compile my own LDAP server. I figured I could then uninstall what came with RH and put my version in its place. As far as RH would know, I don't have OpenLDAP installed.

      Well...easier said than done. RH does a lot of work to force a lot of different packages with different styles as far as file system usage to conform to their own method. They would download the same tarball as me, and then patch the bejevus out of it so that all config files are in etc, all temp files in var, etc...

      So...while you can upgrade bit by bit yourself, if you want to keep an orderly system like RH installs, it could be more than of a pain.

      Not to mention that even if you take the lazy approach and let RH upgrade to the latest of a particular app, it may have dependency upon dependency, hence the need for the full upgrade.

      • Re:True example (Score:2, Informative)

        by Dehumanizer ( 31435 )
        Why not just download the OpenLDAP SRPM from Red Hat, edit the .spec file so it uses Berkeley DB, then do an "rpm -ba openldap.spec", go drink a cup of coffee, and you get exactly what you want... in Red Hat's usual places... and as an RPM?

        I usually do that.

        • Guess the best answer to that is cause I'm a dumbass. :)

          Never knew that option existed - never looked into building rpm's - thought that was more for packaging stuff you've compiled.

          Learn something everyday...cool.

          Heaven and Hell is a much better album though :)
    • Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here

      Two words, my friend: dependency hell.

      Every package you install depends on certain other packages being installed. Say you have package A installed as version 1, which requires package B version 1. You want to install the latest version of package A, but it requires package B version 2. You can't upgrade package A until you upgrade package B. ... But what packages does package B depend on? It often seems to be a never ending chain. Dealing with these types of issues is one of the great things that the distro makers take care of for you.

      This aside, I have never used the upgrade option when you boot off of the Redhat CD, has anyone had any experience with that? I've always reformatted my HD and started from scratch with a clean install.

    • Not a dumb question at all, IMO.

      Personally, I am waiting for 7.3 for a fresh install on a new 120GB HD. My current system is on an 8 gig drive with a secondary 2 gig drive. It was originally installed with RH6.1, upgraded to 6.2, then again to 7.1, and again to 7.2. I upgraded KDE as well along the way. I could upgrade it to 7.3, but I think I want to do a fresh install. I didn't have too many problems with the upgrades, but I want to make sure I am fully on 7.3. And I have the new HD. Yeah, maybe it is overkill, but I am going to install the whole damn distro on there.

    • I keep a daily-update mirror of the Red Hat updates for the "enigma" release, and as of yesterday (Thursday) the CD-ROM image for the updates is at 588,644,352 bytes. In other words, it's more than half of the original distribution. Further, upgrading all of the modules is a royal PITA unless you do a full install because of the hell of dependencies.

      One reason I also tend to reformat and load a new version instead of update is that my IDS database is then rebuilt from scratch -- I know that my servers are not compromised at the re-install (of course I yank the Ethernet connections during the install) and I can re-establish a baseline. It takes longer, but I believe the extra effort is worth it.

      Some people will complain about having to reconfigure everything. Some things, like my spam-blocking list, get carried over (I run PostFix). For some things like my Web server, I cut and paste from the old config to the new config the access control information; when I move to Apache 2.0 I will have to re-work this, but it'll be worth it.

      And when 7.3 is released and the people on the bleeding edge have had time to spill some blood on it, I'll move up and start keeping a new mirror of updates...

  • you will be more pleased by using Mandrake 8.2 than any version of Red Hat. Don't forget: Red Hat is designed as a traditionnal Unix replacement, while Mandrake is designed as a Windows XP with Linux kernel (and solidity).

    I'm afraid many ones should twice before considering Red Hat (which is a great distro) for their desktop environment.
    • eh, I used to do exactly that (RedHat for servers, Mandrake for desktop, I use LFS for desktop now) and I can't say there that much of a difference. I'd say it's more of a personal taste thing, than "this distro is right for this applications, and this one for this!" - that's about as much FUD as that whole "linux isn't ready for the desktop" thing.

      Incidently, something I really liked about Mandrake was that it allowed you to install with ReiserFS by default, something I would definitely appreciate on RedHat, when used for things like webservers and CVS servers (for file servers I'm just fine with ext3 though)

      eh, just my .02

      • Why would Red Hat provide ReiserFS at install? They paid a guy to develop Ext3 for a while and they were certainly angry when ReiserFS was available before Ext3. So I guess Red Hat sees ReiserFS as a competitor...
        • So I guess Red Hat sees ReiserFS as a competitor

          That would be rather sad if they didn't include it for that reason, it's a good product (er, both of them, that is)... Although if RedHat included ReiserFS it would be rather hard for ReiserFS to "compete" with RedHat, I would think...

      • Rather off topic, but if you like LFS, you might want to give gentoo a try.

        I liked the ability to compile packages optimized by my system, but I always ended up giving up when trying to get gnome installed. Figuring out the dependencies, and getting every required package to install was a pain. Gentoo helps out a lot with that.

    • I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MisterP ( 156738 )
      I don't understand this. Aside from the install, these distro's seem quite similar. What makes Mandrake more Windows like and Red Hat more UNIX like? It doesn't make any sense.

  • 3D (Score:2)

    by Odinson ( 4523 )
    Is 3d fixed on vodoo3000 yet? I tried a fresh install of the second beta and 3d (which worked on 7.2/4.1 great) does not work.

    On 7.2 it worked out of the box.

    • Re:3D (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      RedHat betas have a bad history of Voodoo3 3D. Having rolled my own distro, I understand why. For XFree to compile with DRI support for Voodo3, you must have glide3. While hard enought to get on its own, glide3 depends on XFree to compile, a circular dependency. Also, with XFree 4.2, using the standard .cf entries that are supposed to make it work don't, so I have to put in some customization there too. Though it is annoying, I can see how RedHat could overlook this stuff.
  • The entire reason to upgrade is the new version of KDE (v3.0)
    • if thats your entire reason, try Gentoo. [gentoo.org]
      The nice thing was that when I wanted to upgrade to kde3, it was no problem. I wanted to do the same on my mandrake 8.2 and redhat 7.2 installs, but somehow it seemed more trouble than it was worth after typing emerge kde on the gentoo box, going to sleep and waking up with kde3 installed...
      Then again, I'll be upgrading to 7.3 once the (non-beta) iso is available (not on my production server tho, really don't need kde for a mail/print/web server.)
    • I would recommend reading this before:
      "KDE 3.0 - Use with care"
      http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=2087& lang=en [mandrakeforum.com]

      I think this time Mandrake has adopted the good strategy by shipping a stable release of KDE (2.2.2) with Mandrake 8.2.

    • The entire reason to upgrade is the new version of KDE (v3.0)

      Actually, another fine reason is Evolution is now bundled. I had a bitch of a time installing Evolution from RPMs on RH 7.2 (the RPMs from ximian had really fubar dependencies, maybe they have fixed that since I tried).

      For those of you trying to "convert" a friend from Windows over to Linux, Evolution is a key component. It is very Outlook like from a usability perspective, without all the security holes. Plus the "virtual folders" are way cool. I am very happy to see RH include Evolution in 7.3.

  • 3 disks of sheer joy..... (Score:5, Informative)

    by CDWert ( 450988 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @09:59AM (#3415961) Homepage
    Well I touhgt I would DL and play with it.

    So I , as I have done for years downloaded disk 1 and started to install, it asked for 2, I dl and burned it, put it in, and then, and this is a first, It asked for 3.

    I can figure out for the life of me what the he** takes up 3 disks.

    But if you are going to do anything other than a MINIMAL install do yourself a favor, download and burn all 3 Disks, you will need em.

    Another thing I found interesting , albeit a pain since Ive never had a problem, is the CD integrity check, although you can bypass it.

    Why dosent RedHat partner with Ximian and put the whole jobber together with the exchange connector and Ximian Gnome in a nice premium edition, hell I'd buy it....But then again I bought an Apple Lisa when they were new.....

    • Re:3 disks of sheer joy..... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-homeNO@SPAMcobol2java.com> on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:21AM (#3416126) Homepage
      Why would they??

      Exchange connector costs almost $70 - which means your Redhat 7.3 package will costs you something around ~$130..

      Another thing - Ximian RPMS simply break things (although I heard from one of the developers there that this will be fixed very soon) - try to install the Ximian RPMS for mozilla (for example), and then upgrade them with a newer version of Mozilla, not from Ximian.. bzzt - RPM will tell you that Ximian RPMS are newer, despite the fact that it's wrong..

      Also, don't forget - they ARE competitors - both sell competing services (up2date VS. Red-Carpet) to their clients at the same prices, so why would RedHat bundle their competitor stuff into their distribution? that doesn't makes any sence..
      • Heres why.

        "Exchange connector costs almost $70 - which means your Redhat 7.3 package will costs you something around ~$130.."

        True, BUT bulk liscencing for redistribution is MUCH cheaper to the end customer, remember things like TriTeal CDE or something or another RH packaged, it was over 200 in the store and the whole RH with it was less than 75$ , same for stonghold, and other things RH bundles, Ximian sells 100 times more than they ever would on their own and RH gets a great prodcut

        "Another thing - Ximian RPMS simply break things (although I heard from one of the developers there that this will be fixed very soon)"

        True again, this is a reason Ximian and RH working in tandem could completley eliminate this problem while making both their products better.

        "Also, don't forget - they ARE competitors - both sell competing services (up2date VS. Red-Carpet) to their clients at the same prices, so why would RedHat bundle their competitor stuff into their distribution? that doesn't makes any sence.."

        RH has before packaged a competitiors product. I dont see this as much of a problem, They are a half a dozen ways to work around it to both RH and Ximians satisfaction I am sure.
      • Connector is not part of Ximian Desktop, which is what he is talking about bundling.

        Desktop is ~$30 I think, and would be discounted as part of the bundle.

        -Erik
        • Actually no charge for desktop even if redhat felt like bundling it now, its all GPL

          So is evolution, which is included in 7.3

          The only thing in need of a purchase of a mass liscence on RHats part would be the connector.

  • the one thing I love about Red Hat linux is the fact that it is a very strong server platform (yes yes I know it's not the only one). I sure hope they stay on that track and not spend all the r&d time making it a better desktop. I'm not downplaying the importance of having a good desktop system that's not windows.. But it's equally important to have a stable VM, file system, strong security, logging and auditing capabilites... So far, Red Hat has had all of the above and I hope the next release follows suit.

  • Help! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:03AM (#3415999)
    This post is a last resort.... To Lisa, whom I met at the Brooks Café in Seattle last Saturday. Lisa, I lost your phone number and I'm trying to figure out how to reach you! Oh, that magical night we had. I never believed in love at first sight until I met you. I remember talking with you at length about the upcoming Redhat 7.3 release, so I thought maybe, maybe you will read this Slashdot forum. Oh, I hope I will get modded up to something where you will see it!!! I love you so much and I don't know what I would do without you! Love, Gerard P.S. if you do get this, meet me at the same spot this Saturday at 10!!!

    • I *just* knew we would meet again (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:45AM (#3416657)
      That Saturday night was just incredible. I never met a man like you. I was so worried you would never call me. I thought you might try to finger me, lisa@brooks.com, after mounting your device. At least I thought that was your .plan, but to actually open yourself up to the criticism of the slashdot community shows your true love. Of course I will see you Saturday at 10.

  • Code name: Skipjack or Hampton? (Score:3, Informative)

    by gaj ( 1933 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:06AM (#3416022) Homepage Journal
    I know that 7.3 has been called Skipjack all along during development, but I've recently been hearing the name Hampton thrown around. Anybody able to lend a clue here? Obviously not very important, but I'm amused by things like this.
  • I have had too many problems with Redhat AND Mandrake (The latest iterations of both (7.2 and 8.2 respectively) in regards to Firewire, installing a current kernel to use firewire, libs, STANDARD LIB PATHS not being included.. (Come on /usr/public/lib takes no effort to have it in the ld.so.conf file from the box.. WHY THE HELL DONT THEY PUT IT IN THERE!!!... ok done ranting) and several non-standard issues that the "shiney/fluffy" distros love to throw upon everyone.. Granted if you use redhat you should NEVER do anything bus use rpm's or you will have problems like I have.. and if I was a newbie that didn't want to do advanced things with my computer, redhat would be great.

    Otherwise... I stick with slackware.. I can upgrade X without blowing the machine up.. i can upgrade GCC without blowing everything up, and perl -mCPAN doesnt blow the hell out of your perl install when it cant detect perl and re-installs it because it thinks you need an upgrade because some moron at Redhat thought that putting perl in a non-standard location is a smart idea. (Yes, I took that cheap-shot.. whoever put perl where it is in redhat needs to be called a MORON. any decision that breaks standard tools for no reason deserves public ridicule.)

    Slackware... Less headaches more productivity for the advanced user.

    • Re:Great, I wish them luck... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ekrout ( 139379 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:21AM (#3416134) Journal
      Slackware was the greatest for the ultra power user until Gentoo [gentoo.org] came along.

      Currently in version 1.1a, it's the coolest Linux to come along in a decade and includes an amazing Portage system that is the best (apt-get / BSD ports)-like package management system ever created.

      Come on over to [irc.openprojects.net channel #gentoo] and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

      • Re:Great, I wish them luck... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Baki ( 72515 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @02:20PM (#3417862)
        As a long time FreeBSD user, being "forced" to run Linux because of some desktop issues (read, vmware3) I do NOT AGREE at all.

        Everyone seems to be raving about how cool gentoo is, almost like FreeBSD; how the FreeBSD users formerly attracted to Slackware all run to Gentoo now. Well, I don't think so.

        The FreeBSD ports system might have some technical similarities to Gentoo portage (which is even more advanced), but there is a huge and crucial difference:

        Portage is instable, ports are broken all the time (just read the forum on gentoo.org); also in FreeBSD the ports are just an add-on, the base system is not ports-based, but is one monolithic (stable) block.

        I still think that Slackware is the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro, even though it does not have a ports system. Because:
        - it is stable
        - it feels more like FreeBSD, because of little things such as simple init scripts (BSD based)
        - the base system is not monolithic as in FreeBSD, but still installing the a,ap,d and l series provides you with a base that doesn't change all the time. Almost any slack installation has the same set of basic packages installed, it is much less a choose and pick than any other Linux distribution.

        Portage looks nice and impressive the first day you use it, but becomes a nightmare after a few weeks useage (believe me, I was amazed at start and have used it some weeks). Everthing updates all the time, not all dependencies are caught and strange interactions between the ports begin to happen. Not one user of Gentoo has the same versions of packages installed together, because this depends on the (random) timestamps that you decide to run an 'emerge rsync'.

        I think gentoo's approach is interesting, but it is not ready for prime time, it should be version 0.1, not 1.1(a).

        No no, Slackware still is the greatest for the 'ultra power user', and shall remain so for a long time. Creating your own 'ports' is trivial, I wrote some scripts myself (and I think many slack users did) to create them easily. I like to figure out how to 'port' any package running on my machine myself, except for the packages of the only other person I trust (Patrick Volkerding) in this respect.

    • Funny enough, a new slackware box last summer did exactly that when I tried to perl mCPAN stuff. Something wasn't where it thought, so it downloaded and installed the entire perl 5.6 stuff, which is not what I had on there initially and not what I wanted. It ended up overwriting some of the other perl stuff, so now I simply don't use any perl on that box. Quite a shame. :(

  • dumb question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jchristopher ( 198929 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:33AM (#3416223)
    Probably a dumb question, but RH 7.2 was my first experience with Linux and I've been using it on and off.

    If you just stay current with something like Red Carpet or Up2Date, do you basically end up with 7.3 eventually? Or do you need the cds to 'upgrade'?

  • Beta or Release (Score:2, Interesting)

    by moankey ( 142715 )
    When it comes to stuff like open source, aside from support, do people really care if its beta, release candidate, or final release? Unless its extra unstable in alpha form or serious security hole most people will run betas and be happy.
    Heck M$ does it all the time and makes money on each minor revision.

  • "KDE Heavy?" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:45AM (#3416293) Homepage


    Amusingly, i'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but, i'm sure it will devolve into that anyway......

    I think the reason why the review is "KDE-heavy" is because when it comes to GNOME, nothing major has really changed (functionally or asthetically) between the version that shipped with 7.2 and the version you see in 7.3..In other words, theres not really much to say that hasn't already been said.

    The reason why KDE got so much coverage versus GNOME in this review is probably due to the fact that the changes between KDE 2.2.x and KDE 3.x are rather large. Theres no bias here on behalf of the reviewer. One desktop changed radically from 7.2 to 7.3, the other did not.

    Moderate this post however you want. Just don't be a goddamn idiot and say "I like GNOME! KDE suxx!!! I'm going to mod this down!!" since this reply is neither pro-KDE or pro-GNOME.

    • I think the KDE heavy vs. Gnome light is perfectlly understandable:

      As a long time Gnome fan, I have always thought KDE was nice but never ran it for more than a few days at a time before switching back to Gnome...But I must say that with KDE 3, there is some amazing maturity that I just can't deny. The transparent menus are really cool -- along with the anti aliased fonts.....It just LOOKS and FEELS much better all the way around. Plus the web browser holds it's own. I am very impressed and have been using it 99% of the time since 3 came out. Gnome seems to be lagging behind a bit these days when it comes to overall polish and pizazz....And Nautilus seems to be hurting more than helping the overall FEEL of the whole Gnome experience...
  • Why can't distributions just install all previous versions of glibc and libstdc++??? Then there wouldn't be so much of a problem with breaking binary compatibility.... am I missing something?
    • There are usually glibc-XXX-compat.i386.rpm files that you can install alongside of the newer ones for backwards compatibility. They don't seem to get installed by any of the options unless you go in and pick individual packages or just do it post-install though. hunt in your various rpm dirs for *compat*, can be quite helpful!

  • LSB (Score:3, Insightful)

    by javilon ( 99157 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:26AM (#3416526) Homepage
    On their last release, Suse made a point about being LSB compliant.

    Apparently Red Hat is not, but I don't see any comment about it.
    It seems to me that the linux people should follow their own standards.
    Is Red Hat planning to be LSB compliant any time soon?

    • Re:LSB (Score:5, Informative)

      by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-homeNO@SPAMcobol2java.com> on Friday April 26, 2002 @12:21PM (#3416951) Homepage
      RedHat 7.3 is simply an update and it's binary compatible to all previous 7.x versions - so you cannot play with file locations and binaries to be fully LSB compliant on an updated version..

      I guess they'll be LSB compliant on 8.0
      • Actually, I can just about guarantee it. RH said back in March that they'd release a LSB 1.1 compliant distro in 2002, and seeing as how 7.3 can't be it, it'll have to be 8.0 in the Fall/Winter later in this year.

  • Install directly from the ISOs (Score:5, Informative)

    by mnordstr ( 472213 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:53AM (#3416749) Journal
    I love this feature of the RedHat install. Since it's a beta, I don't want to waste 3 cds on it. No problem, I just downloaded the ISOs to another computer (with an NFS daemon), and installed it over the network. Just had to create a simple boot disk [redhat.com], and voila. This is a great and fast way to install the new RedHat if you don't neccessarily need it on CDs. And it is faster because my CD doesn't read as fast as my network can transfer.
    • That is really cool. I have never tried that before, but I think I will when I test the beta tonight!

      I can't wait to see what cool stuff is planned for RH 7.3 :)

      -WS

    • It is also possible to do an FTP install using a boot floppy & text mode (I used this to upgrade at home from Skipjack beta 1 to beta 2.

      What I would like to see is the CD that the package is located on during the install, and also better arrangement of packages on the CDs (server stuff on CD 1, X/KDE/Gnome on CD 2, & maybe devel packages on CD 3).

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