Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch 129
Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have
liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial
Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March
14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will
better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as
Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years
and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen
hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's
high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand
with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."
"Enterprise Linux" (Score:5, Funny)
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R Hell (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you realise how long ago RHEL3 came out?
You couldn't force an upgrade
I don't think your criticisms should be aimed at RHEL. If you wanted new packages over stability or wanted to be able to force upgrade then you picked the wrong distro. You are not their target audience.
If the stability of fedora is enough for your needs maybe you should look there instead?
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It's fair enough that they focus on rock solid stability over new packages. However, it's a bit disappointing that my employers were still paying a support contract on this box but the packag
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that, even though the Python package may be 3 years old, if it's still under support, and tomorrow they found a security bug in that years-old version, you would still get a security patch for it.
That's the thing.. you're not paying for a little flexibility. You're paying for stability and maintenance. It may seem backwards to you but that's the exact sorta thing that most "enterprise" customers want. If they offered the sort of flexibility you're looking for, that would mean supporting multiple different versions of different packages within a single distro.
The reason they can offer such long-term support is that every user of every package in that distro is running the exact same version. It would simply not be economically possible for them to offer 7 years of support on a product if they allowed people to run whatever version they wanted, even as an option.
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Some even allow multiple version installs at the same time as is intended by the software program (multiple gccs, pythons, etc) instead of some single "blessed"/core system version.
Why do packages have to be vendor locked to the OS release? We don't put up with it with Microsoft's stu
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Informative)
That seems a bit off. By early 2006 any current Dell would have been certified for RHEL4 (which itself was released early 2005). As a aside, license for RHEL are valid for any currently supported version, so even if it came imaged with RHEL3 you had right to install RHEL4.
It's fair enough that they focus on rock solid stability over new packages. However, it's a bit disappointing that my employers were still paying a support contract on this box but the package updates that were part of this contract were more than 3 years old.
The updates are not three years old. There was a new update published this morning. The base versions are old, but that's a feature, not a bug. When you're running production systems you want a stable platform with a reasonable deployment cycle, which is where RHEL excels.
I don't think it's too much to expect a little flexibility when you're paying for it.
When you pay for one of the enterprise platforms you're paying for stability not flexibility. It's actually more work for them to backport fixes to older versions than to blindly package newer ones, but new versions mean new bugs and incompatible changes. Some of us pay good money to avoid it, and RPM is flexible and easy enough for the few cases we actually need a newer version than what Red Hat ships stock.
Re:R Hell (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been running Red Hat in an "enterprise" environment for about 8 years now. I've seen it go from an upgrade every 6 months to not needing an upgrade for the life of a box. Taking a look at our satellite server, I see 210 machines still subscribed to the RHEL 3, and even 13 subscribed to 2.1 (itaniums, hey, they still run!). These boxes are stable and secure, and I'm happy with that. They are performing their functions.
No doubt, it's not for everyone. Many people can't afford it, including myself in my personal life (alright, I could, but I really don't feel the need). Fedora is fine for those. Ubuntu is fine for those. Whatever other version you like is fine for those. If you want it to run with minimal upgrades, you stick with something that has support in some fashion for a long long time afterwards, like RHEL, where you can get security fixes for 7 years after release.
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If you color in the lines as far as packages go, RHEL is a remarkably stable OS. Coupled with enterprise support that most PHBs will like, it is a fine arsenal in any sysadmin's cache. Step outside of those lines, and you've defeated the purpose of having a distro with package management, and you might as we
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I am sure version 5 will have much newer packages, but will be woefully outdated in a very short amount of time. With
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The whole point of RHEL is that packages don't change. You can always package your own Samba, though, and update over the core packages. Samba's actually pretty easy to do this with, you can probably just grab a Fedora dev SRPM and recompile it
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And lose support for Samba on that system. Then you must ask--what are you paying for?
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RHEL(L)? (Score:2)
I use RHEL4 compatible distro called Scientific Linux CERN 4 (SLC4) on my laptop. I need it to run some CERN software (mainly Geant4 [cern.ch] and ROOT [root.cern.ch]). These packages mostly work on other systems as well but they work best on SLC4 because they have been thoroughly tested on this platform. On other (newer) distros expecially new GCC4 compiler causes some annoying problems. I really like many things in this distro: stability (both as in "doesn't crash" and "doesn't change insert-name-of-software-package-here version
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I think it depends on the KIND of stability you are looking for... There is stability in the fact that nothing changes, and there is stability in terms of operational reliability.
The problem with the former, is that modern third party software tends to be incompatible with ancient versions of software that a
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
If you run an enterprise application, stability is critical in terms of both operational reliability and package versions. While I agree with you that some of the higher level applications that could be kept more "fresh", Enterprise Linux targets an audience that tends to run mission critical applications on their operating systems. These companies deal with a number of third party ISVs who certify their products on Red Hat Linux. If software package versions are changing constantly, ISVs will refuse to certify said changes due to the cost of doing so.
This was one of the problems with Red Hat's pre-Enterprise Linux audiences. ISVs saw Linux as a moving target. I think Red Hat does a good job of freshening what they can with their point releases.
Simply put, if you need bleeding edge software, you'll need to find it from Fedora or a third party repository. There are a number of repositories out there, AT-RPMs, Dag, RPM Forge, etc. that package applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, for Linux to be enterprise-ready, core stability (again in terms of versioning and reliability are a must.
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Some reason,
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That said, people also choose RHEL so they don't HAVE to maintain everything by hand. With CentosPuls containing PHP5, you
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RHEL is certainly a distro that is aimed at stability rather than the latest features. It is Red Hat's policy that they will not upgrade any package past the minor version that originally shipped with that release. So if it shipped with Python 2.2.3 then it will never go past 2.2.x. They will backport security or stability patches from later releases if necessary.
If that's not the policy you're looking for in a distro, then RHEL is not the distro for you. That said, I have had lots of luck in compiling SR
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Which is why I switched to Ubuntu and FreeBSD long ago from redhat. The conspiracist in me thinks rpm was invented as a way to keep you on the upgrade trendmill. I spent lots of money in the past upgrading linux distros before I had high speed internet access and could apt-get or use the ports. RPM is truly terrible and yum does not solve anything other than to download some other packages that might be required with it. Upgrading is still a nightmare.
I guess commercial software vendors
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We had similar problems. However all you have to do is when you install the newer version of python, do make altinstall instead of a make install. When you need the newer version, you just do
As for your php problem. Remove all of the php rpms and install from source. It does not invalidate your support (at least it hasn't invalidated ours). You can get multiple version of ph
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While no fan of Redhat (anymore), this is just a lame complaint.
You know, Solaris and it's commercial brethren didn't always include the open source tools we've come to expect these days.
Before AIX, Sun, IRIX, etc. all had open source repositories with binaries rolled into the native package format (these days, often provided by the vendor itself!), we admins got along just fine either compiling most sour
This is why /usr/local exists (Score:2)
If you have some scripts that absolutely got to run with the newer version, then compile your own and put it in
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Usually, you can get away with doing a build from source with some variation of --prefix=/usr/local/pkg, so as to not interfere with the native pkg.
That's how I ran my newer custom builds of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and OpenSSL under RH7 and RHEL3. It can get a bit tricky with OpenSSL, due to the runtime linker and some libs, but generally thats what /usr/local/ is there for [or at least that's what I have used it for].
I have not looked into building Python, but as long as you leave the env alone, and specif
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CentOS 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
The two weeks lead time would appear to be borne out by this CentOS FAQ entry. [centos.org]
Re:CentOS 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
This is completely on topic, and I, like (probably) many other people, immediately wondered when CentOS's release would be after seeing this announcement.
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Thanks god there are people paying for rhel if they can afford it though.
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RHEL could gain a LOT more converts and increase value with their own version of Plus. Plus gives you the best of both worlds.
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Technically the packages should work fine, though.
crash dump (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:crash dump (Score:4, Informative)
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There is both netdump (dump to a remote host, via ssh), diskdump (dump to a partition) and the new to be in RHEL5 kdump (which does all kinds of neat things).
and re: debuging tools:
Its not for kids, but check out andersons paper on debugging vmcore files.
http://people.redhat.com/anderson/crash_whitepaper
I've traced down a few causes of bugs with this, One might argue it m
Redhat Dominates enterprise (Score:1, Insightful)
As for being dominant, there is a thing in any industry that if you are the first, its very hard to lose that position. Redhat was first to the commercial sector. Other distributions qualities may rock, but Redhat was still first, and its position in the ma
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Where are the package listings? (Score:2)
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boring == good (Score:5, Insightful)
Proprietary Platforms? (Score:2)
the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.
What do they mean by proprietary platforms? Who knew RH was actively going after z/OS, OS/400, VMS, VxWorks, OSX.... what exactly consistutes a proprietary platform? One that only one vendor can create hardware for? Or one that there is only one vendor selling hardware/software/accessories for it?
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What do they mean by proprietary platforms? Who knew RH was actively going after z/OS, OS/400, VMS, VxWorks, OSX.... what exactly consistutes a proprietary platform? One that only one vendor can create hardware for? Or one that there is only one vendor selling hardware/software/accessories for it?
I think by "proprietary" they mean mostly Unix systems from vendors like Sun, IBM and HP. But when it comes to IBM this goes both ways because Red Hat (and SuSE) run on most, if not all, IBM boxen:
xSeries - I
RH5 Looks good (Score:3, Informative)
3/14 = Pi Day! (Score:2)
Stable, but pricey (Score:1)
Er, why didn't you try CentOS? (Score:2)
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Real-time... for next time? (Score:2, Interesting)
RHEL3 (Score:2, Interesting)
RHEL 5 Release Notes (Score:2)
For those who are interested here are the release notes [redhat.com]. The technology preview is particularly mouth watering. Personally I'm especially looking forward to GFS2.
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No, wait...
I sit corrected.
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When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat? (Score:2)
Re:When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. And s/five/seven =)
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Developers
Develop...
wait, wrong thread.
3 words:
Support.
Support.
Support.
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We were also being pushed down the RHEL path several years back (right when RH EOL'd the RH releases that all our major ISVs had just standardized on... thanks guys, same basic timeframe for the Novell/Suse merger). Our talks about pricing to RH basically went "We'd like to talk about bulk pricing." "We're the only 'certified' ga
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Anyone with useful i
Re:The wait is almost over? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, I imagine we'll still be waiting after March 14th. Now that RHEL5 is official, we will start waiting for vendor support, Oracle, EMC, IBM, etc. Making it official is just step 1. People who use RHEL don't rush to update.
The bad news is now my RHCE, earned under RH v8, is officially expired :(
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Communist!
I keed, I keed.
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RHEL is about the server. Fedora, Ubuntu and other are about the desktop.
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Not true. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS [ubuntu.com] is great for the server.
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That said, I find that there are no technical reasons that Ubuntu is in any way "superior" to RH/Fedora. It's simply just my preference. Don't let the fanboys fool you.
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Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
How much effort was put in to fixing bugs by people paid for by Red Hat.
Software developed by Red Hat includes projects such as Network Manager, Totem etc.
This all costs money and Red Hat funds a lot of development. I do not see Ubuntu on the following list:
Top (kernel) lines changed by employer
(Unknown) 740990 29.5%
Red Hat 361539 14.4%
(None) 239888 9.6%
IBM 200473 8.0%
QLogic 91834 3.7%
Novell 91594 3.6%
Intel 78041 3.1%
MIPS Technologies 58857 2.3%
Nokia 39676 1.6%
SANPeople 36038 1.4%
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/ [lwn.net]
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Good point.
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Don't get me wrong, I applaud RedHat for all the work they are doing, but I have no illusions that they are the only company willing and able to do that work. Furthermore, they
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CentOS, via their Plus repository
Redhat doesn't HAVE a "Plus" repository, which is where CentOS puts recent versions of software for those that require it.
Since I can't get that for ANY price from RH, they actually have LESS value to me.
Here is a real world scenario. I have several racks full of blade servers. The hardware is identical. The configuration is identical. The software loaded is identical. These machines are all clones of each other. If I have a problem
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Alan Cox? (Score:2)
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When you say that Red Hat is "greedy," do you mean that they are wrong for selling Linux? After all, people who buy Red Hat's Linux get support, oodles of manuals (good luck getting that brand-new SATA2 RAID card to work in Ubuntu without some arcane incantation halfway through your init (W
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I think you need to learn your IT history a bit better. Unix has had single sign on capability since NIS (formerly Yellow Pages) was created back in the 80s (I believe version 2 was 1985) and linux has had it since pretty early on in its history. As usual Microsoft were last out of the stalls but made a big song and dance about it and pretended they'd re-invented the
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