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Red Hat Software Businesses

New Red Hat Beta Available 31

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-play-with dept.
nd writes "A new beta of Red Hat is out, available at the Red Hat FTP site. This presumably pre-6.1 release is named Lorax, with quite a bit of new features (note: this is beta and is NOT intended for everyone). Perhaps the biggest is their new installation program, Anaconda, featuring gtk+ and text interfaces. Even better, Anaconda is GPLed. Mirror list available here. Check it out. "
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New Red Hat Beta Available More

New Red Hat Beta Available

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  • Hello everybody,


    when RedHat went public, I didn't think it would change things too much. I knew RH has approximately 50% of the linux community, so I knew they would capitalize on that. That is ok. I also knew that many third parties were making software that runs better or only on RedHat linux. That is not OK, and it resambles the MS world and MS way. However, since Linux is opensource, there will always competition, right? At least this is the opinion of many, including Nicholas Petreley, whom I regard as a good IT journalist.
    However, shortly after RH went public, something started to change: the new RedHat shareholders, who happened to be talented programmers and technoligists, intelligent people therefore, started to hail RedHat a bit louder than usual. This shouldn't have been unexpected, but it still was surprising to me. I know money corrupts people, as it did corrupt many if not all the people who work for Microsoft. Or anyone who makes a buck from Microsoft and it's BS products. But I thought "these Linux guys are developing open source stuff, they arecertainly moral, honest, otherwise they wouldn't do such a noble thing as writing programs and releasing them open and free.."
    What hurts me is seeing Slashdot being biased. I don't mean the slashdot posters in general, even though most ofthem support RH above anything else. No wonder, again, since the largest marketshare RH has among Linux distros. I mean, the moderators seem to be biased. There was a guy in this thread that just said *BSD has good security, and RedHat doesn't. ANd this post was labeled as "Troll". This guy didn't swear, didn't curse. It stated it's opinion.
    Another example: beginning this week, I have posted to Slashdot about Caldera (my preferite RH-like distro) releasing OpenLinux 2.3. It's not a bera, it's a final product. I also informed that the ISO image of the new OL 2.3 is available for download, (as I have downloaded it myself). This didn't appear on Slashdot.
    I have seen much more examples of this biased behaviour on Slashdot, but I am referring only to theones Ihave in front of my eyes right now.

    Well, thinking that my dream of a fair playground for OSs is shattered already really sucks.

    This post won't make a big differene in how things will evolve, still, I wish all of you guys who read it could start being OS agnostic. No matter how much shares of RH you have.


    Have a nice day,


    haggar
  • The KDE path weirdness is inherited from RedHat 6. A few months ago one of the KDE guys wrote a comment on why he packaged it like that, and it made sense (something to do with being able to work on many distributions I believe? But, it has been a while, and I don't quote remember, so I might be wrong.)

    Anyway, one fix is to just symlink /opt/kde to /usr. Simple.
  • Namely: KDE. Under my Red Hat system, KDE usually goes in /opt/kde, and the RPM's I get from www.kde.org go in /opt/kde.

    On Red Hat 6.0 though, the KDE packages are all dumped under /usr by default. I don't particularly like it, but it hasn't annoyed me enough to change it.

    Iff the Mandrake RPM's are relocatable (one would hope so), it may be possible to install them all under /opt/kde with something like rpm --prefix=/opt/kde -ivh *.rpm. Although you'll probably then have to change some init scripts if you're running kdm. Disclaimer: I haven't tried this, so no warranty :-)

  • I feel sorry for all those that insist on buying the deluxe boxed sets for every new version of RH. Now, don't get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that they release new versions so often that they are supposedly up-to-date in the way of stability.. But from what I've seen with 5.2 & 6.0, it doesn't seem to be getting any better. the beta for 6.0 was out for only a couple weeks before the final was released, and half the methods of install never worked (at least when I tried it), such as forgetting to include parallel port modules (?) for install, but saying it's supported? HTTP and FTP install seemed not to want to work at all. And just look at the redhat errata page for 6.0. It's great that they at least update their mistakes and I know RedHat obviously doens't make most of these programs, but perhaps it would be nice to test all these bleeding-edge packages instead of waiting for some security organization to tell them there's another buffer overflow warning in their version of something?
  • The reasoning was that /opt is for "after-market" packages, ones not part of the distribution itself. Since KDE is standard in the redhat 6.0 distribution, it was kept out of /opt for that reason.

    This is a big pet peeve of mine with respect to most all unix setups, the way they want to throw everything in a few common directories. Nested directories and symlinks are fast now, we're out of the days of washtub sized disks. Can we get with the program and start installing things in their own directory more often and just use symlinks if we need the executables or configs in one place? I understand there's a package manager that does that, but that it's also really quite primitive compared to rpm or apt.
  • > There was a guy in this thread that just said *BSD has good security, and RedHat doesn't. ANd this post was labeled as "Troll". This guy didn't swear, didn't curse. It stated it's opinion.


    Might have had to do with the fact that he didn't substantiate the claim in any way. He's probably right, but just throwing out an advocacy flame and running off without substantiating it should be grounds for marking down. That includes MS flames, IMHO.

  • Re:Bootable CD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When did the CDs stop becoming bootable? I installed 5.2 fro mthe original CD, 5.9 off the Cheapbytes CD, and upgraded that to 6.0 from the RH CD. All were booted of the CD-ROM (AOpen Ax6b mobo and Toshiba drive). Jamie
  • Redhat's betas now have code names, Microsoft betas have always had code names.

    Yes, and plenty of other organizations (commercial and otherwise) give code names to products/software releases/etc. under development; this hardly constitutes grounds for considering this a sign that Red Hat is now "think[ing] more like their competition".

    I just find it interesting that they would beta something other than a completely new version.

    And what indicates that this is "something other than a completely new version"?

  • I also knew that many third parties were making software that runs better or only on RedHat linux.

    Whoa right there. Would you mind backing this up? Red Hat Linux is still Linux. How is it even possible to write a program that runs "better" on one distribution over another, aside from perhaps taking better advantage over a version of library that might ship with one distribution and not another.

    I suppose you could write your program to look for key "Red Hat" signature files, and if those don't exist, program in a few delays or randomly crash, but do you really think someone would do this?

    Please elaborate.
  • A scan of the mirrors in the com/net/edu/gov/ca domains revealed that a handful have the Lorax release. Here's the list I compiled. Others might also have it, but are overloaded right now, so I can't check.

    ftp://ftp.aklug.org/pub/redhat/mirror/ lorax/ [aklug.org]
    ftp://cwrulug.cwru.edu/pub/ftp.red hat.com/lorax/ [cwru.edu]
    ftp://ftp.eecs.umic h.edu/pub/linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/lorax/ [umich.edu]
    ftp://metalab.unc.edu/p ub/Linux/distributions/redhat/lorax/ [unc.edu]
    ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.e du/pub/redhat/lorax/ [purdue.edu]
    ftp://ftp.snoopy.net/pub/mirrors/red hat/lorax/ [snoopy.net]

  • Re:Writing programs that only run under RedHat? (Score:3)

    by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @04:22PM (#1699455)
    Umm, these programs and widget sets work just fine under other flavors of Unix (including all distributions of Linux).

    Just because it SHIPS with RedHat (or says, "...for RedHat Linux!") doesn't mean it will run only under RedHat.
  • Do you think RedHat may make the CD bootable again for general ease of use? Not needing a bootdisk and just having a disk image conforming to RockRidge on the CD would make the install much easier for those times when the linux setup has just been royally messed up and the only way to salvage anything is a format.

    Why did they make the CD's no longer bootable anyway?
  • So is there an easy way to upgrade a 6.0 system via FTP? I could manually download all the RPMs for the packages I have installed, and then upgrade them, but that's a pain. I want to be able to do something like:

    % upgrade ftp://ftp.favoritemirror.com/.../RPMS/
  • Redhat's betas now have code names, Microsoft betas have always had code names. I just find it interesting that they would beta something other than a completely new version. I may very well be talking out my ass but it looks like all of Redhat's money has made them think more like their competition.
  • Why did they make the CD's no longer bootable anyway?

    They didn't. At least, not, that I noticed. I booted 6.0 from CD on both Intel and Sparc without problems.

  • RedHat's betas and releases have had code names since 4.2 at least, as I recall ... I *LIKE* that redhat is publicly betaing new minor releases. RedHat 5.1 -> 5.2 was a PITA transition in my department. A nice beta period could have shaken out some of those issues.
  • My one HUGE gripe with Mandrake so far, after having installed it on two computers... is that they completely screw with the locations where the standard RPM dstributions of files install things.

    Namely: KDE. Under my Red Hat system, KDE usually goes in /opt/kde, and the RPM's I get from www.kde.org go in /opt/kde.

    But, maybe following a system path purist regime or something, the Mandrake people have put KDE in the 'proper' paths. (i.e. /usr/share/... /usr/bin...) and so the RPM's from www.kde.org won't work for an upgrade.


    UURRRRGGGHHHH!!

  • Several of these features have been in Mandrake 6.0, like being able to make user accounts when you install... and KDE 1.1.1, but Mandrake 6.1 is going to be better than this I think(KDE 1.2, Lothar hardware manager, still comes with extra software.) Can't wait to see what they do with what Redhat is giving us.
  • Slashdot _never_ mentionned it, but Cassini, the beta version of Mandrake has been available for one week!!! It features XFree3.3.5, KDE1.1.2 etc. and already runs very nice!!! Mandrake will always be a better Red Hat than Red Hat!!!
  • It is not exactly rocket science to make an iso image, man mkisofs.
  • As far as I remember, there is no ISO cd images anywhere on RedHat's ftp site. They don't make it easy for anyone to make their own cd by downloading from their site. Of course the reason is that they want people to buy the cd for ease of use, but this is annoying.

    Other distributions (debian) seem to always do this. If you wait a little while, and ask around on IRC someone will probably be able to point you to a site that has their own cd image made downloadable.

    "The voices in my head say crazy things"

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