[svlug] RHL 5.2

[Walter Reed]

At 08:33 AM 11/13/98 , Ira Abramov wrote:
>On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Todd Martin wrote:
>> > Btw, anyone tried RedHat v5.2?
>> 
>> Nope don't care too either. 5.1 works fine, I'll wait till the 2.2
>> kernel comes out and Red Hat finishes GNOME, then we'll be talking
>> upgrade, till then it would just be a waste. Why fix it if it aint
>> broke.  mean really all 5.2 is more of the same thing.
>
>just a tiny remark to cinfirm. the main thing about 5.2 is that all the
>libraries are upgraded to the latest stable ones needed for 2.2, so
>dropping in the new stable kernel line, or the latest betas, is supposedly
>painless. Also Windowmaker made it into the core installation collection
>of RPMs, and the installation supports having more than one SCSI on the
>system.

I've played with it on a couple machines now...

I do have a beef with a few things. Some of the apps / libraries are OLD.
Bash is at 1.14.7, and 2.02 was out in April, 2.02.1 in July.
Sendmail is at 8.8.7 when the current version is 8.9.1 from July, patched
in August.

One of the reasons I like to pick up the latest versions of Linux
distributions is so I DON'T have to go out on the net and download / 
compile / and install the latest versions of all the important software.


Another problem I ran into, and I'm not sure if it's a problem with the
latest kernels or if it was something specific to RedHat 5.2, is the way
it plays with large disk geometry. I had turned off large drive translation
in my BIOS, yet RedHat turned it on. Hence I was unable to access my
old partitions (as the partition table is different for translation on
or off.

There were a few other issues too, but nothing very serious.

As a slackware user, the big issue I have is how RPM's are managed. I tend to 
keep my packages fairly current for my core software, especially for issues
that show up on RootShell, Bugtraq, CERT etc. The choice needs to be made 
whether to upgrade ontop of the old, or remove and install the new. 
The problem of the package database not reflecting reality can make things
"interesting."

The other minor nit I have with RedHat is the philosophy behind how software
is installed. Check out Apache, which ends up with parts all over the system.
/etc/httpd, /home/httpd, /usr/sbin, /var/log/httpd, /usr/lib/apache, etc.
This is as bad or worse than a Windows program. I'm kind of at a loss trying
to understand why RedHat would move SO far from the standard Apache
installation.



--
Walter Reed
Engineering Director
InterTrade Systems Corp.


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