“Red Hat’s latest release, Red Hat 9, continues the company’s tradition of producing solid offerings that are workmanlike, if not inspired. As with the past several releases, a key part of the package is the Red Hat Network, a services offering that makes maintaining errata for large installations a snap.” Read the review of Red Hat Linux 9 at ServerWatch.
Is the Leader of the Linux Pack Also the Best of Breed?
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if fairness to the modded down guy, he does have a point. rpms are inferior to debian’s slackware’s and gentoo’s package managing systems. i started on this linux lark with mandrake but soon got really annoyed with ‘dependency hell’. redhat should really think about moving to a different package managing system or at least improving rpms.
an ideal situation of course would be ALL distros agreeing on one single package to support so third party companies would be able to release one package and not have to worry about compatibility issues.
I use apt-get and synaptic to keep my rh9 box updated. Its pretty slick and I don’t have and dependency issues. Of course, YMMV.
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an ideal situation of course would be ALL distros agreeing on one single package to support so third party companies would be able to release one package and not have to worry about compatibility issues.
//
Thats not true. You still have to worry about binary compatability and library locations,etc. Thats why you cant always install Mandrake RPMs in Redhat, etc.
All distros will never be 100% compatable, so its a moot point.
And of course, Redhat will never change their package management, because if they had an APT like system, people wouldnt have to pay them for up2date. 😉
Go to freshrpms.net, click on the “apt” link, download Apt for your particular version of Red Hat. Once downloaded, install the Apt RPM. Then, type apt-get install synaptic to get your pretty front end; and you’re rid of your dependency hell. Or get YUM; or on Mandrake get URPMI; there are options out there.
I have had absolutely nothing but bad experiences with Red Hat. When I first seriously considered experimenting with Linux, there was all kinds of hype about the (then) soon to be released Red Hat 9. I unfortunately bought into the hype hook, line, and sinker, and bought a Red Hat Network subscription the day Red Hat 9 was released to it just so I could download the ISOs a week before they went live on FTP. That day I attempted to install Red Hat 9, and when it went into the GUI part of the installer, my screen went blank. I tried again, same thing. I went back on-line and asked around. Turns out that Red Hat 9 and nVidia don’t get along so well when hooked up to LCD monitors via DVI. Sigh. So then I tried Red Hat 9’s text-based installer. It crashed on me as soon as the partitioning of the hard drive was finished. So I said, “Screw this,” and re-formatted and gave up on Red Hat.
Unfortunately, I still have/had a Red Hat Network subscription. I’ve e-mailed Red Hat support twice asking for my account to be canceled, with absolutely not one response. It has been four months since my first cancelation request, and my account is still active, with no word. I just hope they don’t attempt to automatically renew my account when the year comes up…
I forgot to mention that I had the same problem (a blank screen) with every Linux distribution that did not include the proprietary nVidia device driver. Apparently, the open source one can’t handle DVI connections, while the proprietary one can and does. Still, the fact that Red Hat never got back to me regarding my RHN account, and that its text-based installer crashed, doesn’t bode well.
Don’t defend the guy, because I could simply say..
DPKG Sucks
Then someone else would say, but Debian has apt.
Then the Redhat user will say what everyone else has been saying about apt4rpm and synaptic etc.
Try using DPKG only without RPM, then you will see that RPMs don’t suck, because they are equivalent technology (someone please correct me if I am wrong on this last part).
I understand that the next version of Red Hat will be what could be referred to as a “community edition”, is there any move to create a PowerPC version? Btw, with the PowerPC distros, do they support all the features of a Mac, aka, modem, sound, video, usb, firewire?
No, not all of them. YDL does not support all hardware found on Macs. Depend on the actual model.
Try using DPKG only without RPM, then you will see that RPMs don’t suck, because they are equivalent technology (someone please correct me if I am wrong on this last part).
I totally agree with you.
The point is Red Hat does not include apt4rpm and does not support it natively.
That’ would probably be because they want you to use up2date, which AFAIK is not really an alternative for apt.
then i moved to redhat, installed apt, and it was cool. the packages are reliable ( i use up2date to maitain my core packages, and apt to install 3rd party ones. also, i use the demo up2date account which you can get for free )
another interesting tool to look @ is yum. yum is going to be part of Redhat 10. yes, just like debian, well be able to ‘yum install <application>’
with apt from freshrpms.net, the last little sting of annoyance is taken out.
redhat is easy…that’s why i run it.
that said, i’m neck deep into teaching myself freebsd.
one word: portupgrade
now that i’m not dependent on M$ (i still use it, but now I have a choice), I saw no need to stop at redhat. hence my desire to learn freebsd as well.
~
Seraph where did you read this. Got a link.
another interesting tool to look @ is yum. yum is going to be part of Redhat 10. yes, just like debian, well be able to ‘yum install <application>’
A little bit offtopic, anyone knows what will be new in rh 10?
still 2.4 kernel or new kernel? and what will be new?
ontopic: rpm works pretty oke to me. Most majort software titles have rpm’s for rh8/9. And if i can’t install them i simply compile them.
“The point is Red Hat does not include apt4rpm and does not support it natively. ”
It looks like RHL (this future version of Red Hat Linux which will include the work of unpaid contributors) will utilize yum but not apt (there a technical reasons to prefer yum instead of this apt4rpm hack). yum is already in rawhide but a official infrastructure for it is still missing (rawhide is currently in feature freeze).
The way I do it, is I download Linux Red Hat for free from http://www.linuxiso.org and than do the installation, making sure that the platform runs on my hardware. If everything checks out than I pay for a RHN subscription through the UpToDate utility.
About yum, its in Rawhide. That means its being tested for inclusion. up2date in Rawhide now uses the yum backend, so you can point it to Fedora or Freshrpms and it will update. And you will also be able to use the commandline. And if you are more confortable using apt, just install apt. The major repositories (Freshrpms and Fedora and maybe a few others) support both.
And yes, it is good that the poster got modded down. The reason why “Debian rocks” as many put it is not so much because of the package management system but because of how the packages are prepared. There is attention to quality, which is exactly what Fedora is about. Lots of QC is going into Fedora. The thing is rpm based distro’s became binary incompatible, but many Debian based ones keep stuff like directory structure like Debian, so adding repositories will let things work work. Please correct me if I am wrong here though.
Are they using Yum to keep it consistent with YellowDog, eg. Identical tools across platforms.
Also don’t you think the name “Yellow dog Updater, Modified” is funny? How did they come up with that?
I think there are technical reasons to do this. YUM was made for rpm, and is not a port, so it works best with rpm. See this page http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/questions.ptml for arguments about that. Others may disagree.
$2499 for a server operating system? are there any fools that pay this for linux? I do like redhat but is it the best? thats a stretch IMHO there isn’t a single Linux distribution that does what a complete OS should do. Some are very close but generally they all fall short. I suppose it does depend on the user I have played with BSD off and on over the years and fianlly settled on NetBSD. Which i believe is a far superior OS than Linux.
Thanks for the link Maynard.
Whenever a big business ‘buys’ software, YOU are the one that is paying for part of it, the ordinary tax payer. So yes, there are people who will pay that high price for Red Hat Enterprise, and that person indirectly is YOU!
Whenever a big business ‘buys’ software, YOU are the one that is paying for part of it, the ordinary tax payer. So yes, there are people who will pay that high price for Red Hat Enterprise, and that person indirectly is YOU!
Are you saying that the government is subsidising businesses in the US?
Well, Red Hat is not a monopoly. In a capitalist economy, any business that spends too much on software will be driven out of the market through competition against businesses that don’t. Businesses buy Red Hat because Red Hat provides value. That $2499 comes with top-notch support and proven, supported compatibility with high-end linux system equipment and third-party software like Oracle. Any business could also pay $149 for the desktop version and run Apache on it if that’s all they need. Or they could download Red Hat for free if they don’t need support.
All business costs are ultimately borne buy consumers. That doesn’t mean those costs are necessarily wasteful.
There is a serious problem with the regular expression handling in RedHat 9. egrep commands that should take a fraction of a second take up to a few minutes on Redhat 9, at least when UTF is enabled. The problem is, many man pages are corrupted or unreadable when UTF is disabled. Where I work we (unfortunately) standardized on Redhat 9… some sysadmins decided to live with the broken rexegp handling and some decided to live with broken man pages.
I haven’t personally, but I can see how an admin’s job being so much easier. Update all computers and schedule them to reboot in less than 5 minutes. The $149 for desktop version surely ends up saving money in administration cost. I still don’t know what the server version offers that would be worth $2499.
“I haven’t personally, but I can see how an admin’s job being so much easier. Update all computers and schedule them to reboot in less than 5 minutes.”
why on earth would you reboot them?
the server version offers things like
– longer support with security patches etc
– longer release cycles
– supported for use with oracle and other vendors
i don’t know if it’s worth that kind of money but a lot of businesses seem to value this
the up2date in rawhide actually supports apt4rpm and yum repos.
Support from third-party vendors is crucial for companies using third-party tools. Being able to get support from Oracle instead of having to ask on a newsgroup or mailing list is worth a lot of money.
What with Severn out for a month or so (beta for the next RH release) and RH 9 out for, what, 4-5 months now, I think “ServerWatch” ought to watch out for new server releases a bit quicker 🙂
As for RH 9, I’ve tried it at home and whilst it’s a reasonable incremental improvement, I didn’t see enough changes worth changing our RH 8.0 desktops at work, plus RH 7.2 and 8 don’t EOL until the end of the year, by which time RH 9’s successor will be out, so if you’re thinking of jumping from 7 or 8, wait until 10 (or whatever it’ll be numbered) comes out.
As usual, this article missed the biggest problem with the “retail” (downloadable-for-free) version of Red Hat – it’s *not* the disappearance of the boxed version from retail shelves after Red Hat 9 has sold out, but actually the End-of-Life of *all* downloadable/standard versions now being set to 12 months after release.
So no patches after the EOL, particularly for the kernel, which means either a third party has to step in and build/distribute patched kernels [with appropriate new RPMs], you build your own [probably too much effort for a busy sysadmin], you follow the “bleeding edge” downloadable releases [painful having to upgrade live servers every year !], you fork out $2,000 or so for the Enterprise version or you change to another distro (or to *BSD)…
With the addition of yum, the EOL’ing every 12 months hurts much less. Just use yum to upgrade the entire distro, like you’d do with Debian.
-Erwos
Actually in RH10 the new up2date will be able to take packages from apt and yum repositories, and even use the directory with RPMs as a repository. It also going to include support for distro upgrade.
If this is true this will address probably my biggest concern with RedHat. For legal reasons and business reasons I understand and appreciate the RH will not come with everything suse comes with. This is alright for me because I end up having to recompile or go get the latest versions of plugin x with suse anyway. What I could not stand was the fact that they never had the apt or now yum backend for the rpm mechanism. This is great.
All they need to do now is get the up2date to ask me if I want the nvidia drivers, ltmodem drivers etc..etc.. non free desktop crap and take care of that as well.
Cool beans. I hear and acknowledge the complaints of many people in the above comments. However, at work, we are Solaris/suse house for our servers. Suse or any other non-redhat distro can be a bit of a pain because all the thirdparty support for apps like Test Tracker Pro and Convolo Dataguard and device drivers and such are all very redhat focused. Drives me nuts. The installations, and docs are the same way. Would have rather used suse and knocked out one more unknown when troubleshooting issues on the application servers and all that.
Sorry my brain at 5am waiting on people for a data migration is a bit fried.
If NVidia wants, it could let someone manage a repository, much like the how you can get the flash plugin with apt (By just installing the Fedora apt package) So getting flash was as easy as typing ‘apt-get install flash-plugin’. I do not see why it can’t be done with NVidia drivers. It just takes (a little) effort by someone. Redhat does not want to ship proprietary stuff, but I think I heard something along the lines that they might put them there. Not that I really care right now, my NVidia Geforce2 MX card burnt last night, so I am now using a borrowed ATI Rage with 8MB RAM. But that is seriously off-topic.