Red Hat Linux 9 review (of sorts) [LWN.net]

Red Hat Linux 9 review (of sorts)

Posted Mar 25, 2003 21:32 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

And for the lazy amongst us, that's: here.

The review is a bit rough, as, I suspect, is the reviewer (RH has had an "upgrade" option on it's install since, what, 4.1?), but it's not too bad.

It is unclear on several points (is "Everything" *not* the default install choice?, for example), but on other points, it's delightfully informative -- notably the fact that the reviewer includes *all* the version numbers of the included packages.

My only gripe with OpenOffice is it has an annoying delay while loading up a module even on a very fast and current computer. Opening Microsoft Word in Windows XP on the same system is instantaneous compared to OpenOffice Writer

Well, of course it is, guy: MS Office *is completely loaded, taking up space* from boot time, on a Windows machine. What did you expect?

I did enjoy:

I ran this entire article more than once through OpenOffice Writer (which is the Microsoft Word Equivalent) and it handled this really well. The spell checker was put to the test too, so if you spot some errors you know where to blame them. (Editor's note: this article was absolutely rife with spelling and punctuation errors when I received it, seriously)

The reviewer didn't seem to put any thought into *why* RH9 might not include MP3 codecs -- this is almost certainly a licensing issue. [ reads further ] Aha! *RedHat* says so, he simply didn't mention it on first reference.

In the final analysis, though, this reviewer doesn't think there's any reason to upgrade from 8 to 9, and *I* haven't yet thought there was any reason to upgrade from 7.3 to 8 -- so if you *do*, why not tell us all why, huh? ;-)

Red Hat Linux 9 review (of sorts)

Posted Mar 26, 2003 12:40 UTC (Wed) by minichaz (guest, #630) [Link]

I moved from Red Hat 7.3 to 8.0 quite a while ago. My main reasons were the more polished desktop in 8.0 and better integration of OpenOffice.org without having to mess around with the MIME types and so on.

My servers are still on 7.3. I think this is the same for a lot of people: servers on 7.3 and desktops on 8.0.

Will I move to 9? Well... Probably. I'm looking to get rid of a computer and put dual heads on my main box. Red Hat 9 has Gnome 2.2 which does multi head stuff much better than Gnome 2.0 (ie it works).

Has anyone used the "upgrade" option on the Red Hat installation? I've never risked it but I would be interested to know if its any good.

Cheers

Red Hat Linux 9 review (of sorts)

Posted Mar 27, 2003 4:45 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

I've used the upgrade option for years. Works quite well. You have to do a bit of searching for ".rpmsave" and ".rpmorig" files (usually config files) right afterwards and maybe change a few things, but overall, not bad. If you've installed a lot of third-party or custom RPMs, it may be more work.

Of course on the other hand, there's always something to be said for a fresh start. :)

Upgrading Red Hat

Posted Mar 27, 2003 10:10 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

Has anyone used the "upgrade" option on the Red Hat installation? I've never risked it but I would be interested to know if its any good.

Yes, I'll regularly upgrade Red Hat releases. I've only ever come across three problems, two of which one might expect:

One older computer, with 32 MB RAM and about 80 MB swap (that runs in text mode only, usually headless), didn't have quite enough virtual memory to upgrade to Red Hat 8. The upgrade hung while upgrading glibc, which left the computer "between OSes". Since I had decent backups, I reinstalled from scratch, having increased swap space.
I was surprised that the install didn't warn me about this, but it failed to do a new install as well without extra swap.
Obviously, if you change too much in your installation (running Bastille or changing mail servers, for instance), then upgrade, you end up with something which isn't quite one version, not quite the next, not quite hardened, etc. The upgrade does a very good job, but it's practically impossible for it to Do The Right Thing in every circumstance.
I have my own set of fortune files. On every upgrade, Red Hat insists on replacing them with the default standard set, which have hardly changed in about ten years. Major problem there, methinks...

Hope this helps,

James.