Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge reviews Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation. "By contrast, small businesses that ran Red Hat Linux 9 on their servers certainly will notice what they're missing. A lot of the functionality that was available in Red Hat Linux 9 has been stripped out of Enterprise Linux WS, undoubtedly to force subscribers to the Enterprise Linux product line to move to the more expensive ES and AS platforms. This has naturally filtered down to Professional Workstation, which is missing server components such as BIND, OpenLDAP, DHCP, inews, and Kerberos 5."

(Log in to post comments)

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 17:09 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think it's good that somebody's finally providing a distribution which
isn't suitable for servers, because it seems to me that workstations have
a tendancy of becoming poorly-maintained servers.

Probably, Red Hat should introduce a similarly-priced "small server"
product that just has the other subset and doesn't have all the stuff
that people shouldn't run on the server anyway. I'm not sure this would
cut into their AS and ES sales, since those have always seemed to me to
be sold based on some vaguely-defined improvements, rather than simply
having some other standard packages.

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 18:03 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link]

Is all this stuff based on what support services they want to provide? If I bought one of the "smaller" RH distribution versions, would I have what I needed to add the other components from FLOSS sites directly?

If RH stripped down their distribution until the toolchain is missing, I'd be disappointed. Though the toolchain(s) shouldn't be installed by default for Joe Sixpack, they should always be there for the rest of us, since we still need them to do some tayloring.

For example, as a musician, I will want to be able to compile music-related tools that aren't in the distro or the various RPM sites, and have them work correctly, no matter how "low-cost" the distro may be.

Then again, as a musician, I've very often been "on my own" when it comes to all sorts of technical matters, both computer- and non-computer related. So I don't have any expectations.

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 18:35 UTC (Wed) by fLameDogg (guest, #11305) [Link]

Though the toolchain(s) shouldn't be installed by default for Joe Sixpack, they should always be there for the rest of us, since we still need them to do some tayloring.

For example, as a musician, I will want to be able to compile music-related tools that aren't in the distro or the various RPM sites, and have them work correctly, no matter how "low-cost" the distro may be.

Ah. You'd probably be doing "James Tayloring" then? ;O)

[Snipping and added emphasis by me.]

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 21:57 UTC (Wed) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

RHEL3 is missing support for ISA sound cards, too. Funny that they didn't mention it in their Release Notes (since it was supported in RHEL2.1). So which PCI sound cards are certified compatible with RHEL3? Red Hat's RHEL3 compatible hardware list is silent on that subject, too.

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 18:06 UTC (Wed) by penguinroar (guest, #14460) [Link]

This is a good thing if it gets priced right.

I would love to have an install stripped of all the things that shouldnt be running on a workstation and trimmed down a bit from the usual suspects. Why should i have DNS, DHCP, etc on a workstation? I dont like the thought of using a workstation as a server and i have never bought into the workgroup think.

What redhat needs to do is improve some administration points on linux such as howto manage users easy and howto lock the systems down (tamper proofing).

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 19:14 UTC (Wed) by drathos (guest, #6454) [Link]

SuSE Personal sounds like it's just what you're looking for. For only $40, you get a distribution designed for use by end users. (See the feature compairson with SuSE Professional here)

If there's any features it's missing that you need, you can just get them from the ftp site.

No Kerberos on workstation???

Posted Feb 18, 2004 20:17 UTC (Wed) by ninjaz (guest, #2083) [Link]

The article is a bit on the vague side, saying -

This has naturally filtered down to Professional Workstation, which is missing server components such as BIND, OpenLDAP, DHCP, inews, and Kerberos 5.

Presumably what that means is the server part of Kerberos is no longer included. The same for named, slapd, dhcpd, etc.

I think this makes a lot of sense. If this is used in a company as a user desktop, the IT administrator will almost certainly not want users running their own nameservers, dhcp servers or news servers.

On the other hand, file-sharing daemons are included (apache, samba and the nfs server) So, it looks like they're moving more toward the features people have come expect on a traditional user desktop running MacOS or Windows.

The real bummer is: "OpenOffice.org remains at an aged 1.0.2" I can't imagine what they were thinking there. OpenOffice.org 1.1 has been better for me every way compared to 1.0.2 You'd think for the $$ Red Hat would focus a bit more on key parts of a "Professional Workstation"

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 18, 2004 22:29 UTC (Wed) by johnnylange (guest, #18647) [Link]

They're not offering you less features on your behalf because they're worried someone might "happen" to turn them on and use them for a malicious reason or because if you really need those extra features you'll be more than happy to pay extra for the version that offers those features. It's plain and simple, they want to make more money! That's it!

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 19, 2004 17:10 UTC (Thu) by janitorbob (guest, #19599) [Link]

the reason I Like linux is it has the option of installing everything, or not I stoped using red hat becouse it's custom installer sucks, with mandrake or suse I can install any package I wont or not install them. if you don't wont to run BIND or DHCP on your box DON'T!!! and it's basic security if your not using it don't run it.

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 20, 2004 19:28 UTC (Fri) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

Here's a reply to this article that I posted on newsforge...

http://www.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=35993&cid=86221

I'm to lazy to type it out again.

-- If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.

Red Hat Professional Workstation: More expensive, fewer features (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 21, 2004 5:00 UTC (Sat) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link]

Imagine lotsa newcomers visiting RedHat's website and see a latest $100,=
Red Hat Professional Workstation for sale. Everyone not knowing Redhat
Linux from the old days will purchase without hesitation, and will only
say to that Linux oldtimer: "Will you please shut the f..k up? I'm just
purchasing a shrinkwrapped Linux Workstation from a premier vendor".

Well nothing wrong with that, certainly if it makes RedHat a stronger and
healthy company.

However do i smell a rat here?

All of the Red Hat Professional Workstation software components,
allthough with RedHat varnish, are created and developed by people on the
internet and NOT nessecarily on the payroll of RedHat. There is a
discrepancy in that fact. And i predict that sooner or later RedHat would
be better off to start contributing financially to the key open source
softwareprojects which are inside their Enterprise labeled products.

Robert