Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

[Posted May 7, 2019 by ris]

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. "Modern IT is hybrid IT. But turning a sprawling ecosystem—from traditional datacenters to public cloud services—into a true hybrid environment requires a few things. Scaling as needed. Moving workloads seamlessly. Developing and managing applications that run anywhere. There's an operating system that makes those things possible. And now it gives you predictive analytics and remediation." See the release notes for more information.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 9, 2019 12:29 UTC (Thu) by ScottMinster (subscriber, #67541) [Link] (13 responses)

Looking through the notes, it's amazing how much has been removed from RHEL. The notes don't mention, but it has been reported elsewhere that KDE is no longer available at all in RHEL8. I assume that extends to many useful KDE applications like kompare (GUI difference tool), kcachegrind (for analyzing valgrind's callgrind output), and okteta (hex editor). I don't think there are any Gnome/GTK equivalents to these useful development tools. And that doesn't even count personal preferences among applications with similar features (gedit vs. kwrite for example).

Other items I thought were interesting to remove:
* ntpd is being replaced with chrony. I guess as long as the latter does the job of keeping the time correct it's not a big deal, but time is important, especially when NFS is involved. I hope the latter is up to the task.

* Removal of RCS support. This is unfortunate. RCS is small and self contained, and is still useful (I think) for keeping track of small differences. Especially in places like configuration files or small scripts. Sure, one could use git, but git's whole repository view of the world doesn't make as much sense for files that aren't directly related. It seems like there's still a use case for RCS, but maybe I'm in a minority in that thinking. Maybe it's time to dust off the old "rcs2git" script I found for the remaining directories.

Not to be too down -- it seems like there are also lots of good upgrades and new features. But other losses, especially KDE and its related applications, will make this version harder to work with for development.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 9, 2019 15:10 UTC (Thu) by Chousuke (subscriber, #54562) [Link] (1 responses)

I consider it a good thing that RHEL is removing KDE. It must already be a niche use case to even run a RHEL workstation, and by focusing their effort on Gnome to fulfill that niche, it's more likely that they can provide a stable Gnome experience.

If you want to run KDE, chances are you would be better served by using a distribution that has a similar focus on KDE.

Removing RCS is probably due to the fact that finding people who are familiar with RCS is getting harder and harder. Git's much more popular and does the same thing better.

I've seen RCS on some legacy servers for local repositories, and what usually happens is that it gets replaced with git since neither I nor my colleagues have any reason to keep using RCS.

As far as chrony vs ntpd goes, my impression of the consensus is that chrony is considered higher-quality, though I don't know exactly why. I've been using it in production on RHEL7 already and it seems fine, so there's not much to worry about.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 11, 2019 13:22 UTC (Sat) by j1mc (subscriber, #56848) [Link]

Re: chrony and ntpd, the Core Infrastructure Initiative took at look at three different network time implementations back in 2017 [0]. Chrony was the clear winner in terms of security, though it lacked a few of the features of ntpd.

[0] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/blogs/securing-network...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 9, 2019 15:45 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

If you need RCS, building it from sources happens in an instant on modern machines, it is quite portable and non-bloated (being old).
I also suspect someone will eventually provide KDE RPMs for rhel8 on the unofficial repos.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 9, 2019 15:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

EPEL will handle these packages. Join that effort if you are interested

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 3:51 UTC (Fri) by abo (subscriber, #77288) [Link] (1 responses)

RHEL7 uses chronyd too.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 13:37 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> RHEL7 uses chronyd too.

Yes it did but it also shipped with ntpd

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 9:57 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (5 responses)

kompare: what's wrong with meld (not that I would use either of these … vimdiff forever!)?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 12:40 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (4 responses)

> what's wrong with meld

It doesn't show the difference between the two lines with the lines also shown above one another as WinMerge (Windows) do:
https://www.google.fr/search?q=winmerge&tbm=isch&...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 12:47 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

What's the ticket on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/issues ?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 12:49 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

And when looking at http://meldmerge.org/ (the first image) it looks like meld does it, doesn't it?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 15:07 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

? I don't see the two lines of the current diff shown vertically as in the bottom of the image I linked.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 10, 2019 16:10 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

Oh, I see. OK, than just filing that ticket (if it really isn't in Meld). BTW, my wife’s maiden name is Přikrylová ;).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released

Posted May 13, 2019 0:03 UTC (Mon) by jamespow (guest, #125052) [Link]

sendmail deprecated was the biggest shock to me

yum/dnf

Posted May 9, 2019 12:51 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (6 responses)

So apparently on RHEL 8 it's still the yum command, even though it is based on dnf, while on Fedora it's the dnf command. Is it possible to use the dnf command on RHEL 8 too? Would make my life a little simpler.

yum/dnf

Posted May 9, 2019 13:37 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

The situation is the same in Fedora and RHEL 8, yum and dnf both are just a symlink to dnf-3. For the most part, dnf on the command line works identical to yum.

yum/dnf

Posted May 10, 2019 11:59 UTC (Fri) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

Good news, thanks for the info.

yum/dnf

Posted May 9, 2019 13:37 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Yes, pretty sure it is.

yum/dnf

Posted May 10, 2019 8:49 UTC (Fri) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] (2 responses)

yeah - i would prefer to make the switch to dnf. is it "safe" to just symlink dnf to yum on RHEL/CentOS 7?

yum/dnf

Posted May 10, 2019 12:02 UTC (Fri) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

Another way is to add a shell alias for dnf.

yum/dnf

Posted May 13, 2019 12:30 UTC (Mon) by musicinmybrain (subscriber, #42780) [Link]

On RHEL7/CentOS7, “yum install dnf” works fine as long as you haven’t disabled the extras repo. Or “yum install nextgen-yum4” to get yum4 as a symlink to dnf.