DistributionWatch Review: Red Hat Linux 7.1

By: Brian Proffitt
Friday, May 18, 2001 09:03:37 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3380/1/

Red Hat's Subtle Movement

If Linux-Mandrake likes to ride the cutting edge of point releases by jamming everything new it can find in the installation package set, then Red Hat's releases must lie toward the other end of this spectrum. For Red Hat's releases tend to be more subtle in their forward movements--slowly advancing toward technological Nirvana.

This is not so much a criticism of Red Hat Linux 7.1 as an explanation of how this latest release came to be. RH 7.1 is much like its predecessors: a stable and slightly newer collection of useful Linux tools. As this slow evolution moves along, important features start getting noticed--features that indicated more clearly than ever that in the long-term, Red Hat is definitely pushing their distribution toward the corporate end-user.

But while Red Hat's movements have been slow in some ways, there have been other changes within the distribution that make one wonder what Red Hat is doing in the short-term.

Installing Seawolf

The evaluation copy I received from Red Hat was their Deluxe Workstation, which is the company's middle of the road offering. It includes a little more documentation than the Standard Edition as well as some "extra" applications on the Workstation Applications, PowerTools, and Loki Games CD. The use of quotes around the word extra is my own affectation, because I am often puzzled why StarOffice, available on the Workstation Applications CD, is considered an extra and not bundled in the Standard Edition. Granted, you can download the suite with a minimum of effort, but why have users hassle with it?

This is particularly true when you consider that what you are really paying more for here is the added support users get over and above the Standard Edition, which allots one system 30 days of Red Hat Network Software Manager support. In the Deluxe Workstation version, you can get five systems supported for 60 days and in the Professional Server flavor, 10 systems for 90 days.

Feeling a bit impulsive, I installed Red Hat 7.1 on my AMD K6 500MHz test machine, blowing away the SuSE and Mandrake installs that resided in the machine. I realize this may not be exactly living on the edge, but you take what you can get at my age. I opted to use the Anaconda graphic install, because of its default status.

The first thing I noted right off the bat was the fact that the X implementation that was running Anaconda for me did not choose a 640X480 (re: Reader's Digest Large Print Edition) screen resolution that often truncated too many fields on previous installs. This time, it went the other way and displayed in a 1024X768 resolution.

This wasn't the only thing that changed in Anaconda. Besides the usual Workstation, Server, Upgrade installation option is a Laptop option which I am itching to try on my wife's machine later. Also new and of note was the "Firewalling" screen, which let you choose from preset firewall options or manually select which ports you want traffic to come through. I know that some have argued this is not a true firewall setup, but rather a cushy little front-end for Lokkit, but I appreciated the option nonetheless, given Red Hat's troubled history with leaving a lot of ports open by default. It worked, too, I should add--nothing was open that I didn't want to be after the installation.

One curious change was the lack of an automatic text of the X configuration. The card probing and resolution setting steps were there, but then it went right on with the rest of the install without a test start of X. In my case, no harm done, everything worked fine. I am kicking myself for not seeing if I missed hitting a checkbox somewhere, though.

Hello, Red Hat, My Old Schizophrenic Friend

Though I have recently preferred using SuSE as my personal distribution, my first working install was Red Hat and it was like a nice little homecoming to come back and see what changes have been made.

One of my favorite features, up2date, has been significantly improved and coupled with the Red Hat Network Software Manager that lets you monitor bug fixes and errata reports online. Working with these tools was a definite pleasure, though the up2date tool has been turned into a wizard that rather annoyingly stops after the package download and installation steps, so this is no longer a fire and forget operation.

Everything about the way the apps are organized in both GNOME and KDE screams "corporate desktop" to me, too. This was especially true, interestingly enough, in the KDE desktop, but I'll get to that in a moment. The inclusion of the Loki Games CD seems counter to this, but neat as playing Alpha Centauri is, I am discounting the games' inclusion as merely eye candy.

GNOME users will be disappointed to note that nothing really cutting edge has been added in this environment: no prerelease of Evolution or Nautilus to whet user's whistle. This is a good, solid GNOME 1.2 install and nothing more than that. This plays very well into Red Hat's conservative nature of not releasing anything that might be construed as unstable.

On the other hand, the default KDE 2.1 configuration has placed many of the KOffice icons right on the KDE Panel right in plain sight. This certainly is aimed toward corporate ease of use. I like what the KOffice development team has done, don't get me wrong, but its placement at the forefront of KDE's desktop might be a tad premature since these apps aren't the most stable critters in the world. Here, it seems, Red Hat is dancing along that edge again.

It's this kind of dichotomy that lends to a little confusion on judging Red Hat. Conservative in many ways on what's released but every once in a while they run off and implement something that's way ahead of the rest of the Linux distros. They did it with glibc, they did it with gcc (which is version 2.96-RH in this release, by the way), and they are doing it with the inclusion of ReiserFS.

While I have personally had no problems with Reiser, many people have questioned its use on production systems--enough that you would think Red Hat would wait and see a bit before releasing it in their distribution.

Second guessing what Linux distributors are going to do seems to be almost every Linux journalist's favorite hobby. Speaking for myself, it gives me a headache. The ever-changing market conditions and technological breakthroughs make this task as easy as using a Ouija board to compile source code. Still, long-term I think there is little doubt in my mind that Red Hat is moving towards getting this distribution onto the corporate desktops of the world. Red Hat Linux 7.1 confirms this.