DistributionWatch: Another Tip of the Red Hat - Examining Red Hat 7.3
By: Bill von Hagen
Friday, June 14, 2002 11:33:57 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4258/1/
Overview and Installation
Because I tend to focus on the commercial and personal use of Linux as a full-time operating system, Red Hat has been my favorite x86 Linux distribution for years now. Yet even I greet each Red Hat release with a strange mixture of anticipation and fear, since everyone knows that Red Hat has made some spectacularly questionable decisions in past releases. Many people tend to avoid Red Hat's x.0 releases since they always seem a bit rough around the edges. Red Hat's premature incorporation of a development version of gcc (2.96) is an albatross that they are still dragging along into new releases today.
Part of the global awareness of Red Hat's successes and mistakes is due to their prominence in the Linux market - Red Hat has clearly won the Linux branding wars in the public's eyes, at least in the United States. As the best known Linux distribution, Red Hat is therefore more quickly slapped under a microscope to expose both features and flaws than any other Linux distribution. Which is exactly the point of this article - what's new and improved in Red Hat 7.3, and is Red Hat 7.3 a distribution that you should consider upgrading to?
Red Hat 7.3 provides no surprises to anyone who has installed earlier Red Hat 7.x distributions. By default, Red Hat 7.3 uses the same framebuffer-based X Window system graphical installer as previous releases. A text-only installation mode is also available for The graphically challenged, as well as a Kickstart installation mechanism that makes it easy for you to automate installing Red Hat in exactly the same way on multiple systems. This section describes the default graphical installer.
After asking the standard sorts of questions about your keyboard, language preferences, and mouse, Red Hat 7.3 offers a variety of installation classes. These consist of pre-selected groups of packages that are oriented towards workstations, servers, laptops, upgrading from a previous version of Red Hat, and my favorite, the Custom class, in which you can customize the list of packages that you want to install.
My favorite customization option is "Everything" which does exactly what the name suggests. In these days of relatively large disk drives, I'd rather install a few packages that I may not even know about than have to sift through the installation CDs to install and test some cool new utility that I happened to hear about. This will remain my favorite installation option as long as disk size stays ahead of Linux distribution size - which isn't guaranteed, given that the standard Red Hat 7.3 binary distribution now spans 3 CDs. Red Hat seems interested in challenging SuSE's title as the most expansive Linux distribution, and more power to them. I buy pre-packaged Linux distributions to get as much pre-compiled, pre-tested software as I can.
Once you've selected the class of installation that you want to perform and the packages, if necessary, the next step in the installation process is disk partitioning, which (in graphical mode) provides Red Hat's excellent Disk Druid package, which is only available during installation. Red Hat could win a few points from anyone who has to partition disks if they released a standalone version of Disk Druid, since it is both graphical and eminently usable, but perhaps they're too busy complaining about Sun and Microsoft.
A significant drawback of Disk Druid is that it only supports the ext2, ext3, and vfat filesystems. Its support for software RAID during installation is broken (though you can always do this after installing Red Hat 7.3, using standard Linux fdisk and the md/lvm tools. Fans of journaling filesystems will be disappointed - if you're a ReiserFS, JFS, or XFS fan, those simply are not options, which isn't all that surprising since Red Hat was the primary sponsor of the ext3 development effort. In Red Hat's defense, JFS and XFS have only been "officially" incorporated into the 2.5 development kernel, but I would have expected to at least see the ReiserFS in there, since it's been in the kernel forever.
The next few installation steps are Boot Loader Configuration (both GRUB and LILO are supported), Network Configuration, and Firewall Configuration, in which you can specify a default security level, specify trusted devices and the types of incoming connections and ports that you want to enable, and so on. Though Firewall Configuration has been a part of the Red Hat installation process since at least 7.2, Red Hat still deserves kudos for adding it in the first place, since this helps make Red Hat installations more secure out of the box.
The last few installation steps are Language Selection, Account Configuration, Authentication Configuration (supporting NIS, LDAP, Kerberos, and SMB, plus the standard MD5/shadow password options), Package Selection (only if you've specified the custom installation class), and initial Video Configuration. After installing the packages that you've selected or which are associated with the installation class you selected, the installer completes your X Window system configuration and lets you select the desktop that you want to use.
A nice addition here would be automatic support for just using an X Window system window manager rather than a complete desktop environment - even the laptop installation only lets you choose between GNOME and KDE. Support for a "Window-Manager Only" installation or a light-weight desktop such as XFCE would be a nice thing to add, though perhaps this would confuse more people than it would benefit.
What's New in Red Hat 7.3
Red Hat 7.3 is the largest Red Hat distribution yet, consisting of eight CDs in the off-the-shelf personal version. The distribution is composed of three installation CDs for the core distribution, two CDs of source code, one of documentation, and two applications CDs - one containing Star Office 5.2 and another containing productivity applications. Given Red Hat's recent gripes to the press about Sun beginning to charge for Star Office 6 (pot::kettle::black, anyone?), I would have expected Red Hat to provide Open Office 1.0 rather than a version of Star Office that's been around for a year or so, but they seem to have ignored my phone calls.
The Productivity Applications CD includes software such as Fax2Send (2.1), an old version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader (4.05), StuffIt (5.1.6.588), and some industry-specific tools such as Photodex's CompuPic digital content manager, the Dataplore data analysis package, and the impressive VariCAD design and modeling package. To clarify, the items on the Star Office and Productivity Applications CDs are not a part of the default Red Hat installation, but must be seperately installed after you've installed Red Hat 7.3.
The core Red Hat 7.3 distribution is based on the 2.4.18-3 kernel, and provides reasonably up-to-date and patched versions of the most popular Linux software with some interesting new additions. Red Hat 7.3 includes glibc 2.2.5-54, XFree86 4.2.0-8, KDE 3.0.0-12, GNOME 1.4.0.4-54, emacs 21.2-2, Ghostscript 6.52-8, BIND 9.2.0-8, Sendmail 8.11.6-15, MySQL 3.23.49-3, PostgreSQL 7.2.1-15, PHP 4.1.2-7, and Apache 1.3.23-11. Red Hat 7.3 still insists on providing GCC 2.96 (now up to patch level 100 - what a surprise), and unfortunately does not include any version of GCC 3.x. On the browser front, Netscape 4.79-1 and Mozilla 0.0.9-7 are included, as well as recent versions of KDE's Konqueror (3.0.0-12) and GNOME's Nautilus (1.0.6-15), both of which you can either view as browsers or as file managers that happen to understand URLs. The versions of both Netscape and Mozilla were disappointing - while I'm still a fan of Netscape "Classic", Netscape 6.2 should have been provided in some form, and release candidates of Mozilla 1.0 have been all over the Web for months now.
Aside from my disappointment regarding the Netscape and Mozilla versions, the most irritating aspect of this dirtibution for me is the version of emacs included with Red Hat 7.3. The default emacs is compiled with the Xaw3d widgets, and therefore provides stupid eye candy like 3d scroll bars and an icon-oriented toolbar across the top. I'll send $5.00 to the first person who can give me some X Window system magic to disable this crapola without recompiling emacs. For God's sake, leave emacs alone! People who want those sorts of bells and whistles should be running xemacs (21.4.6-7) in the first place. The next thing you know, Red Hat's default version of vi will have a toolbar and "What's This" help. (If this is actually something you'd like to see, you can run "gvim", but you and I must be from different universes.)
Above and beyond the basics that you expect to find in any Linux distribution, Red Hat 7.3 includes a nice collection of productivity applications as part of the default instalation process. It includes AbiWord 0.99.5-1 (almost ready for prime time!), GNUmeric 1.0.5-3, GNUcash 1.6.6-3, KOffice 1.1.1-5, and now includes Ximian's excellent Evolution email client (1.0.3-4), which is a complete replacement for Microsoft Outlook except for the virus distribution features. Unfortunately, this version of Evolution lags a few versions behind what you can get from Ximian's Web site (www.ximian.org), and lacks some of the bug fixes and features that you will need if you want to use Ximian's proprietary Outlook Connector to interface directly with Microsoft Exchange mail servers at any level beyond POP and IMAP.
A truly pleasant surprise in Red Hat 7.3 is their inclusion of the "Mr. Project" GNOME project management software package (0.5.1-8). Though there have been a number of open-source project management packages under development for Linux and Java, Mr. Project is much more usable than the others, even in its current "actively under development" state. If you'll pardon the expression, Mr Project is a project to watch, because a full-featured Microsoft Project replacement for Linux is the last mandatory application for corporate users who can no longer afford to use Microsoft Windows. Mr Project currently does not provide import/export for Microsoft Project files, but that functionality will certainly be on their plate in the future.
Should You Upgrade?
Sigh. I'd like to give an unqualified "yes," but the fact of the matter is that I found installing Red Hat 7.3 to be problematic on several of my test machines. On an old HP desktop system, the Red Hat 7.3 installer "exited abnormally" several times when installing from scratch, while Red Hat 7.2 installed with no problems. Similarly, the X Window system configuration portion of the installer didn't correctly probe and identify the LCD display on my IBM ThinkPad A20p, though this worked fine when installing Red Hat 7.2. (I was able to find an XF86Config-4 file on the Web that worked just fine, but this really should have worked correctly - especially since it used to under Red Hat 7.2.) On my more random test machines (ones I've built myself from random parts), both from-scratch and upgrade (from Red Hat 7.2) installations worked fine.
Red Hat 7.3 includes a newer kernel than previous releases, which is important if you are using USB or PCMCIA devices (especially wireless) that require the updated drivers and subsystem support found in the latest kernels. It also includes KDE 3.0 and GNOME 1.4, which provide significant improvements over earlier versions. If you're already running Red Hat and have a fairly stock system (in other words, if you haven't manually installed lots of packages since a previous release of Red Hat), I'd recommend upgrading to Red Hat 7.3.
If you're putting together a new system, I would also recommend trying Red Hat 7.3 - if you have problems installing it, that's what Red Hat's much-touted customer support is for. The new versions of KDE and GNOME are truly attractive, stable, and powerful, and Red Hat 7.3 includes a nice selection of recent and current utilities and applications.
On the other hand, if you have a business-critical server system, are already running Red Hat and have significantly tweaked your system, or don't care about having the latest and greatest versions of KDE and GNOME, I don't see any must-have features in Red Hat 7.3 beyond simply staying current. If some of the new software bundled with Red Hat 7.3 sounds intriguing, You can get things like Mr Project (www.codefactory.se) and Evolution (www.ximian.org) from their home sites and manually install them on your existing system.
In general, Red Hat 7.3 is the best version of Red Hat yet, though plagued by some irritating installer problems on some of my test systems. Caveat Downloader.