DistributionWatch Review: Red Hat Linux 7.1 From
www.Linuxplanet.com
Brian Proffitt
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.
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.
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