On Mon, 19 Nov 2001 13:18, Michael Scottaline wrote: > I recently installed RH 7.2 on a sony Vaio laptop (FX340). I'm afraid I > had no problems, thus none to share. Absolutely everything worked right > out of the box, NIC, video, audio, CD (burner and DVD, though I haven't > tried in that mode yet).
Mostly same here. It was an even better install than the 7.1 and I was impressed enough with that: mostly due to kudzu / anaconda. A quick note on a CD burner gotcha is that you *must* fire up xcdroast as superman first (then as a mere mortal for evermore). Redhat/ kde have an unpleasant habit of forcing kdesud (you keep typing your root password to do simple things like kppp. Ditto cd burning.) There are ways of dealing with this, detailed on the SxS site. --- I did a custom install on an old ext2 partition reformatted to ext3 (by the installer). I strongly suspect that for the first time ever, if I had chosen 'workstation' I _probably_ would have got exactly what i wanted and saved myself a lot of finger picking. Redhat have dropped the 'powertools' approach and supply dual cd's. This means that the days of 'install everything' are probably over since there's now just too much stuff you'll never use. You really do need to pick thru, or at best, use the workstation/server type bundles. For hardened penguins, the Gentoo or Linux from Scratch distros where you minimalise the lot is a better option. I was hoping for a minimal install select on RH72 but didn't find one (unless you assume 'custom' means just that). RH73, or for that matter SuSe 74 should look at that 'feature', it's becoming a necessity. Once you install a kernel, an xfree, and a few admin tools, that should be good enough to boot and do the rest later. It took me over an hour to go thru each package I thought I wanted *before* continuing the install, this is frustrating because (as we know), you generally install twice due to boo-boos. --- When partitioning (by whatever means), be *very* generous with your swap space. The installer screams and screams if you have less than 2 x ram. ---- The gotcha's with no cures were 7.2 refused to upgrade on a previous RH7.1 partition. It kept squealing that an fsck was needed. 7.1 'seemed' shonky when powering down. When first installed, 7.1 did auto power offs on shutdown, but after a kernel upgrade, that no longer occured. No amount of fsck'ing that partition stopped 7.2 squealing. I suspect a connection. -- Dual video cards threw it somewhat. It detected the pci S3 rather than the GeForce Agp. That surprised me. After taking the easy option of hurling the S3 out the door, it detected the correct Geforce model, and the correct 17" monitor. An impressive list of supported cards/monitors was there on show. While, naturally, that isn't Redhat, it was an impressive show of how far along Xfree has come (4.11-0), and to a certain extent how well integrated redhat have applied it. Ditto my usb mouse. It auto detected correct make, buttons, and model. Again, an impressive hit on how far usb has come (remember kernel 2.2.x?) and again, not bad RH for integrating it. Still on the subject of usb, the pace is furious. The /etc/hotplug directory contains more than 7.1 Again, this is not kudos to RH but a comment that after what? 4 months? RH72 was sorely needed to account for the rapidly expanding devices. 7.2 detected my hotplug camera, 7.1 did not. You get the feeling that the dot com bubble blowout is over, and it's back to business as usual where we all expect a distro, any distro, to keep pumping the releases within a few months (just like "the good old days'). A few months ago most of us were despondent about the Linux desktop, it seemed to have run out of steam. The RH72 release serves notice on Windows that Redhat, at least, have picked up the cudgel and are running hard. kudzu / anaconda gets betterer each time. This release, it autodected my vibra128 (ensoniq). Rh7.1 had a series of common sound cards it couldn't detect. The consequences of that lack is there was a lot of /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ browsing. The big problem with sound is a *lot* of post and pre-install statements are required in modules.conf for nearly any sound card. I'm happy that kudzu figures them out because I can't. The vibra128 is hardly a new sound card, but it's good that obviously more common hardware is getting sorted. (I also installed RH72 on a system with AWE64, sans problems, same results) Ditto, it detected that I had a cd-rw and correspondingly put the all important append= statement in lilo.conf. It gave the impression of a few i's are being dotted and t's crossed. Ie some completeness in the install process. The one install dissapointment was my zip drive (parallel) and my parallel LS120. I wasn't fussed about the ls120, but a Zip is fairly standard isn't it? The problem is most likely to be the large changes that occured at kernel 2.4 to the parallel interface drivers (4). The Ieee1284 standards were incorporated but I suspect the kudzu authors were playing catch-up with the ever revising kernel api for this interface. The West Australian maintainer has done a great clean up job of this driver, but it aint settled yet because (oddly) of pci problems. Pci registration, and Linux's way of handling it are an abortion. None of which is directly related to kudzu detection, it's just (I think) kudzu maintainers will focus on parallel when it setlles down. The Redhat cure for all those (types of) ills is /etc/rc.local. You plunk lotsa modprobes in there for things the installer can't find. It's messy. Mercifully, while RH were pushing you to install ext3, there was no mention of @#)(*)($ /devfs. It was not on the radar. Mr Gooch, my Aussie comrade, you need to keep polishing. devfs is a fine product, if you explain how mortals can use it. ----- One gotcha carried thru from 7.1 is #@$)(&)$# paths. The bash script gives an eminently sensible $home/bin directory. Ie, plunk whatever you want to run in ~/bin. There is no ~/bin directory. You have to create it. Similarly, there's a really irritating su. It retains your user environment, it doesn't replace it with superman's paths. Thus, if you want to lilo/ modprobe, or just about any other su thing, you have to /sbin/thing this is irritating. The fix is su (dash) it's a cure, but an irritating one. -- If you do nothing else, after installing, run the sysV init editor. Your jaw might drop how many processes have started that you don't want, (and each one slugs your cpu). My favorite is Sendmail. Every install of any release, it always starts. I have a home workstation, it's useless. Editing the traffic lights in the SysV init dialog is well worth your time (and your cpu's). Redhat have done a very good job at dialoging the /etc/rc.d/init.d scripts, they have special comment fields which the gui editor picks up on with useful tool tips and tricks. --- The traditional approach when doing upgrade-installs is to copy over your $home directory. In this instance I'd be highly selective with the 'hidden' folders', particularly (dot)kde. There's a lot more under the hood in the newer kde (2.2-11++) and it gets crippled if you retain your old config files. Take the pain, and re-configure your personal profiles, it's worth it. --- Kernel is version 2.4.7 (a little stale). I had no trouble over-writing with a previously compiled 2.4.13 (and modules). However, the /boot directory and /usr/src is a little strange. There is no traditional /usr/src/linux symlink and the /boot folder contains some mysteries like 'module-info'. But so far, no hiccups. glibc / gcc is a double dose with the up and coming version 3.x and, the non- standard, standard 2.96. There's a bug in 2.96 that makes a mess of closing directory searches, dissapointed Rh didn't patch it. Each release brings on a newer, bigger, faster, (better?) method of print management. Under the covers it's CUPS. However I always have a little trouble finding out what they call the print manager spooler editor thingamejig this time round. I preferred whatever it was and whatever it was called, in rh71. RH71 dialog selections were based on RH5.2 *yes, 5.2, hellishly easy to follow, but with a truly excellent 'test' suite underneath Rh71. Europeans watch out, Kde / Redhat insist your printer is US letter. Prepare to spend some time tweaking in all the 'A4' entries required because the Wizards won't help you. The printers available this time are hellishly impressive and seriously lots but it falls over, badly, by giving you multiple choice cryptic drivers for each type (hp laser4 eg). Unless you've been there previously, there is no way of discovering what an STC500UP.DLL is (epson 400 if you ask). You select and pray. Printing in Linux is a continuing and unecessary pain in the rectum, they just made it harder. Again. I've claimed previously that RH stole the install process directly from Caldera COL 2.2. That was *the* benchmark of how to do it properly. Col 2.2 pulled Linux out of the grunge ISP market and into the user's home. It inspired Corel and TurboLinux. RH saw the light so to speak when they followed in with KDE as the preferred desktop, It seems that RH have gone further by selecting Grub as their preferred boot loader. (Truthfully, I can't see the point behind that). ----- The readme notes are WORTHWILE. There's a lot of interesting information you can browse thru while waiting for the install to complete. Notably, the heavy emphasis on Athlon processors, and, interestingly, the deprecated items, Top of that tree is linuxconf! --- I view distro releases as a convenient bundled package of the latest software (kde/Xfree eg) that saves me MegaFtp. As such I don't favour any distro over another but like to praise when reasonable. The RH7.2 release is impressive to the newbie++ and the windows refugee. I am getting comments from first time, and dual boot, users here how 'easy' it was to install, and how 'windows like' it is (actually kde). If you're newbie, this one's better than RH71. and RH71 was good. If you're ex-caldera you'd know the important and necessary catchup of COL2.4 vs COL2.2 and this release is in the same measure. If you're Linux ISP, forget it. This release has nothing for you. You've already upgraded better security patches than what's in here and the desktop candy is just that. If you're Suse / Debian etc, then you like polished bare metal and this release doesn't have anything for you. The only reason a person on an existing Linux distro should consider RH72 is if they now choose to migrate to KDE. This install makes that move easy. -- http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
