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a quick RH Linux 5.9 report




(if you are uninterested in betas, skip the message. if this is
considdered off-topic, boot me in person(al Email))

installed a few hours ago, haven't had time for serious testing, here
are some notes so far. Mostly rants, afterall it IS a beta.

* installation design a bit improved. package selection now with
collapsible tree, a few rough edges, but generally same as before (where
did the redneck language selection go?)

* can't expand X11/Application category in above tree, what's up with
that?

* Xemacs still not an option, but 120 megs of multilingual howtos are. I
fail to accept. my CD will kick those out and replaces them with Xemacs

* an SMP kernel is offered as an option.

* reported kernel version is 2.2.3-5 (was there a 2.2.3ac5?). v. 2.2.4
came out last night, btw.

* yp binding specified during install but needed configuring anyway
after boot.

* install procedure offers to start with shadow passwords and/or MD5
passwords.

* can now specify additional Xservers at install time (3Dlabs in
addition to the SVGA

* Xnest and Xvfb are not installed by default anymore... anyone uses
those, anyway?

* install has both gnome and KDE as option packages. an upgrade of a
system w/o gnome offers to add it in a special dialog box.

* if gnome and E are installed, they become the default
winmanager+environment. gnome will come up with gmc and the help window,
menus feature the default gnome stuff. the redhat menus and kde menus
as submenus.

* gdm is default for runlevel 5 instead of xdm

* switching between winmanagers is not a menu option anymore as before,
I'll look into it tommorow.

* gnome's control panel let's you changes WM from E to Windowmaker, but
option doesn't seem to work (E turns off, a 

* woops! XF86Setup requiers 75dpi fonts, but dependency is not set in
the package!

* system installed with locate but no updatedb!

* woops! system installed w/o /usr/lib/rpm/ and more specifically no
/usr/lib/rpm/rpmrc. had to ftp it from a RHL 5.2 machine, otherwise no
installs, removes or queries of packages!

* update: apperently the rpm RPM package was not installed :-)
  not in the DB, but at least the install procedure was nice enough to
leave me with a binary...
      # rpm -qf /bin/rpm
      file /bin/rpm is not owned by any package

* update[2]: apperently the rpm package I mirrored was not complete,
will remirror. installed rpm-2.5.1-1 for now and it looks ok.


if you want the full listing of all the included packages send Email to
ira-starthin@scso.com. for a full listing with file sizes (ls -l) email
ira-starbuck@scso.com and Qmail will immediately send you the file (Red
Hat's FTP site is hosed... imagine that...)


the next stage: I did a 5.9 installation on a workstation and an upgrad
on a laptop. I have an identical laptop here which will have Berolinux
installed as soon as my mirror finishes, whereupon I will let them duel
and compare features, configs and benchmarks. (Bero is a pgcc recompile
and enhancement of RHL 5.2 on kernel 2.2.3)



-- 
Ira Abramov ;  whois:IA58  ;  www.scso.com ;  all around Linux enthusiast 
                              --  "Of course Unix is a user friendly OS, 
                              it is just very picky about its friends..."