Submitted by “Sex appeal doesn’t seem to be the focus of this release. Instead, Red Hat makes a strong statement in its competitive infrastructure in the form of well-executed virtualisation and user session controls in its RHEL5 release. The aggressive number of components inside this operating system still beg to be sewn together more comprehensively with better administrative tools, but the fundamentals are definitely in there.”
“There’s really no new lipstick on the Red Hat pig. It’s still using Gnome 7.1;”
o_O
7.1 is more likely to be X.org version. Makes one wonder if the reviewer know what he’s talking about at all.
o_O
7.1 is more likely to be X.org version. Makes one wonder if the reviewer know what he’s talking about at all. — miscz
Considering how the lack of eye candy is such a big point, I’d say he doesn’t. I miss the days when NO server OS had a GUI (I’m not sure if they were any better, but the articles about them used to be…).
He do not. He describes Opteron servers as having Athlon 64 CPUs.
Oh My! No “eye candy” that’s as flashy as Mac or Microsoft. Just a solid, sensable, stable, and reliable OS that customers prefer for mission critical operations.
“Shame on you Red Hat” for concentrating on what an OS should do.
Composited desktops remind me a bit of the Hula Hoops that were such a fad during the late 1950s.
For your viewing pleasure, let me draw some analogies with imagery.
The Windows Aero Hula Hoop:
http://tinyurl.com/ywu2b8
The MacOS X Hula Hoop:
http://tinyurl.com/yufrdu
And the Linux/Compiz/Beryl Hula Hoop:
http://tinyurl.com/yp9dgk
These are the featured images on Wikipedia, and I was amazed at how perfect they were for this analogy.
Hah! Hah! and more Hah!! That is the very likely the best image analogy I have ever seen! Sir – you have made my night!
Ditto!
Fantastic!
What makes someone interested in AIGLX and high performance graphics on a server OS?
Just because Apple doesn’t remove its Exposé and Quartz Extreme from its server OS it doesn’t make sense to indirectly ask Red Hat to activate alle this stuff that you can add yourself if you want to – even though it makes absolutely no sense…
I’d rather drop to a command line…
I know, I was thinking the same thing, as most of the time a production server doesn’t boot past init 3.
This is correct init 3 is what a server is going to be in no X-windows is needed.
It is just overhead and not installed if he is talking about a desktop Red Hat is trying to get serious about this since SLED is getting all the attention in the Enterprise.
I hope Red Hat really works on the desktop push the more competition.
However, for some reason redhat tries really really hard to get X and gnome on your system, and starts into RL5 if you don’t edit /etc/inittab on these same systems. I am currently working on putting a frigging web server into production use that has goddamned openoffice on it because I didn’t do the install, and the redhat default includes this kind of thing. I can’t wait to try pulling individual packages off the box with up2date
Moreover, whenever I have submitted a ticket to redhat, the first level techs always make the assumption I a) have x installed on the box along with all the redhat specific gui tools, and b have physical access to the box. Redhat definitely think along the “point and click” lines rather than the “vi /etc/services” lines – this isn’t really a bad thing considering the number of people out there that *require* a GUI to do any work on a machine, but it is somewhat of a PITA if you have no intention of ever admining a box that way.
Red Hat Enterprise is more than just ‘server’ it also has workstation/desktop as well. The issue I have with the review is this, does he even know what Linux is, because is ballsing up the most easiest of information – GNOME 7.1? the constant harping on about ‘eye candy’.
For me, if I were to review it, my concern wouldn’t be aboout eye candy, but instead looking at the kinds of tools which enterprise customers will find useful when deploying the server/workstation in large configuration.
Btw, I can understand the need for a gui on the server, to lower the bar for administrators as to lower the over all cost of administrating IT infrastructure, but at the same time, I can’t work out the facination over eye candy which the reviewer has given that it offers nothing in the way of usability improvement resulting in productivity improvement.
Does “nedit” work — and does it work properly? For me, as a HPCC-computing environmental
modeler who works on a variety of systems (not all of them Linux — some AIX, some Solaris,
even some old IRIX), that is a drop-dead requirement.
Can one install “ddd” (or other Fortran-supporting GUI debugger) without having to do the build-from-source equivalent of “DLL Hell”? [Note that neither the KDE nor Gnome GUI debuggers
permit source-level Fortran debugging ;-( and so are useless from an environmental modeler’s
point-of-view. And I am tired of spending half a week chasing down everything necessary to build “ddd” from scratch on RH systems!]
Has the default browser still been munged so that attempting to view documentation on a server
in fact invokes a browser on your local desktop — an entirely different machine from the one
on which the documents live ?!? I don’t like having to commit copyright infringement
just to see the Intel compiler documentation on my servers… particularly when the only
justification given is “Netscape 3 compatibility.”
How would you rate Suse vs. the new Redhat 5?
The review seems to have two flaws:
1) the distinction where the server and the client side is reviewed is not made clear enough.
2) the review is too shallow for the technically inclined.
Point 1) is obvious, many here complained about the apparent lack of knowledge on X-Window-System basics and confused arguments toward the client release with arguments brought forward against the server release. Taking the GUI arguments as targetted against the client release, a comparison to other client OSes seems to be in scope and in comparison, to be honest, with desktop oriented distributions or MS Windows Vista and Mac OS X the RHEL5 desktop looks plain. You can’t argue against that.
On the server-side they touched upon some major changes: new SELinux audit tools, Xen, IPV6, a new driver model, and more FOSS drivers. They also talked about some problems they discovered, such as the confusing log situation. I would have liked to read more about the driver model and how the improved storage management is supposed to work, but I guess I will get this from more technical and less business related articles.
Overall the review gives out a fair summary: Red Hat focused on strengthening the core and as a result RHEL5 is a solid but not fancy OS. More integration would be nice and make the admin’s job easier.
Note that they don’t even mention the plain client desktop in their summary.