DistroWatch has the details of the official release: The press release has all the details with links to further information, such as features and benefits, product description of the Personal and Professional editions, technical details and the package list. Red Hat Linux 9 is available for immediate download to paid subscribers to Red Hat Network (US$60 per year). It will be released to FTP servers on 7 April. Update: Release notes on the newly created “Shrike” mailing list. New Nvidia drivers here. Update 2: How to add the Java plugin on RH 9.
Red Hat Linux 9 Officially Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Sweet! This is the one I’ve been waiting for!
Could be nice, but why the new major version number?
by the way, Matthias Saou has already built a ton of add-on packages for Shrike, available here:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net
So go there, download and install apt, then do apt-get install synaptic, then use synaptic to download and install all the add-ons you need, including the xmms mp3 plugin!
Nnice job and thanks Matthias!
I’m looking forward to putting RH 9 onto my new computer when I get it in a couple months. I personally thought RH 8 was an extremely good release, and polishing it can only help. I don’t expect the world with every new release, even if it has a “major” version.
A couple questions:
1. Did they clean up the menu system and add a proper menu editor? Having all those useful programs under extras was _SO_ annoying. I know, I could have delved into gconf and fixed it, but I’m the lazy sort.
2. What kind of speed and compatibility increases can Radeon 7200 (ie, the regular Radeon, not VE or 7500) expect to see? The DRI drivers under XF86 4.2.0 were not very speedy, and somewhat buggy. In particular, does Soldier of Fortune work properly yet? I loved that game, but it’s hard to play with opaque fog.
3. Does the RH screen configurator (you know, the GUI one) properly handle Xinerama setups? This was one of my pet peeves with it – it did absolutely nothing to try to support it.
-Erwos
“Immediate Download”? Hah. I’m a RHN subscriber and I wouldn’t call the 2-10kbps I’m getting “immediate download”. Methinks that the RedHat folks underestimated the demand for this release. There must be thousands of people all trying to download it from RHN right now.
On a side note, NVidia has quietly posted a new Linux driver that fixes some 2D slowdowns and a few other things here:
* Fixed a problem that prevented running multiple X servers on different virtual terminals.
* Improved IDCT level acceleration in XvMC.
* Fixed a 2D performance slowdown experienced by many people.
ftp://download1.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-4349
This driver supposedly fixes all the compatability issues with RedHat 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1
“Could be nice, but why the new major version number?”
To make it short, the new O(1) threading model means that a few programs that do strange things with threads will not work properly _out of the box_ – it’s usually possible to make them work with a few environment variables. This includes WINE and some JVMs. Most programs will be fine and binary-compatible, but RedHat has done the safe (and probably smart) thing by incrementing the major version number because of these issues. You get significant performance gains in multi-threaded apps in return, so it’s a pretty good trade-off, especially on the server side, but even on the desktop.
There is a lot of FUD going on about this particular issue, most of it totally untrue. The proof is in the pudding, and that is that most RH 9 beta testers saw very few compatibility problems.
-Erwos
… c’mon, can’t thrust that all ‘mirrors’ are closed
Thanks a lot!
@red hat – ” Link 4 everyone please? Thanks!”
All the downloads are done through a special HTTPS link session authenticated to a specific account
Which sucks, because I know the download would be faster if it wasn’t https.
I was hoping for a bit more speed too. They did push the instant ISO feature this time around, so I knew it would be slower than before the relase, but at this rate I’ll be done about when it’s released to the FTP sites
it does everything i want it to and runs perfectly on my laptop. I have no issues with file compatiblity when using windows files (documents and all) and if needed i’ll use the terminal without any fuss. Mplayer plays all my media files and i have like 40 episodes of Futurama and 30 Simpson files all encoded as mpeg, avi or divx, it plays them all! Woot!
It detects all my hardware; printer, mice and USB pen drives. CD burning is so easy and firewire works with no hiccups whatsoever.
I am so glad i bought a mac!
Hahahaha!
@shawn
I can wait this 7 days. But it would be nice if anyone has a link (for everyone)
And this link for everyone don’t must use https (as Red Hat did)
Don’t be shy to mail me to this mail address, just created this temporaly.
Btw, it’s really no april fool: my birthday is at 1st april
That’s the real one and only reason that it would be nice if anyone knows a public link.
Because I like Slackware 9.0 too and *can* wait this 7 days.
I can everyone pass one URL alternative from donwload ISO RH 9.
This post from the phoebe list might be of interest:
I have written a perl script that uses curl to login to rhn.redhat.com, grab the right url, and start the download using curl.
Usage: rhn-isos release-name disc-number arch username password
Example: rhn-isos psyche disc1 i386 bob bicycle
Will download the first i386 binary iso of RedHat 8.0.
It will work with releases 7.0 and higher. Though with 7.0 it is a little different since the filename is 7.0 and not the release name.
Also 7.0 i386 isos have the word respin in the place of the arch. You can set a default arch, username, and password at the top of the script.
You can also use it to get source rpm isos by using SRPMS as the arch.
Yes, I know I could have used perl code to replace the grep and cut commands. I am a novice programmer, this is a hack, and it works. If anyone wants to submit to me a cleaned up version that works, feel free.
http://24.205.202.237/rhn-isos
I decided to do this after a friend was complaining about the lack of priority ftp access and what a waste it was to do it over https. I had recently made 3-4 scripts very similar in nature to automate the creation of mail accounts via the web-cyradm interface.
Yes, the menu system is non-lamified in this release.
Looks good. I’ve been waiting for RH9 to upgrade my rh8 and suse8 boxes to all at once. I think this is going to be a strong release
Good to hear about the nvidia drivers, that’ll reduce the amount of flamage on linuxquestions.org quite a bit 
But of all the Linux distro’s, Redhat.com is teh most professionally done website. These guys sure know how to keep a good image. Whenever I am on their website, I feel like I am going to be visiting it for a couple of years to come, make that many years.
Come on Mandrake, give us a better website. Mandrake does have an image problem.
Still, the Redhat site show how much can be done with WCC compliant HTML. Good stuff, it should encourage those who use shady stuff to rethink their use of HTML.Redhat 4 life.
At least at my local CompUSA, I picked up a packaged copy of RH9 on Saturday. I guess no one heard they weren’t supposed to sell them until next week.
You’d be foolish to pay your money for Red Hat Network, since you cannot unsubscribe!. Here’s the deal: their terms say that the only way to cancel your subscription is to send them registered or certified mail. They specifically state that e-mail is not sufficient. Buyer beware!
I believed that since I payed for rhn I’d be able to download the ISOs _before_ they are released to the ftp:s……. With this download speed it will be more or less impossible.
*sigh* It sucks big time
Well sounds like with the slow d/l rates and $60.00 subscriptions, RedHat is slowly becoming the greedy inefficient M$ counterpart for Linux.
I mean come on just release it to everyone and have a special URL or FTP for subscribers. This way FTP’s around the world could offset some of the rush that students, researchers, hackers, etc… are putting on RH servers for v.9
And it does suck. I hope that they are resolving the issues with bandwidth. They probably didn’t realize so many people would purchase rhn… I don’t know.
I just wish that there was some feedback on the mailing lists or somewhere from Redhat. Would make me feel a bit better about the money I spent.
“Here’s the deal: their terms say that the only way to cancel your subscription is to send them registered or certified mail. They specifically state that e-mail is not sufficient. Buyer beware!”
I’m not so sure about that. According to the RHN FAQ,
“How do I delete my account?
If you no longer want to receive the services of Red Hat Network, you can delete your account. To do so, you will need to sign in, click on “Your Account” (on the left), then click on “Delete Account”. From there, follow directions. Deletion of account should occur within one business week.”
Script is kewl… I am downloading at work, and will resume at home…This saves a few steps.
Thanks.
What a bunch of B.S this is. I’ve been sitting at 1.92KB/sec all morning.
I hope this version will let me actually use my modem. RH7.1 never gave me a problem with my external Rockwell or my PC card XJack, but with 8 I was NEVER able to “activate” either modem. I would love to hear if anyone else who has to dial in has any success without major effort.
So are there any mirrors of RH9 ISOs available yet?
So when is the World’s First RedHat 9.0 Review for? I’m surprised the first review didn’t come out before the official announcement (are you letting your guard down?)
By the way, its RedHat 9, not 9.0, as they now use a different numbering scheme thats not supposed to represent the version anymore.
Does anyone know if the mozilla 1.3 rpms for redhat 8 on mozilla.org will work with this? If not whats the best way to get 1.3, as mail filtering is nice. Also will the galeon rpms on the galeon site work. I’m just curious how much incompatibility 9 is going to bring.
> So when is the World’s First RedHat 9.0 Review for? I’m surprised the first review didn’t come out before the official announcement
What are you talking about? OSAlert had the first exclusive review last week about this version! We could not post it earlier (we could if we wanted to), as these were the instructions we had from Red Hat, Inc.
>By the way, its RedHat 9, not 9.0,
Actually, it is Red Hat Linux 9
Skaeight,
I doubt the RPMS work right now, but I do imagine they will release RH9 rpm’s in short order.
There really aren’t very man incompatibilities between RH8 and 9. The main thing is that the RH8 RPM’s will be built on different libraries and might not install.
If you are looking for RPM’s that will work now there ARE phoebe rpm’s of Galeon & Mozilla out there.
Try looking at http://freshrpms.net/ or http://rpm.pbone.net/
Good luck!
…to subscribe to RHN when I decided “hmm, better check out OSAlert first”. There’s no way I’m subscribing to get 10kB/s download speeds. I’ll try my hand at a local Best Buy to see if I can get a packaged copy early. And can anyone suggest why RedHat is using https when somebody could simply download the ISOs and re-host them? Why are they trying to be like the RIAA on this? Of all people, they should know this stuff just does not work and only pisses off legitimate customers!
For anyone updating their systems to RH 9 or MDK 9 that have Nvidia cards check this out:
“Nvidia updates Linux software”
http://news.com.com/2100-1045-994716.html?tag=fd_top
I’m sure that they are doing it over SSL to make it harder for people to share the ftp address with all their friends and saturate the servers that should be for paying members.
There is NOTHING stopping people from putting the ISO’s on a server and sharing them. Redhat has never done anything to stop this.
I think that Redhat is just trying to make some money by offering a reliable place to download the ISO’s early. Hopefully they are able to keep their servers up with demand… :+)
RH9 has hit BitTorrent and BT users seem to be getting better speeds than RHN subscribers. Info on Slashdot.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/31/1256236
Leave BitTorrent up and running after yours finishes.
Here’s the relevant quote from Red Hat’s terms on the Basic subscription. This sounds extremely unfriendly, to say the least:
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS. For annual subscriptions to the Service, the initial term of this Agreement shall commence on the Effective Date and shall continue for one (1) year. Thereafter, the term shall renew for successive terms of one (1) year each unless either party gives written notice to the other of its intention not to renew at least sixty (60) days prior to the commencement of the next term. Customer may provide notice of non-renewal in writing to Red Hat by registered or certified mail, return receipt requested, to the following address: Red Hat, Inc., Customer Service1801 Varsity Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina 27606. You may not terminate the Service or this Agreement by email.
So don’t say you didn’t know. The URL for this is https://rhn.redhat.com/network/sales/purchase/terms.pxt, section 6.
I stopped by my local CompUSA here in Naperville, IL and would you believe, they already had RH9 on display. So, I picked up a copy this past Saturday. What great luck! I haven’t yet had a chance to install it, but Monday, the 31st looks as good a day as any.
Yesterday (3/30/2003) I was just in CompUSA here in Duluth, GA and all copies of Red Hat Linux 8.0 were removed from the shelves. They mave have the new release on the shelves today if it’s already happened at some other places.
Yum. I’ll have to check CompUSA this week.
Say, I’m surprised that RH even offers downloads for shrike to begin with. I mean, there’s paying customers who’ll go buy the box off the shelf. Seems kinda’ like throwing money away.
Well, perhaps it’s their way of generating good will among the community. Dunno.
Btw, the reason that you can’t terminate the RHN subscription via email is likely just a security measure — to keep some cracker from cancelling your account on you. Heh, `cause everyone knows that crackers are too cheap to pay for registered or certified mail, right?
Quote from technical specs:
“CPU:
Minimum: Pentium-class
Recommended for Text Mode: 200 Megahertz Pentium-class or better
Recommended for Graphical Mode: 400 Megahertz Pentium-class or better”
Reading from the technical page, it is hard to understand why RedHat are still providing i386 packages if a pentium is supposedly the minimum requirement.
Am downlaoding Disc1 at 159.1kb/sec and disks2 at 64.4kb/sec. Disk2 didnt want to do more than 1.4kb/sec, will try again later.
AFAIK, often RedHat optimizes for i686, though it only uses i386 instructions. With gcc, one can issue the compile flag -mcpu=<arch> and -march=<arch>. The -march=<arch> flag will generate instructions specific to that architecture, and implies -mcpu=<arch>. What -mcpu=<arch> does is schedule instructions optimally for a certain platform. So, issuing -mcpu=i686 -march=i386 would tell gcc to generate only instructions that are standard across all i386 compatible processors, but optimize the scheduling of these instructions for i686 processors. Issuing simply -march=i686 would tell gcc to optimize the scheduling of instructions for i686 and also use i686-specific instructions. With the latter case, one may not necessary be able to use a Pentium with the distribution – only Pentium Pro and higher. With the latter, original Pentiums can still be used, though the distribution is slightly optimized for i686. All this being said, RedHat does offer glibc and the kernel in fully i686-optimized packages – this is where a large performance gain can be seen. If one uses KDE, it would be a good idea to recompiled QT, kdelibs, and kdebase with i686 optimizations, as RedHat does not offer i686 versions of these packages. I’ve gone through the trouble of optimizing several packages for my Pentium 4, and I have to admit that there isn’t a large amount of performance to be gained. Incidentally, the further one optimizes a package, the likelier they will introduce instabilities. I know Gentoo users swear by the optimizations, but I would argue that their perceived performance gains are coming from somewhere other than optimally compiled packages – perhaps a tweaked kernel, lighter memory footprint, etc.
Would somebody with a really fast connection be nice and upload this to alt.binaries.images.linux ?
Somebody upload Slackware 9 there, which is where I got it.
I don’t know…I’m getting it at 70k a sec from RHN. Mybe it was an early problem? Or am I the exception. What speeds are people getting with BitTorrent?
I passed 170KBps using it a while ago.
Nice
I think it would be wise to RHAT to take a look at this tech when they’re distributing their ISOs…
Although I am a paying RHN customer I would use Bit Torrent…except for one thing – all the three ISOs are bundled in one. I have a bandwidth cap and I have enough to pull 2 ISOs, anything above and I will be charged.
So it looks like I’m getting in via RHN.
Stopped the store on the way home, and lo, there she was.
Got my copy.
Note that the RH9 box looks almost exactly like the RH8.0 box.
Also, from the release notes, looks like it comes with subversion. Yee haw!
It does?!
started off slow but now after 1 hr its at 200KPS and 30 up. Bit torrent should be used for every major release of a distro. So much faster this way.
Friend of mine comes over today (he works for an unnamed company that gets a lot gets a lot of distros) and gives me a copy of RH9. He doesn’t know what version of RH9 it is (Professional or whatever), but it comes on 7 CDs – 6 for the OS and 1 for the documentation.
He says we’ll have Suse 8.2 on 4/7/03
I am downloading at the moment with BitTorrent…guess what ? DL: 280 Kb/s UL: 120 Kb/s
I LOVE this Software..:-)))
Downloading at 120k/s via bittorret, I will leave it open for a couple of days to be nice (96% done right now)
Download finished…i will leave the upload (at 200 Kb/s right now) on for the next few days…
I’m not getting the kind of speeds John Deere waas for some reason, but I’m pretty happy with my 65kB down/20kB up. I guess it’s my poor ADSL that’s slowing my upload, but I’m not sure what’s limiting the down.
Anyways, I’m about 4 hours from finishing the download, I’ll be leaving the upload running when mine finishes too. I’ll also be sharing this on the Gnutella2 network when the download completes.
I’m soooooo not going to download RH9….. until next week.
During a graphical installation, you can now press SHIFT-Print Screen and a screenshot of the current installation screen will be taken.
These are stored in the following directory: /root/anaconda-screenshots/
The screenshots can be accessed once the newly-installed system is rebooted.
Hangs on the screen asking whether you want to probe the integrity of the CD Medium.
However by just typing:
linux lowres
installation just runs fine
My notebook does that also, turning off legacy USB fixed it for me.
On a T3, I had all 3 CD’s in under two hours! Max of 1 MB/s+
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/rh9.html
Well, I paid the 60 bucks and started the ISO image download. After 14 hours (on an 800k SDSL !) it stopped 100MB short for each of the 3 images. Popped along to CompUSA and bought the shrink-wrapped for $40.
Now, about that refund…
Hopefully this release has fixed the problem I’ve had with
RedHat 8.0; switching between workspaces causes keyboard
input focus to be lost! I’ve switched to using IceWM which
may not look as pretty, but is fast and less buggy.