Guinness

By anders pearson 31 Jan 2001

a couple days ago, after i installed it on a new server at work, i was all set to post a glowing review of RedHat 7.0 up here. then i decided that first, i would upgrade my home machine. everything is basically settled down now. overall, i was pretty impressed with it although i have a couple small issues.

first off, the new installer “anaconda” is great. its done with Gtk now so linux newbies migrating from windows will be fairly comfortable clicking their way through it. it basically follows the same steps as the old redhat text-based installer (a few things are in slightly different order. eg, you set your root password and setup your network card before choosing packages now). also, the descriptions of the packages that pop up when you go through the list selecting them (assuming you choose “select individual packages” at the right step) are very nice; with the copious amounts of stuff crammed into a linux distro, even a fairly knowledgeable linux geek won’t know what every single one is and what it does by name.

the first problem i ran into wasn’t so much with the installer, but i encountered it during the install process, so i’ll mention it here. RH7.0 is now a two disk install. not knowing this, i went to linuxiso.org, downloaded and burned the first disk assuming that disk 2 was the standard disk of source code that the old versions shipped with. the install was about 90% complete when it stops, pops out the cd-tray and a “please insert disk 2” message pops up. crap. had to go download and burn disk 2 in a hurry.

while the installer’s interface is nice, the guts aren’t quite so good. i first tried to “upgrade” over my RH 6.0 system. it sort of worked. a little. not really. the console was basically fscked so i couldn’t logon to the machine. i could get it to boot in single user mode and start everything up fine (aside from hundreds of warning messages) by hand and then it was ok, but normal boots were no good. i never really did that much weird stuff to screw up my configuration so it’s disappointing that the upgrade wasn’t very smooth.

instead, i wiped the / partition and just did a straight install. that went real smoothly. then i noticed that i had no network. not only did i not have a connection, the system was pretty sure that i didn’t even have a card. i was pretty sure that i had a pretty standard SMC card (about 2 years old now) in there which previous versions of redhat had had no problem detecting and configuring. so i had to go back and do an “expert” install, forcing it to recognize my card. that did finally work.

i was happy to see that by default wu-ftpd is now not installed. however there were still lots of weird things like rpc, yp-bind, portmap, and nfs turned on by default. it seems to me like the default settings for an OS should be as restrictive as possible while allowing the non-power users to get the most common stuff installed without having to call a help line. so i expect to see telnet on a default install. someone new to linux might not know enough to install it themselves later, but they certainly expect to have it on there; if it weren’t, redhat would have to spend their entire budget on answering phone calls from confused newbies. but things like rpc and yp-bind aren’t really your typical home-user fair. they’re pretty useful if you have a well set-up (and firewalled) intranet, but out in the wild they seem to attract security holes at an alarming rate. but it also seems like the only people who would really be interested in them are the same kinds of people who probably know enough to be able to set them up for themselves. so why include them on the default? i don’t get it.

what made me the happiest though was seeing that openssh is now included and on by default. sweet. now they just need to remove telnet and i’ll be pretty pleased.

ASIDE: the new server at work came with a GeForce 2 GTS. if you keep up on graphics cards, you’re probably drooling right now. dear god. that is a fast card. i was running an openGL screensaver in the root window at full speed/resolution while i worked and it didn’t even make a noticable dent in performance/responsiveness.