[TriLUG] Red Hat 7.2 beta report

[John Matthews]

After some crazy weirdness with my cable modem suddenly deciding not to
talk to my FreeBSD 486 firewall, I decided to put my main Linux box on
the network as the firewall temporarily. I backed up /home to a CD-R and
tried out the new Red Hat 7.2 beta. I grabbed the ISO images, burned
them, and installed.

I chose to use ext3 partitions and grub for my boot loader; the new
graphical boot loader is very nice. The total install size was huge
(like 1.8G or so) but it includes just about everything I had on my
fairly current 7.1 box. One program that seemed unusually old, like
Abiword (at 0.7, I think), but Mozilla 0.9.2 was included, so it seems
that we're finally past the days of using 0.7 (or whatever it was in
7.0-7.1). Sound was configured out of the box and X was set up nicely,
although without DRI functionality (using a Radeon 64Mb DDR). The
firewall also seems to be easy to set up, and assuming that I didn't do
something boneheaded, it will withstand the hostile outside world as
seen through my cable modem all day today. Oh, and I was excited to see
gcc 3.0 included, although I wish it were the default compiler already.
:^) Not that I have any compelling reasons...just the usual Linux user
"gotta have the newest version" mania.

After I burned the install discs, I had mounted the second disc on my
secondary CD drive as a cursory test that it wasn't a complete coaster.
I forgot it was in there, and booted up off the first disc in the
primary CD drive. I configured everything and started the installing of
packages and went in the other room to play some Twisted Metal: Black on
my PS2. When I came back, the whole install was done already! Since it
had said it was installing 1.8G of data, I figured it had really fscked
up, but then I realized that it had seen the second install CD in the
secondary drive and automatically switched to installing packages from
there after it was done with the first CD. Very nice touch, although one
that most people probably won't take advantage of, or even know about.

A couple of gripes...I was disappointed to see that Pan (news reader)
doesn't seem to be the version that includes inline image viewing. (No
comment.) Also, the aforementioned older version of Abiword. And
finally, the GAIM that was installed seemed to be getting kicked off by
AOL for not being an "official" client. The one I had before (compiled
from CVS) seemed to not have this problem and the one at work doesn't
have it either, despite being essentially the same versions. Perhaps
something is broken in a config file and I'm using TOC instead of OSCAR.
Anyway, it was annoying last night, but I was tired and I'll figure out
how to fix it tonight when I get home.

Also tonight I'll need to get Mandy (wife) set back up with KDE. She
seemed to be getting along well with it before this upgrade, so
hopefully things have only gotten better. (I'm a GNOME/Sawfish user.)

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews      \ ph: 919.660.2811                    \ Use        _o) w00t
Duke Univ., Postdoc \ jvmatthe at math.duke.edu              \ GNU/Linux /\\
Dept. of Mathematics \ http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ Today   _\_V