REVIEW: Red Hat Commercial Linux 2.0

There are many reasonably good Linux distributions available now.
I mentioned last month that I have lost confidence in Slackware - it's
still good but doesn't have the features that I need (mainly it's hard
to upgrade and keep up-to-date with Slackware). Recently Slackware
3.0 (including full-ELF support) was released and the comments in the
newsgroups indicate that it has only improved modestly (meaning don't
upgrade to it, but it might be OK for a first-time Linux install).
On the recommendation of no less than one Matt Welsh, I installed Red
Hat Commercial Linux on my home PC. I have tried installing from a disk
partition and remotely by ftp from a machine directly connected to the
Internet. I ran into several installation glitches. I think Red Hat is
a good distribution, but it isn't what this perfectionist was looking for.

I created a 250 Meg partition for Red Hat and downloaded several HOWTOs,
the appropriate boot image (there is an index file that tells what
devices each boot image supports), two ramdisks, the "base" directory
and its contents, and all the files in the RPMS directory that I thought
were necessary. The Red Hat ftp site (I used a mirror) is fairly well
organized and after reading the excellent documentation, I pretty much
knew which files I needed. I really like Red Hat's boot images: they
have a lot, each has minimal driver support compiled in, the index makes
it easy to find the one you need, and they cp the kernel image from floppy
to your harddisk so you can be sure your system will boot properly (not
every distribution does this). The Red Hat installation requires Perl
5.0, which means that two ramdisks are necessary. This is unfortunate
as memory can quickly become an issue. On my 16M home system with lots
of swap space this was not a problem. But when I tried installing Red
Hat on another system with only 8M and no swap partitions, I ran out
of memory. Finally, the base/series file lists the names of all the
necessary packages for the base, networking, X, etc. However the ftp
site has all these files in a single directory, RedHat/RPMS, which made
it VERY annoying to download a minimal system (during my first attempt
I omitted several packages from the base system causing undue hardship).

There were numerous little annoyances involved in getting Red Hat
installed. First, the installation assumes that you're installing from
CD-ROM or ftp and I wasn't. So I had to chose the CD-ROM install option
and once the installation realized that I didn't have a CD, it let me
tell it which partition had the installation packages. Then it assumed
the files were in the "RedHat" directory on that partition and the "mv"
command isn't included on the ramdisks, so I had to reboot into my old
Linux system and rename the directory (I couldn't even use the /bin/mv
from my old Linux system because the ELF-based installation doesn't
support a.out shared libraries - maybe I could have set an environment
variable to tell it where my a.out shared libs were, but I didn't
think of it at the time). Next, the installation asks "Configure Net",
but what they mean is do you want to configure your ethernet card for
the Internet (this causes several cryptic error messages as the system
tries to configure your card). Red Hat has a menu to help you set up
your filesystems. It works a bit like /etc/fstab, but wasn't intuitive
the first time I had to use it. I told it to install several series:
Networking, Development, Mail, and a.out compatibility. A half hour
later, I had a working installation! Well, it took a long time to
download all the files and do the research in preparation for the install
and to solve all the other glitches I've mentioned. But in the end I
had installed 87 packages and 63 Megs in about a half hour.

The system itself is very up-to-date and cleanly laid out. And there are
lots of supplemental packages (I ended up installing over 600 programs
in /usr/bin), including databases, spreadsheets, desktop publishing,
and games. RedHat is the first distribution I've seen that includes
several utilities for manipulating Mac files including binhex! Several
security problems in Slackware seem to be gone (though one never knows
when some new problem will be discovered). I was also pleased that
makewhatis worked without a hitch. I like the rpm tool. It lets one
query installed packages --- quite useful. They have included everything
AND the kitchen sink. Red Hat's Xconfigurator tool is very good and gave
me nearly the same XF86Config file as the one I rolled by hand so long
ago --- this will be a real boon to new users. This distribution is
sure to please those who need a complete, full-featured distribution.
Overall, the system works "out of the box" with relatively little
configuration necessary.

I have found several "little bugs" in the system. First, it makes
no sense to me that xxgdb is the only program placed in /usr/local.
The lilo User's Guide seems to be missing (if one installs the faq
package, you'll find the Lilo FAQ for version 0.11 - version 0.16 is what
Red Hat uses in the distribution - Arrgh). I would like to have been
able to choose the directory locations for some of the optional packages.
For example, Red Hat has a package for netpbm (a graphics utility suite
that is very useful and used by many other packages), but putting all this
stuff in /usr/bin was not my idea of organization. I would have put it
in /usr/local or /usr/local/netpbm (since it includes over 150 programs
which now clutter my /usr/bin). I noticed that the man page for diff(1)
is missing. Although Red Hat does include all the info system files I
want, it doesn't give an example "dir" file (I will have to roll my own).
It would have been nice if they provided a script to generate a dir file
from listings of the contents of /usr/info, /usr/local/info, etc. In Red
Hat's comp.os.linux.announce announcement for version 2.0, they claim
that one can find the ftp site of origin for each package and determine
exactly which changes Red Hat made to the original source to compile
and improve it. Unfortunately, I was unable to use this "feature" -- I
just couldn't figure out how -- it wasn't documented in rpm(1), the Red
Hat Package Manager, which is otherwise very nice and pleasant to use.
Red Hat includes several spiffy X-Tcl based system configuration tools.
They look nice, but I found them to be more bother than they're worth (I
suspect one of them screwed up my system clock). dip(8) doesn't seem to
configure the sl0 interface nor set the routes correctly (fortunately,
I know how to do this manually!). Finally, I find the system V init
package to be a bit too "elaborate" and poorly documented (one has to
read the sh(1) source to puzzle out how everything fits together - very
unpleasant). I still haven't figured out how to get it to automatically
run all the necessary deamons for my SLIP/PPP connection without running
the scripts to configure my (nonexistent) ethernet card. I'd say this
has been my biggest annoyance with this generally good distribution.

In my two years of working with Linux, my standards for a good
distribution keep rising (perhaps faster than the quality of the
distributions themselves!). I started with SLS. Looking back it was
the "dark ages", but I learned a lot and had great fun with it until
I installed Slackware. My needs for Linux have evolved to the point
where Slackware is no longer good enough for me. Red Hat would meet
almost all of those needs, but I'm looking for something more flexible.
I have already begun to download debian. Next month I will report on my
experiences working with it. All in all, I find Red Hat to be a complete,
well-maintained distribution of Linux.

UNIX SIG

Next Month's topic:  Debian Linux