Recently in Red Hat/Fedora Category

I feel like I'm booting children off a train.

Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it.

But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so.

But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

After fighting with Debian Lenny for months over the Gateway's screen-refresh problems (which basically render much of that screen unreadable after a half-hour or so of use), I finally decided that I couldn't stick with the Testing branch of my favorite Linux distro on its road to becoming Stable. While many other problems cropped up and were mowed down either by me or the Debian Project itself, this last issue just wouldn't go away. And since I see not even one other person with this same problem, I fear the issue will never be resolved. I don't even know which package to file a bug against.

Remember when I thought I fixed my random-screen-freeze problem on this same laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS? I thought that turning off automatic suspend in GNOME fixed the problem.

That didn't work. I still have random freezes. And I can't really blame it on the power plug because I've been in conditions where that plug does not move, and moreover these freezes never happened in Debian (when my screen image was not totally disintegrating, that is).

I was trying to get some pre-election work done on http://www.dailynews.com, and when I found that I didn't have the Java runtime installed (and needed it), I moved over to Ubuntu 8.04. In a half-hour, I had three unrecoverable crashes.

Again, I haven't heard of this happening to anybody but me.

I have TWO surplus laptops waiting in the wings. I'll see if any of them perform as well as or better than this Gateway. But whatever happens with those two machines, the Gateway will remain in service.

Once I decided to let go of Debian Lenny, I thought I would try Fedora 9, but when the live CD wouldn't let me install it, I turned to CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux — instead.

I first booted the live CD, then used the live CD to do a network install (NOT from the live environment but as a boot option). Once I determined that an http install wouldn't work but an ftp install would, I was off and running.

I've been testing CentOS 5.2 for about a week now. I've been slowly solving problems (adding things like Pidgin and Flash), and at this point I can say that CentOS 5.2 boots quickly, seems as snappy on this hardware as Ubuntu or Debian and runs extremely well.

I have yet to see a bug, and it has never crashed.

I have a full review and how-to for CentOS 5.2 in the works.

I hadn't anticipated replacing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I've had trouble with Ubuntu on this laptop since 7.04, and I've gone back and forth with it. Until I pulled it last week, I always had either Debian Etch or Lenny running on it. I've run Puppy 3.01 from live CD and the Slackware-based Wolvix Hunter — both with few problems.

The 2.6.18 kernel in CentOS 5 has always run better than any other on the Gateway. Other distros that share this kernel (albeit in slightly different versions) include PCLinuxOS 2007 and Debian Lenny.

And with support for RHEL/CentOS 5 slated to last a very, very long time, the fact that it runs so exceedingly well on this hardware gives me a true long-term solution.

I suspect that if I rolled the older Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — which has a little over seven months of support left before it EOLs — onto this laptop, it would run flawlessly. But it's packages are even older than Debian Etch's ...

As it stands right now, I'm going to stick with CentOS 5.2, and as much as I don't want to do it, I need to drop Ubuntu 8.04. I love Ubuntu — its philosophy and package mix, if not its brown color scheme. But I can't deal with the random freezes (after which ctrl-alt-backspace and ctrl-alt-delete are useless and only a hard reboot will work).

Aside from the screen-refresh problem, Debian Lenny was doing great. It improves on Etch in many, many ways.

I could see myself returning to Etch, which will have a full year of support as Debian's Old Stable distribution once Lenny is declared stable.

Whether I continue using this laptop or not, it has to run my daughter's educational games (GCompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay), and it has to be as stable as possible.

With Etch on the Gateway, I had trouble with the Alps touchpad, but since those problems were so easily solved in CentOS 5.2, perhaps I've learned enough to figure them out in Etch, where in addition to the touchpad-tapping issue the speed differences between the touchpad and a plugged-in USB mouse were more than a little incovenient.

I remember PCLinuxOS running as well as anything during the week or so I used it. I wonder how much support is left for the 2007 edition of that distro. The hype over PCLinuxOS has really slowed down over the past year, but I still think it's a very solid distro (based on Mandriva but with Debian-style apt and Synaptic package tools).

I've had trouble with X in Slackware on this platform, never seeming to get xorg.conf right, although Slack-based Wolvix runs perfectly for some reason. Slackware-based ZenWalk has all the packages I need and during the brief times I've run it has show itself to be extremely fast.

And since I'm running with separate /home partitions for both distros on this PC, switching those distros in and out should be less traumatic than in the past.

Even though I've taken great pains, after the fact (when it's harder to reconcile), to keep my user accounts' UID and GID numbers in Debian- and Red Hat- based distros compatible, I will probably dual-boot Fedora and CentOS for a while just to see how they match up on this hardware.

Depending on how things go with CentOS 5.2, I could eventually simplify things and do the unthinkable: not dual-boot anything.

CentOS seems terribly boring. But ever since Red Hat rolled a bunch of newer apps into its RHEL 5.2 (the base for CentOS), including Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 2.3, I've seen it as a very real alternative for the desktop.

And I neither expected it to run so well or for Debian and Ubuntu to run so comparatively poorly on this specific hunk of hardware.

If I had 10 test machines and Debian or Ubuntu ran flawlessly on them, I would be telling a different story, but from the perspective of this 6-year-old Gateway, RHEL/CentOS is pulling way out in front.

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released.

Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

I first tried the live CD on my Dell desktop. It booted, but not after the usual Fedora disc access errors, which take up a minute of time before the disc boots and then seem to have no effect whatsoever on subsequent loading and performance of the OS and applications.

Fedora 9 loaded, I configured the network and then ran the system for awhile on the Dell.

Then I needed to prepare the Gateway. I plan to keep Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on the laptop, so that part of the installation was going to stay exactly as is.

Before wiping Debian off the drive, I rsynced the Lenny /home files to Ubuntu's /home partition. (I did forget to archive my Puppy 3.01 configuration, which I'm not happy about losing.)

Previously I had Ubuntu set up to have its own separate /home partition on the extended partition. Debian, however, had the root and /home directories on the same partition.

This time I wanted each GNU/Linux distribution to have their own separate /home partitions.

Here's how I divided up the 30 GB hard drive:

I started with a 1 GB swap partition on hda1. Then came Ubuntu's root partition on hda2 and space for a Fedora root partition on hda3, about 10 GB each.

The rest of the drive was configured as extended partition hda4. On that extended partition, Ubuntu's /home directory was living on hda6, and that left hda5 for Fedora's /home directory.

This way, if any of these two distros needs to be replaced, the /home partitions should remain intact and can be used as /home for any other Linux distros that could potentially take their place.

I also planned to keep Ubuntu's GRUB bootloader on the master boot record with a stanza in its menu.lst chainloading to a second GRUB (or LILO or ...) located on the secondary distro's root partition. I've found that setting the bootloaders up this way solves all problems with menu.lst updating when new kernels roll through the two distros on the drive.

Before I began, I downloaded a new Fedora 9 ISO and burned a new disc. I booted the new disc on the Gateway, and while I got the same errors early in the boot sequence on the Gateway as I did on the Dell, the disc did load, and I was in the GNOME desktop in fairly good time.

After checking out Fedora for awhile in the live environment, I was ready to install.

I always like live CDs that allow you to install while in the live environment. It's one of the things that makes distros like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so successful. You can try the distro with a live CD and if the hardware responds even halfway well, install right then and there.

I clicked Fedora 9's "Install Fedora to disc" icon.

Nothing happened. I clicked again. And again. Still nothing.

I rebooted the live CD and tried to install again. It wasn't working.

At this point I could've begun downloading the install images and burning them to disc, but I didn't.

I liked the fact that Fedora has a fairly deep repository that included most of the applications I wanted. I wasn't crazy about needing to upgrade every six months — especially upon seeing the Fedora Project's recommendation that you do a full install instead of the kinds of upgrades you're encouraged to do in Debian and Ubuntu (as in changing your sources.list and update/dist-upgrade).

And I don't know whether it was my hardware that refused to install Fedora from the live CD, or a glitch that affected every user of the live image, but I was ready to move on.

Wiping Debian Lenny from the drive was a big step, since I'd been running the distro for well over six months on the laptop and had grown quite fond of its many improvements over Etch. But my X configuration's refusal to cease slowly degrading during every computing session made it easy to run Ubuntu more as well as consider jumping back into distro-hopping mode for a secondary system.

At this point, it's all about having a reliable pair of distros on the laptop that each allow me to get work done without causing problems.

Coming up next: Now that Debian Lenny was gone and Fedora wouldn't install, I turned my attentions to CentOS 5. I had done a couple of successful CentOS 3 installs on a different system, and ever since Red Hat shook up its Enterprise Linux with newer packages and a greater emphasis on the desktop experience with version 5.2, I had been eager to see how it played out in CentOS's 5.2 clone of RHEL.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf.

I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

I'm already running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on this system, and I've been thinking about what to do for the second distro. I'd go back to Debian Etch, but I had problems with the speed of the USB-connected mouse vs. the Alps touchpad, plus problems controlling the touchpad on its own.

In Lenny, the problems I've dealt with (and mostly solved) over the past six or more months have included suddenly disappearing sound (fixed with manually installed ESS Allegro modules), and an Epiphany browser that would always start in offline mode (fixed with a modification to Gconf2, if I have the name of the app right).

Nothing major — and nothing that couldn't be fixed with some help from either the bug reports themselves or other helpful people on the Web.

But this screen-refresh problem persists. I keep hoping that a routine software upgrade will take care of it, but that hasn't happened in countless xorg, driver and kernel updates. I don't think it's going to happen, either.

If you're running something that's very popular that catches the attention of developers (like the Asus Eee PC), chances are good that issues will be resolved. But I can't imagine any developers anywhere are paying any attention whatsoever to my 2002-era Gateway laptop. I'm no C hacker, so there's nothing much I can do, either.

I love Debian. I'm running two newish Etch installs right now (one PowerPC, one i386), and I could very well add a third with my $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), or even more to a couple of testing desktops I have waiting in the wings. Whenever Lenny goes Stable, Etch will have another year's worth of patches as Old Stable before it reaches its end of life.

Etch has been great, and Lenny has made dozens of improvements. But this one regression has made it very hard to keep my favorite distro on my main laptop.

So I have been thinking for months about what to do, all the while hoping that I could fix the X problem in Lenny.

First of all, I need to rewire the power supply plug. I think that is what is responsible for my intermittent freezes in Ubuntu (which don't seem to happen in Lenny, for reasons unknown). When I have the laptop on a desk, it never freezes, but when it's on my actual lap, as it was when I was trying to work on last-minute election programming yesterday morning, those freezes can really throw me off. I moved over to Debian, but I needed the Java runtime, didn't have it installed and didn't have the time to do that.

And then there's the video issue.

So I've been thinking, what should I install in place of Debian Lenny? I'm a big fan of long-term support releases, especially for older hardware, so I strongly considered CentOS 5, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But the relative lack of consumer-oriented software had me worried. I could add the Dag Wieers repositories to deal with that issue, but even that repository doesn't cover everything I need.

Mandriva is also on the table, as is one of my favorite distros, Wolvix. The Slackware 11-based Wolvix is due for a new version soon. While its package mix addresses most of my issues, there are a few things that I can't easily find for it. And I worry in Wolvix's case (as well as Slackware's in general) about how long the kernel goes without getting patched.

I almost never see new kernels for older Slackware releases. I don't know if that's because they are unnecessary, but with patched kernels rolling into Debian and Ubuntu fairly regularly, I wonder why Slackware does things differently.

I'd run "regular" Slackware, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting X configured, and I'd rather use GNOME than KDE. I know there are GNOME projects for Slackware, but what I'm trying to do is install something that works well, comes together easily and has lots of available packages.

Given all the Mandriva fans on LXer, I considered it. I've used the Mandriva-derived PCLinuxOS and thought highly of it — and I may in fact go that way. The 2.6.18 kernel in PCLinuxOS 2007 (Debian Etch is also built on that kernel) is perhaps the best ever for the Gateway in that it controls the CPU fan with no intervention. The intervention needed in other kernels is slight (a single line in /etc/rc.local usually does it), but it's nice to have it done automatically.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of KDE, and I find that distros that are either KDE- or GNOME-centric tend to treat the other desktop environment as something of a second-class citizen.

I've had Fedora in the back of my mind for a while. Seeing all the packages available is very encouraging. And the Fedora community looks like a very good resource in terms of getting things working. I imagine that quite a bit of RHEL information would apply to Fedora as well, giving the distro an even deeper bench.

I'm not crazy about the length of support for a given Fedora release, which looks to be 12 to 13 months. I'd feel better with the 18 months that Ubuntu's non-LTS releases get, or even a full 2 years. Compromising on length of support is something I'm willing to do at this time for something that potentially gives me all the packages I want and that runs well besides.

As far as the availability of packages goes, Fedora acquits itself well. I have run it from the live CD before, and it seemed to do well on the Gateway.

In a slightly related matter, my install of Fedora 9 on my Power Mac G4/466 didn't go so well. The X configuration was horrible, and the distro ran much slower than Debian Etch on the same hardware. And Debian did a perfect X configuration for the internal graphics card and huge LaCie electron22blue monitor. Sure I could've used the information from the xorg.conf in Debian to properly modify the same config file in Fedora, but with such a performance hit, it didn't seem worth it.

Since the 1.3 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM in the Gateway offers much more power than the 466 MHz and 384 MB in the G4, Fedora seems to run fine on the faster machine.

And now that I have the Ubuntu LTS as my main distro (and hopefully a trouble-free one once I replace that shaky power plug), it's time to try something else.

First I need to keep copies of the xorg.conf, my CPU-fan script and rc.local from Debian Lenny in case I do a reinstall. Then I need to back up the /home files and consider adding a separate /home partition for the secondary distro (Ubuntu already has a separate /home partition).

Again, I'm not happy about the 13-month life cycle of any given Fedora release, and I really don't need a cutting-edge kernel for my not-cutting-edge hardware (unless, of course, it makes a cheap wireless adapter work), but with /home on its own partition, and Fedora installing GRUB on the root partition instead of the master boot record, with the GRUB on the MBR chainloading to the Fedora partition, it shouldn't be hard to roll Fedora out and something else in.

I could change my mind ... or not.

Update: OpenSUSE offers about two years of support per release, and that is enough to get me interested.

I'm downloading new OpenSUSE 11 and Fedora 9 ISOs now, and I'll burn them in the morning.

Every time I write about wanting to use CentOS — the free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux &mash; but don't know where to find the many desktop applications not maintained by Red Hat, somebody suggests that I use the Dag Wieers repositories.

I have been looking, and there indeed is quite a bit of software that Mr. Wieers, himself a developer for CentOS, has compiled into RPM packages. Things that aren't easy to find in CentOS, like the video-editing app Cinelerra and the Geany text editor, are right there.

I found it interesting that Wieers suggests Debian's apt package manager on your RH/CentOS system because of the way it handles dependencies.

I found it interesting to read this Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols post about Wikipedia moving its servers from a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

It's hard to see exactly why they didn't opt for the free CentOS version of RHEL, so it's not just about the distro being free and having long-term support.

Some say it's the easier upgrade path for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, the difference in package management between apt-based Debian-like systems and RPM/Yum-based Red Hat-like systems.

Whatever the reason, it's a big win for Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical. I've never really thought of Ubuntu as a server OS because they seem to be all about the desktop experience, and I figure that Debian is a way more popular choice on the server.

But there must be something (or a combination of somethings) from an operational standpoint, whether it be installation and maintenance, long-term support, hardware compatibility, remote/automated management options, reliability or performance that is driving a company/entity like Wikipedia to adopt Ubuntu on the server.

Note: I found out through Matt Asay's post on this subject, where the comments include a response from Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, where he sort of clarifies the fact that Wikipedia/Wikimedia never used the paid-for, supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux but instead was using old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux. (Actually, the commenter before Vibber says that Wikimedia used RHL instead of RHEL, and Vibber only says that his company was "never, at any time, a customer of Red Hat."

In a word: yikes. That's old code. But it's good to see that it still works.

And for clarity's sake, here's The Register's article on the subject, which makes somewhat clear the use of RHL, and why Wikimedia is choosing Ubuntu's LTS distribution:

Wikimedia has 350 servers today supporting its operations and fewer than 20 desktops, with the exception of a couple of servers still running a Red Hat Linux and a Windows desktop machine that is used to run QuickBooks to do the accounting for the foundation.

All remaining servers and many desktops are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. All future servers will be setup with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Wikimedia intends to push that LTS-only idea to the limit by not changing Linuxes unless it has to.

It's been a little while since my last report on how Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has been doing on the $0 Laptop.

In short, all continues to go very, very well. At this point I could see ratcheting down my use of Debian on this machine and pretty much devoting it to Ubuntu all the way.

Why? Everything in Ubuntu works with as little effort as possible.

I have made some strides in getting Debian Lenny working better on the Gateway Solo 1450. I got sound to return by installing the ALSA modules myself. I'm having a problem with the upper GNOME panel looking a bit funky at times, with graphical "ghosting" marring its appearance. It's not a deal-breaker, but it also doesn't happen in any other distro.

And again, Ubuntu just does what it's supposed to do.

I still haven't conquered suspend-resume in any other distro. In Ubuntu, that just worked.

If for some miraculous reason suspend/resume works in CentOS/RHEL 5.2, I'll re-evaluate things, but a test of 5.1 today confirmed that it does not work out of the box. And I tried to install 5.2 on a free partition with the super-small network installer, which hung up early in the process. I bailed out of it and figured I'd forget about the whole thing until the CentOS 5.2 live CD image is released.

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here.

I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Here are the release notes from the CentOS team.

There are DVDs, CDs and a 7.7MB netinstall image. No live CD yet, but that will be coming soon enough, I figure.

For the past few CentOS releases, I've been trying the live CD just to see what kind of hardware detection I can get on my various PCs. I'll be anxious to give 5.2 a spin because Red Hat is promising better support for laptops.

Already CentOS/Red Hat 5.0 has been pretty good on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. Not so good as to bump Ubuntu or Debian off of it, but good nonetheless.

And Fedora 9 didn't suspend/resume it. So it doesn't look good for CentOS/RHEL 5.2, but I will still give it a try.

One thing that's new about RHEL is that Red Hat has pledged four years of "intensive" support, up from three, followed by what appears to be three years of less-"intensive" support, but support nonetheless.

So you can count on seven years of security patches on any Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and that means CentOS will do the same.

Previously in Click:

• Red Hat's desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?
• Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS
• CentOS 5.2 almost here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — a way bigger deal than you might think

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It's just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is.

I think Red Hat knows this. And it's OK with it.

One day Red Hat bigwigs are saying that they are not interested in aggressively pursuing the Linux desktop market, that Ubuntu has much of it sewn up, and why do it anyway when all the money is in servers and the support Red Hat so richly provides to those who want it?

Good question.

But I see a strategy in there somewhere. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, late of Ziff Davis, now writing just about everywhere else, including his own Practical Technology, has met recently with a bunch of Red Hatters. In SJVN's recent post, the Red Hat people still push Fedora, the community distribution that serves as a testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, but the company is sometimes not-so-quietly working on making its flagship RHEL product a better fit for the desktop — and laptops, too. And Red Hat does see a niche for RHEL apart from the server:

What Red Hat is working on is continuing to make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) business desktop friendly. Whitehurst said many business customers want the Linux desktop. They don't want to move their desktops lock, stock, and barrel to RHEL, or any other Linux desktop. What Fortune 500 companies do want though is to start moving up to 25% of their desktops to Linux.

Why? Because they want the benefits of Linux. Besides the usual advantages of improved TCO (total cost of ownership) and improved security, Red Hat's corporate customers want a Linux desktop that can be carried as a virtual machine on a USB key and can be be managed by Red Hat's management tools. Is this for someone who wants a Windows XP Home replacement? No. It's not. It is, however, something that can catch the attention of CIOs who want a Windows XP Pro replacement.

And who can resist SJVN's money quote from Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst?:

"There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"

It's a riddle, right?

OK, forget about all of that. Just read Red Hat's own press release for RHEL 5.2, which not only talks up all the work they're doing to make suspend/resume work but highlighting the inclusion of desktop applications that aren't a generation too old for office use. I'm talking about OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, the latter of which just had its final release this week.

Here are a few quotes from the RHEL 5.2 press release:

"We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2," said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coodinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. "Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms."

"LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops," said Werner Schmidt, LVM's CIO. "We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months."

The key in all of this is the corporate/enterprise connection, the idea not of wholly changing desktop platforms but bringing needed diversity to the desktop with Linux where appropriate, and leveraging the whole Red Hat relationship with server customers to solve problems on the desktop while adding incremental revenue and giving those customers even more reasons to stick with — and continue paying for — Red Hat.

And all those management tools, most of which I know nothing about, that Red Hat offers to keep servers in line and up to date — all that stuff can also make desktop management a more orderly procedure than the absolute mess that's going on now with Joe Worker's desktop PC.

Not that Ubuntu isn't also working on corporate, managed solutions for desktop PC management, but when it comes to paying for support, Ubuntu doesn't seem to be offering any deep discounts over what Red Hat is charging. And if a huge enterprise already has a lot of Red Hat on the premises, a little more doesn't hurt, right?

And there's another side to this valuable coin: While Ubuntu is mainly thought of as a desktop system, it's no secret at all that parent company Canonical is making a huge push into servers, with certifications coming for use on hardware from any number of vendors, commitments of long-term support and the same kind of sysadmin-helping tools that help leverage things for Red Hat.

So if Ubuntu is leveraging its desktop success to build a potentially lucrative server business, Red Hat needs to expand its own desktop commitment to keep and grow the already lucrative server market it currently dominates.

Who wins?

Damn near everybody, I figure. More competition means better products, most of which can be had for free. Remember, if you don't want to pay for Red Hat, there's always Fedora, or the RHEL clones put together by CentOS and Scientific Linux. And if you're deploying Ubuntu in an enterprise situation, you can pay Canonical, or leverage the substantial Ubuntu community to solve problems.

And while some of us can't imagine paying thousands of dollars a year for support on a server, that kind of thing starts to make sense in the enterprise when you weigh it with your own labor costs.

It's an equation that has worked in Red Hat's favor for a long time. And a few extra variables in said equation are just part of the game.

Today's rumor, which suggests that Oracle may buy Red Hat, or something along those lines, comes from Matt Asay.

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it's nice to have choices.

Dag Wieers shows you how on his blog, which I found via Planet CentOS. (Have you noticed that Planet CentOS is a great place to find out stuff?)

It's all courtesy of a project called APT-RPM.

The best way to follow CentOS news is at Planet CentOS, which is just like Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, only more succinct.

All three of these blog-aggregator sites, which collect posts from developers, package maintainers and others involved in their respective Linux projects are very much worth reading on a regular basis.

But the reason for this post is that CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release, according to Tim Verhoeven:

We are currently in the progress of doing QA testing. All packages have been build. The current plan is to be able to finish all QA test this week so we might be able to release 5.2 next weekend or in the days after it.

While Fedora 9 didn't properly suspend/resume my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, I'm still holding out hope that RHEL/CentOS 5.2 will, since greater laptop compatibility is one of the selling points of this significant new RHEL release.

I call it significant because it is bringing some new, very-much-up-to-date versions of popular applications to RHEL/CentOS. Until now, I think that desktop users of RHEL/CentOS have had to be content with Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.

Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn't even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3.

So while the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it's 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren't relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

Another thing about CentOS: Lately CentOS has been releasing a live CD and a small network installer image in addition to the full set of CDs and DVD.

I plan to grab the live CD as soon as it's available to see how the Gateway likes it.

But what about my VIA C3 Samuel test box? It runs CentOS 3.9 and won't boot anything after that ...

At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great

When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I've ever run.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.

I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.

Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I'm still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.

And I'm open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.

But for now, I'm reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.

I don't know why I'm compelled to continually report on how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is running on the $0 Laptop, but I keep doing it.

From the graphical polish to Suspend/Resume, Alps touchpad control and everything else I've done with it, this is the most impressive Linux distribution I've run thus far.

For use on this laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450 -- it's better than Debian Lenny, my other go-to OS.

Today I tried a live CD of Fedora 9, since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 supposedly has beefed up its support of Suspend/Resume on laptops, I figured that maybe, just maybe, that functionality was present in Fedora 9.

It very well might be, but in the Fedora 9 live environment, Suspend/Resume doesn't work on this laptop.

Moving on to Debian, in the Lenny updates I installed today, there was a new kernel among them. I booted into it after the update, and the new 2.6.24 kernel still doesn't support the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip on the Gateway.

In order to have working sound, I'm still using the original Lenny 2.6.22 kernel, which does support the chip. I do understand that I can manually add the module I need to support sound in the new kernel, but I'm waiting to see if and when Debian decides that it would like a certain number of its users to enjoy sound. Until then, I'll stick with 2.6.22.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS supports sound just fine on the laptop, even with a 2.6.24 kernel. Score another one for Ubuntu. If the binary blob in the kernel for the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip were the only such blob left in the kernel as configured by Debian, then I'd understand its sudden exclusion from the distribution, but I have a very good feeling that this is not the case.

I will consider adding the sound modules myself, as detailed in one of the relevant bug reports, but I'll more than likely turn to Ubuntu for the simple reason that it just runs better. And this is coming from a person who has championed Debian quite a bit. (As an aside, I love bug reports that give you a fix for the problem that often works but leaves the bug intact to a) annoy some users and b) drive others away.)

I've thought about it quite a bit. If you're running a standard desktop computer, it's easy to make just about any Linux distribution work well, if it will work at all. You're not often worrying about unsupported touchpads, uncontrolled CPU fans, flaky or nonexistant Suspend/Resume, other power-management issues and the like. I can run Debian Etch with carefree abandon on some of my desktop systems, but getting Etch to work well with an Alps Touchpad is just not in the cards ... or maybe it is, since I found some new suggestions for configuring xorg.conf to make the Alps perform better. But since I've made the move to Lenny, I'm probably not going back to Etch on that system, even though the sound-chip issue continues to piss me off.

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL).

The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

When it comes to the up-to-date applications, RHEL purposefully stays behind the curve so as not to break anything, especially on servers. But for desktop users, having to run Firefox 1.5 for-freakin'-ever is a bit of a bummer. Same for OpenOffice; the version I last used (probably in CentOS 4) didn't even have ODF compatibility.

Users of RHEL 5.2 will enjoy the following newish applications:

• Evolution 2.12.3
• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice 2.3.0
• Thunderbird 2.0

This is one of the parts of the release that makes me eager to try RHEL 5.2:

We also significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow us to certify more laptop systems.

Also, many graphics drivers where updated, including a backport of the "intel" graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Bottom line: These improvements make RHEL/CentOS much more attractive on the desktop (and especially for laptop users).

Could this mean a greater push from Red Hat on the desktop, even though the company has stated recently that it will not focus on that very market?

I say yes.

Red Hat 5.0 (OK, in my case the free CentOS 5.0) runs pretty damn well on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), except that Suspend/Resume doesn't work ... and if it did, I would be very happy about it.

The Red Hat release didn't mention the fact that RHEL didn't suffer from the same OpenSSH vulnerability that has affected Debian-derived Linux distros, but the CentOS team does point it out while also telling CentOS users to check suspect keys from users of Debian-based systems that have had SSH contact with your RHEL/CentOS box.

Note: I originally wrote this post on 2/15/08. Today is 4/24/08. Since that time, I've looked into updating in the BSDs a bit further. In FreeBSD, it's certainly possible to update both ports and packages.

Anyway, here is the "original" 2/15/08 entry:

While it's pretty easy to install software from precompiled packages or from ports in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, I've hit a bit of a wall when it comes to keeping any of these systems up to date with periodic security and bug patches.

I don't know if such updates are either not as necessary in the BSDs, even though my Linux boxes have a dozen or so of them every week, or that it's just to hard to do for the average BSD user.

I see plenty of Web help on how to upgrade from one version of a BSD to another, but I don't see anything that covers searching for periodically updated packages and updating an installation on, lets say, a weekly basis as security and bug problems arise and are presumably updated in the repositories of packages and ports.

O, BSD users, correct me if I'm wrong -- and I do hope that I am wrong. But with apt/Aptitude/Synaptic in Debian-based Linux distributions, rpm/Yum in Red Hat- and Suse-style systems, and upgradepkg (and slapt-get/Gslapt) in Slackware (with security announcements going to the mailing list and the www.slackware.com/security page) ... need I go on?

The point is that almost all Linux installations are easily upgraded with precompiled binary packages. Gentoo ... well, I won't go there because I know it has its own BSD-like ports system, but I've never used it and don't know how it works.

Again, the point is that all of these Linux distributions have me conditioned to expect -- and to install -- updates on a regular basis.

But what do I do with BSD? In OpenBSD, for instance, I've never even downloaded the ports tree. Everything I've installed has been a precompiled binary package for the i386 architecture. It's very slick, works perfectly ... but am I exposing myself to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of the newer 2.0.0.12? Is all that extra OpenBSD security for nought if I'm running applications rife with security holes?

I'm being completely serious. Is there something I'm missing here? Since OpenBSD, at least, updates the whole system every six months, am I OK to keep the same packages running until the next release? What does this say about BSD vs. Linux when it comes to security and bugs?

But wait. I did run DesktopBSD for awhile, and I remember that system having a GUI package manager that not only fetched new packages but upgraded those already installed.

So that's what Matt Olander was talking about when he said that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD were working together to share technology when it came to package management.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't need to do my updates in a GUI app. I'm perfectly OK with using the console. Just being able to do that updating is enough. That is, unless someone out there can convince me that Linux has conditioned me to think I need something that I really don't.

Those on all sides of this issue, please enlighten me -- and quickly.