[NTLUG:Discuss] Redhat9 - hostid doesn't work

[Tom Adelstein]

This is an interesting thread. I haven't had these problems with RH9. 
I've installed it on about 3 dozen servers and workstations. The City 
off Houston just upgraded to RH9 from 7.2 and they don't report problems.

I don't have problems with GRUB. If I wanted to dual boot in the past, I 
had to manually add other OSes on my HD by editing grub.conf but not so 
with RH9. So, I can not relate to booting problems unless they are user 
errors in partitioning. RH9 comes with ext2 & ext3 - so if you're 
wanting ReiserFS I wouldn't use RH.

RH isn't a techie distribution. If you're going to build most of your 
system and manually do swapon, etc. RH isn't designed for that. It's 
really for the guys who have MCSE's CNE's, etc. and didn't have to 
install slackware 2, etc.

Some things I noticed:

1. Multimedia - you can play whatever you want, RH just makes the user 
choose the tools. That's to protect RH. I think that's the smart thing.

2. UTF 8 local. This is fixed with updates. RedHat had problems with 
fonts (man page problems) those are gone. If you use OpenOffice, RH 
configured the fonts and they work.

3. Native POSIX threads. I believe this is the first RH to support NPTL 
and it interferes with many things. Turn it off. users can do an "export 
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=kernel-version"

or system wide by sticking nosysinfo at the end of the kernel load line 
in the bootloader. Check the release notes.

Some bad news. RedHat has saved all the best stuff for money. They don't 
provide a free ride.

The way I got my RH9 systems running has cost $60 each per year per box. 
I buy entitlements. I also buy the Professional Version. I get it on 
eBay and it costs me much less than in a store.

If you just download the CD ISO's you get the equivalent of a RH 5.0 
quality control distribution. Things are broken. I recently installed 
RH9 on a system and after rhn-register, it took as long to do the 
updates as the original install.

In March, I had to upgrade the day after the product release and I have 
rights to pre-public releases. The iso's were released and already had 
patches.

Personally, I like RH for customers. Given a choice, I use Gentoo, 
Slackware or hack of Debian for my own desktop. Our website is slackware 
hacked by Phil Howard. That's my personal preference.

If you have multiple machines and you plan to create your own grid at 
home, the IBM GridToolBox requires RH 7.2. For a server, it's fine and 
still upgrades to the most current kernel.



fredjame at concentric.net wrote:
> I understand the frustration, and not to be a "one trick poney", but did 
> you try the boot floppy - assuming the DL380 has a floppy drive.  
> Honestly, I have had good experience with the floppy solving this type 
> of problem, though I am not sure why that should be so.  Of course, my 
> answer to RH9 (assuming that is what we are still talking about) was 
> Mandrake 9.1 - a very good choice for me (YMMV).  Hope this helps.
> 
> Chris Cox wrote:
> 
>> fredjame wrote:
>> ...
>>
>>> Beginning with RH9 (I skipped from 7.3 to 9, so I have never tried 
>>> 8.x) I am fan of Mandrake (editorial note: of Mandrake, I have only 
>>> tried 9.1).
>>> However, as to failing to boot an install from CD - my experience is 
>>> this is fixed by making a floppy from the boot.img file on the CD, 
>>> and booting from the floppy - not going to work on a system that 
>>> doesn't have a floppy drive, of course.
>>
>>
>>
>> The problem isn't in booting, the DL380 boots the CD fine... then
>> when it says what do you want to install from... it says it cannot
>> find a CDROM device (strange when you realize that it boots
>> off of the CD just fine).
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>