-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 i had to (unexpectedly) update a rather old Red Hat system (running 6.2!) today... decided to install FC2 to see how it went, 2.6 kernel and all =)
Hardware: 500Mhz PII, 128MB RAM installation was the usual simplicity, though it never did ask me to set up any users besides root (so i did that on reboot). i chose to do a Custom install, and selected the "Minimal install" option from the packages selection. it installed a little over 500MB of packages. 200MB+ was their glibc package (which includes all the locales.....), the kernal was 100MB+, Perl was another 32MB, etc ... compared to pretty much ALL the other distros out there that i've used, this is HUGE for a "minimal install". as a data point: SUSE is ~100MB. Mandrake comes the closest with ~350MB IIRC. but even Mandrake is lighter. oh well. at least it didn't install many unecessary packages (NFS and portmap were the primary offenders), and installed exactly 0 servers, extra tools, etc... so, despite the size, the minimal install is nice and minimal ... not even xinetd =) minimal also means "no X", but it STILL defaults to runlevel 5 and tries to run an X display manager (graphical login) which, of course, fails. oops! quick edit to /etc/inittab fixed that. still, kind of sloppy. the choice of file systems was also rather minimal: ext2, ext3. that's it. setting up LVM and RAID are quite easy, even if their graphical partition tool is the worst in the industry: it's SLOOOOW, needs a LOT of usability work and does odd things at times (like resizing partitions for you by a MB or three if you do certain things... even though those things shouldn't affect other partitions in the least). otherwise it was pretty boring. all hardware detected and set up properly (including the scroll mouse ;), everything installed properly, and it only took about 2 hours to restore the system from data and config back ups and everything just worked. well... almost. cvs didn't come with ANYthing set up to run a CVS server. i grabbed an xinetd config file for CVS off the net (thanks google!), but otherwise that was another uneventful checklist item. they also still install sendmail by default instead of postfix. *sigh* and installing postfix doesn't uninstall sendmail, even when doing it through yum. *double sigh* also, when uninstalling portmap via yum it messed up and while it removed the files, failed the clean up script (which seems broken) and therefore left the entry in the RPM db even though it doesn't actually exist on disc anymore. speaking of yum... it's probably the best thing in Fedora over older Red Hat releases. for those not familiar with it, yum is Fedora's answer to apt-get, urpmi, etc... it's a network-aware package installer that takes care of finding packages, installing them (including dependency resolution) and managing them ... finally, even Red Hat doesn't suffer from RPM dependency-installation hell and can take advantage of networked, media-less install sources. this also means that when you install a package, you always get the newest available version and updating your system (think: security patches) is a single command. this is all ho-hum, yawn-yawn for those using other Linux OSes, but for Red Hatters it's a "FINALLY!" only one problem. yum is amazingly slow. i used to think YAST was slow. then i met yum. and even worse: yum is a resource HOG. it wasn't unusual for YUM to take 80-100MB while installing a package! that's INSANE! there's a LOT of optimization to be done with YUM, obviously. it feels very much like early 1.0 software: it does every step (such as checking for new headers) even when it shouldn't need to (despite the -C flag being used), and it seems to slurp in a LOT of irrelevant data. you can make it ignore packages by name (and by type glob) which one might think would help (it doesn't), but it doesn't come anywhere near what distros like Gentoo have with USE flags. anyways... all in all, FC2 is a decent distro. it's a wee bit rough around the edges (Red Hat's QA team hasn't been over it thoroughly yet), it's not a newby-friendly distro, lacks in some options (no ReiserFS, XFS, JFS?) but it seems to be production ready and, at least as an X-less server, fairly well put together. - -- Aaron J. Seigo GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 while (!horse()); cart(); -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAr/w21rcusafx20MRAo54AJ91kz8qB64IChNErDniCDOgAfaFlwCgpdnN vFSpKfJ2tefpY56pmjwphws= =1url -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
