Limbo

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

I received email the other day about another upcoming Red Hat beta, so
I thought I should take a look at the current one to see what's new.

Here's a few quotes from the RELEASE-NOTES file:

   This beta is distributed as 700MB CD images. Attempting to write these
   images to 650MB CD-R/CD-RWs will most likely fail.

I recently set up a few machines with software RAID mirrored drives,
which was a fair bit more difficult than it should have been, so I
appreciated this:

     * There is now a tool in Disk Druid to help create large RAID arrays
       consisting of drives which are identically partitioned. The Clone Tool
       allows you to select a source drive and copy its partitioning scheme
       onto an arbitrary number of other drives in the system.

Here's more partitioning/RAID/etc. stuff:

     * It is now possible to remove all partitions on a drive by selecting
       the drive in the GUI tree view and clicking the Delete button.  You
       will receive a warning if some of the partitions could not be removed
       (due to being members of a RAID device or a LVM Volume Group).Note
       that this option is only available in the GUI installer currently.

     * Logical Volume Management (LVM) configuration is now available during
       installation. Testing this component is much appreciated.

     * The /boot partition cannot be in a logical volume. If the root (/)
       partition is a logical volume, you need to create a separate /boot
       partition, which is not a part of a volume group.

     * You can create and edit volume groups in the graphical installation
       program. In text installation program, you can only assign mount
       points to existing logical volumes.

     * There is kickstart support for using LVM.

So I guess the thing to do if you want to use LVM to mirror a couple
of disks is set up /boot as a old-style mirrored software RAID
partition, then make the rest of each drive one big partition, and
make the two partitions into a volume group.

I'm going to have to try this on a spare box...

Here's a nice one.  (No more floppies!)

     * It is now possible to perform a network installation after booting
       from the CD. You will need to type linux askmethod at the boot: prompt
       to be prompted for the install source when booting from CD.

They've removed Netscape (good riddance), XFree86 3.3.6, and a whole
bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily understand...  Here's the
whole list they give:

    alien blt dip fvwm2 ee elm extace gnomeicu gnome-pim gnorpm ical
    jikes kaffe metamail micq netscape playmidi rxvt sliplogin
    snavigator taper xbill xdaliclock xlockmore xmailbox xpilot

Here's some interesting stuff about RPM:

     * The RPM Package Manager (RPM) verifies digital signatures when reading
       packages during installation. In order to verify signatures for
       packages after installation, the package's public key must be imported
       into the rpm database. For example, to import the Red Hat public key,
       type the following as root at a shell prompt:

       rpm --import /usr/share/doc/rpm-<version>/RPM-GPG-KEY

       After importing the public key, you can verify package digest and
       signature information using the following command:

       rpm --checksig package_name

     * RPM will also suggest package(s) that will satisfy unresolved
       dependencies if the rpmdb-redhat package is installed.

There are also some interesting kernel changes that I won't go into
here.  I have to leave something for everyone to read.  :-)

Anyway, expect the new beta before the end of the month.  (And then
we'll see what else has changed...)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.