Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 has been released. This is the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux release that includes Xen based open source virtualization technology. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 release contains virtualization on the i386 and x86_64 architectures as well as a technology preview for IA64. More info
here and here.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 Released
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I wonder how long until CentOS starts working on CentOS 5?
Hopefully they’re working on beta1 right now.
The first attempt at this release by Red Hat came with broken iso images. After fixing this we have been told this is a preview of beta 1 and not beta 1 itself.
Though members of the CentOS project now have the code of this release, it is a waste of time working with it due too it’s _very_ poor quality and far from any form of beta release readiness.
If you went and grabbed software when there is no official announcement being made, you deserve all the brokeness you get. So it might be a pre release, broken release or whatever. Besides the breakage it was just a arch specific on one package on a client ISO which was not in the actual beta1 ISO available after the announcement was made . No big deal.
Beta and test releases *will* have bugs anyway.
I know very well of alpha and beta readiness and this release doesn’t even rate as either.
I personally would not have had the guts to release anything of this quality and so incomplete that all it is a preview of a version of Gnome already in Fedora with a few extra issues thrown in.
Well I downloaded the ISO’s yesterday and installed it without any problems. It has been running solid so far. There are a number of new GUI management tools. SELinux got some much needed attention with lots of new policies out of the box. RHEL5 appears to be shaping up nicely in my opinion and I’m looking forward to it’s final release.
The first attempt at this release by Red Hat came with broken iso images. After fixing this we have been told this is a preview of beta 1 and not beta 1 itself.
It certainly doesn’t inspire confidence when basic things like that are broken.
“This is the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux release that includes Xen based open source virtualization technology”
And they went after Novell for including Xen support saying it wasn’t ready…
Not that I really care either way, but Novell has Xen released in an final release product. RHEL 5 is not even beta 1 according to the comments here, so figure on at least a few more months of development and bug testing, by then I’m sure they are guessing (hoping) that Xen will be ready. Though wouldn’t that just be a kick in the pants to everyone if it wasn’t?
Debian Etch and Ubuntu Edgy have Xen enabled kernels as well in them. More than likely, Red Hat had stated that it wasn’t ready, but then since everyone else is doing it, unfortunately to save face, Red Hat has to do it too. Either way you look at it, bring on the Xen. Wonder what the Xen Buddhists have to say abou this?
And they went after Novell for including Xen support saying it wasn’t ready…
And Red Hat were right. It probably won’t be ready by the time RHEL is released either.
Unless they ship some decent management tools for Xen then it’s pretty much useless.
Let’s not forget, Xen HAS alredy released their first official supported product and management tools, which actually look pretty awesome. IMO, from the video of the tool, on their website, in action, it looks to actually have some very advanced features not seen in any products of its kind thus far…Maybe you should check it out, and actually USE it before you agree with the company that made the statement basically bashing it’s #1 competitor in the marketplace?
I’ve used Xen since early 2.0 releases, and it is quite stable. As a matter of fact, in the 2 years I have been using it, I have NEVER had a domU go down, and the only instances where I had any dom0 problems..were due to me not RTFM and configuring my custom kernels improperly. I think people often times confuse stability, with a product being “idiot proof”. It doesn’t need to be “easy to use” or “have kewl looking point and click tools” to be stable for experienced administrators.
Linux has a LONG history of having programs that usage proves stability long before version numbers…
Edited 2006-09-08 12:26
Let’s not forget, Xen HAS alredy released their first official supported product and management tools, which actually look pretty awesome.
But are those tools open source? I suspect not. So RHEL 5 will be stuck with bare-bones Xen admin tools or whatever Red Hat writes.
In fact, virt-manager is available on Fedora Core 6 Test which allows an easier xen management.
They went after novell because there were *known* issues with Xen occasionally corrupting filesystems and also there were some issues with the speed of some of the networking code. If you grab a copy of Suse linux enterprise server 10, you will notice that it’s version of Xen is stripped down and *only* supports running another SLES10 instance under it. Redhat isn’t interested in shipping a “crippled” version of Xen so they put more work into it and are just now shipping it after most of those issues have been dealt with.
im just wondering. how does red hat actually fares nowadays both as dekstop and server? there has been a time when it takes big chunks of the limelight among linux flavors.
however looking at reviews and distrowatch, it seems that it has recieved quite considerably less attention, with Ubuntu, Suse and some others (not to mention Vista) taking more and more of the attention.
They’re strongest in the markey they care about, ie enterprise (that is, $$$) where it’s still (from what I know) a redhat dominated world, weaker in the one they don’t, the home user/hobbiest/enthusiast/etc. distrowatch would be more a reflection (among other things) of a distro’s popularity in that latter group not the former.
remember for many CIOs and corporate folk, linux still largely == redhat.
Exactly. Red Hat’s sales are over 8 times what Novell’s Linux sales are.
AS’s a pretty bland no-frills subset compared to most distros off the street, heck the client is only half a distro, it will never fare well on distrowatch. Fedora on the other hand is very, very popular and fully loaded.
We had some pretty nasty breakages happen with our RHEL AS servers. The whole 4.3 issue was a buggy piece of crap in my opinion. I’m running WS 4.4 on my desktop here, and it seems a bit better. Time will tell.
The biggest show stopper was a bug that was introduced in 4.3, which broke the firewall when NIS authentication was activated. We couldn’t open ANY ports on the firewall if NIS authentication was switched on, so that kind of negated the point a bit. I tried it on three machines, so I don’t think it was anything to do with a particular box. I hope they’ve fixed that in the 4.4 update. I’ll have to have a look when I have time.
Also, the 4.3 installer would hang when a particular SCSI controller was present.
With all that, the random overwriting of config files, and that bloody up2date “kernel-ib” fiasco. I pretty much dread new Redhat updates.
I’ll be trying out this beta on something though. I’m a glutton for punishment.
FYI, here’s the link to the original Red Hat FTP tree where you can download the ISO images:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/RHEL5-Beta1/
Usual proviso about being careful how you download DVD ISO images that are >2GB applies and you may want to look at Fedora mirror sites as Distrowatch says since I suspect Red Hat’s site might be somewhat overloaded.
Note that talk on the beta mailing list is that there may be an install issue with the DVD ISO(s), so you might want to play it safe and get the CDs with this release.
DVD image downloading pretty fast now.
Xen has been in Fedora Core since 4, Red Hat didn’t say that it doesn’t *work*, there saying its not something mature enough to *support* in the enterprise. Thats why they are rolling it into a beta and are working on it. They want it to improve and be a viable option in there support model.
That’s my take anyway…..
Yeah, but I still call bull$hit, even as a Redhat supporter, because the timing and “initial” scope of the statements they made regarding it. What they stated was a opinion presented as facts.