DistroWatch published the release notes of Red Hat Linux “Severn” 9.0.93. The beta is scheduled to be released early this week, so make sure you keep checking the FTP mirrors of Red Hat. “Don’t expect too much new, however, as the beta release appears to be more of a consolidation release of Red Hat Linux 9, rather than a release full of cutting edge features” DistroWatch notes. We also spotted Severn’s ability to get into graphics mode just right after the kernel is loaded. Update: The RHL site is up.
Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 Release Notes Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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and for understandable reasons, but I was hoping RH 10 would include 2.6. We shall see….hmmmm. Doesn’t really matter tho, I’ll just download and compile my own 2.6 if it doesn’t.
There are [unsupported] RPMs of 2.6 for Red Hat already. Severn might include them too.
http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/
What’s that? Will they code-name Red Hat 10 “eighrt”?
-Jeremy
rhl.redhat.com is now as slow as hell (from here anyway). Looks like this release has generated a bit of excitement.
<tongue_in_cheek>I vote that the first person to ask about MP3 support be hung, drawn and quartered.
</tongue_in_cheek>
(Note that this I am not asking about MP3 support!) 😉
Severn is not just misspelled number, it’s also a river in Britain. You know that country, right?
When will RedHat start building their rpm’s and OS for i586 instead of i386 ? I mean come on how many people use 386 or 486 machines ? You can’t even run a gui on that type of hardware without experincing major slow downs. Not to mention the major slowdowns you get in the console.
Yeah, Eugenia, you could for example put up a pull on which x86 generation people run Linux 🙂
That is always one of the major things that has bugged me about RH, compiling for 386 -> 586 is silly, but I have heard that in fact most rpms are compiled for the i686, on the install CD. However, I may be wrong/mis informed/mis read.
I wonder if the default GUI installation option still sets the screen refresh rate to an LCD-destroying >60Hz? Maybe I’ll get it to install by using Anaconda this time, if they’ve fixed that annoying ‘feature.’
Dan Severn is one of the world’s greatest weaponless combat specialists. You need to see more fights, and fewer online adverts.
As a special favour for me, please tell your parents that the internet isn’t a replacement for the babysitter. Thanks.
Huh:? Red Hat? Who uses that these days?
I am not an expert but doesn’t redhat compile it in such a way where it compiles in all the enhancements of new processor but still maintains backwards compatibility.
eg. I have compiled in support for MMX or 3DNOW yet the binary is smart enough to run on older i386 hardware. eg backwards compatible.
Come on Gentoo users give these people some advice about these compile methods.
Also my kernel is an i586 how do you figure that? So it is not all i386.
What new things will be in this release?
Will just be an upgrade of existing software. eg Mozilla will now be 1.4?
Maybe they will include Mplayer with Divx and ogg support. Then us users will be able to just download the codecs we need.
I am hoping they do what I said about Mplayer and possibly give it a nice Media Player Classic front-end.
What do you think about that with browser plugin program installed by default too.
Once we download the codecs our selves from freshrpms or mplayer website, we would good Multimedia support.
Eugenia (or anyone else) next time you do an interview with Redhat please ask them if they would consider doing this.
NOTE: I am stating this early in the comments page. Redhat Linux is not intended for the home consumer market. It is intended for the workstation market. Which does in some cases needs Multimedia support.
Also don’t say anything about them including Nvidia drivers, because as I said the intended market is the workstation market and the admins will set this up.
Is that clear?
Is that clear?
😉 Sorry I just had to. I don’t want to read posts about the same old arguments.
“When will RedHat start building their rpm’s and OS for i586 instead of i386 ? ”
If everything was optimized for i586. 386 would break, i686 would be crap and only the 586 ppl would be happy.
btw the optimizations do very, very little. for instance only multimedia and video would be enhanced for my MMX system. sound like something worth breaking tons of compatibilty for? And someone else pointed out they do have 686 tuned but allow lower end to still run. you’re not missing out on anything there are only a handfull of applications that will make any sort of difference, like the gimp, kernel, glibc thats it. compile those if you want to get your 0.271721ms speed improvement.
IIRC. The only thing is that they optimize for i686 but using i386 instructions. There is very little benefit to be had by optimizing using i686 specific instructions as they say, but they od optimize their kernels. There will be i386, 586, 686 and athlon for the x86 compatibles.
I hope this clears things up. I do believe they are not the only ones to do such anyone so maybe cut them some slack.
RH has offered different versions of performance critical rpm’s long time. Just look under i686/athlon directory and install optimized openssl, glibc and kernel packages.
I am not an expert but doesn’t redhat compile it in such a way where it compiles in all the enhancements of new processor but still maintains backwards compatibility.
eg. I have compiled in support for MMX or 3DNOW yet the binary is smart enough to run on older i386 hardware. eg backwards compatible.
Come on Gentoo users give these people some advice about these compile methods.
Also my kernel is an i586 how do you figure that? So it is not all i386.
Hmmm…as a gentoo user, I’ll come to your aid as gentoo is that one linux distro sick tweakers and optimizers, myself included.
Two important optimization options come into play here.
-mcpu=your architecture (athlon, athlon-xp, pentium4, pentium2, i686, i586, etc)
-march=your archictecture (same as above)
If you use the -mcpu architecture, it is some compatible with architectures within the same group. a -mcpu=athlon optimization will compile packages that will work with all athlon processors on all athlon and athlon relation computers.
The -march architecture is optimization hard coded to your system only. It is unlikely to work on any other computer except yours.
Okay now that that’s out of the way, I’m positive Red hat compiles their packages using -mcpu=i386 or i486. The reason for this is the i386 albeit not optimized for your latest i586 or i686 processors is somewhat generic, that is it works half heartedly, I might add on almost all x86 processors, but it does not take any advantage of the technological breakthroughs, if there are any, of the more modern i586 and 1686 cpus.
However, and i686 optimized app is unlikely to work on an i386 cpu. It is not backward compatible per say. Each new processor category is hardly backward compatible.
The next question you might ask if there is any performance difference between packages compiled for an i386 and those for an i686 cpu architecture, and the obvious answer is yes. In fact quite a lot. Several gentoo enthusiast have carried out crude tests to demonstrate the perfomance gain from moving from an i386 to i686 optimization. But you be the judge. A crude experiment provided my a gentoo enthusiast is provided in the link below.
http://home.comcast.net/~jcunningham63/linux/GCC_Optimization.html
To your last question, do a ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo’ at your favorite terminal, you might come up with interesting facts about your cpu.
>> “Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 now uses a graphical interface while booting. The graphical boot screen will appear once the kernel has loaded. Presently the graphical boot interface has known issues with respect to interactions with the Kudzu hardware probing tool; work on resolving these issues is proceeding. Graphical booting is controlled by the GRAPHICAL line in the /etc/sysconfig/init file; set it to “no” to permanently disable graphical booting.”
Yeay! whoopie! cool! awesome! finally!
You are correct, you should be modded down.
A beta release of a future Redhat product has nothing to do with MS FUD.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn now contains this beta release! However, it would be very courteous if we let the mirrors receive it before we all start diving in. 24hours time and it should exist at a mirror near you.
Okay now that that’s out of the way, I’m positive Red hat compiles their packages using -mcpu=i386 or i486.
I’m pretty sure that red hat actually complies their packages with -mcpu=i686 and a -march=i386. The reason being that it will work w/ older machines, but also take advanatage of some of the the newer features in the 686+ chips.
Granted also when you install redhat, it will install a specific kernel to fit your processer (i.e. 686 for anything above a pentium pro, or athlon for anything above an athlon).
Now I could be wrong about my above statements, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they are doing, which to me makes sense, as you should be able to use linux on an old 386 you have laying around if you want to. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
Say’s it all.
Recieved this about 10 minutes ago
As always, you can get SEVERN at redhat.com, specifically:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/beta/severn/
Or the following mirrors:
North America:
United States:
ftp://moni.msci.memphis.edu/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
http://moni.msci.memphis.edu/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://linux.stanford.edu/pub/mirrors/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://mirror.eas.muohio.edu/mirrors/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/redhat/beta/severn/
ftp://redhat.dulug.duke.edu/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://mirror.hiwaay.net/redhat/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
http://mirror.hiwaay.net/redhat/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
rsync://rsync.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
Canada:
ftp://less.cogeco.net/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://ftp.nrc.ca/pub/systems/linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/linux/bet…
South America:
Brazil:
http://bastion.las.ic.unicamp.br/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn
ftp://bastion.las.ic.unicamp.br/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn
Chile:
ftp://ftp.tecnoera.com/Linux/redhat-beta/severn/
Europe:
Austria:
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/redhat.com/dist/linux/beta/sever…
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/redhat.com/dist/linux/beta/sever…
rsync://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/redhat.com/dist/linux/beta/severn/
Czech Republic:
ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/beta…
ftp://ultra.linux.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/beta/seve…
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://ftp6.linux.cz/pub/linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
Denmark:
ftp://klid.dk/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
Germany:
ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/redhat-ftp/redhat/linux/beta/se…
http://wftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/redhat-ftp/redhat/linux/beta/s…
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/pub/linux/Mirror/ftp.redhat….
ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/redhat/linux/bet…
Ireland:
ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/beta/severn…
http://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/beta/severn…
rsync://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
Netherlands:
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/RedHat/ftp/redhat/linux/beta…
ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/RedHat/ftp/redhat/linux/be…
ftp://alviss.et.tudelft.nl/pub/redhat/beta/severn/
Poland:
ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
rsync://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/ftp/pub/Linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
Romania:
ftp://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/pub/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/lin…
http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/b…
rsync://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn /
Turkey:
ftp://ftp.linux.org.tr/pub/redhat/beta/severn/
United Kingdom:
http://zeniiia.linux.org.uk/pub/distributions/redhat/beta/severn/
ftp://zeniiia.linux.org.uk/pub/distributions/redhat/beta/severn/
rsync://zeniiia.linux.org.uk/ftp/pub/distributions/redhat/beta/severn/
Asia/Pacific:
Australia:
http://planetmirror.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/redhat/linux/severn/
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/redhat/linux/severn/
Japan:
ftp://ftp.sfc.wide.ad.jp/pub/Linux/RedHat/linux/beta/severn/
Singapore:
ftp://ftp.oss.eznetsols.org/linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
rsync://rsync.oss.eznetsols.org/linux/redhat/linux/beta/severn/
One additional feature provided by the Linux community is the
availability of SEVERN via BitTorrent.
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/severn-binary-iso.torrent
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/severn-source-iso.torrent
RPMS for Red Hat Linux 7.3 through 9 of BitTorrent are available
from:
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/
Usage is simple:
btdownloadcurses.py –url http://URL.torrent
Allow incoming TCP 6881 – 6889 to join the torrent swarm.
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/
>Okay now that that’s out of the way, I’m positive Red hat >compiles their packages using -mcpu=i386 or i486.
They do not.
They compile with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686
That is, optimized for i686, but only using i386 instructions.
A few packages, atleast glibc and the kernel are specifically compiled (only -march=i3/4/5/686/athlon) for the architecture one installs redhat on..
That’s what I thought. See my post above.
“The following packages have been deprecated, and may be removed from a future release of Red Hat Linux:
– Glide3 — Multi-platform issues”
ehh.. so what abouth us that have voodoo card`s then??
Hehe…forgive me, it’s being a while since tried out Reh Hat. However, there seems to be a myth that combining -march and -mcpu actually restricts or controls the compiler to a certain class and general architecture. To be best of my knowledge, and I may be absolutely wrong again, the compiler should only be presented with one of the options. Either -march or -mcpu, but not both. Bah, but it doesn’t matter, does it? 🙂
Regards,
Mystilleef
<surprised>
Hey…dbus is included…I didn’t know it was actually in production use
are you sure that the people you may get away from Red Hat will actually choose your beloved Gentoo, Debian or Slackware?
It might just be that they tire of all the infighting and just leaves the *NIX world altogether.
“ehh.. so what abouth us that have voodoo card`s then??”
Seriously… when was the last Glide game made… especially for Linux? They are all opengl and direct3d now. If you want to play legacy games… use a legacy architecture and a legacy operating system… the games will run better then.
I think there is good reason to compile for only i686 or ATHLON instead of leaving i386 compatibility with i686 optimizations: You end up with a bigger binary which takes up more RAM and more CPU cycles which makes your system slower.
Redhat allows you to download ATHLON and i686 kernels and other core files, but almost all others are i386: apache, mysql, gnome etc.
I still haven’t switched to gentoo yet because it takes a long time to install. If I am using a business machine, I’d still use RedHat. A fun machine and I would put Gentoo…I just haven’t had the time to try it yet
I’m a slow geek.
I’m fairly new to Linux- I’ve recently adopted it since we use it at my work. I’ve read the GPL over and over, and I really like the concept of free software. Anyway–
I’ve been fond of the ideals of Debian, but frankly I’ve not been too fond of its technological disadvantage to Red Hat (aside from apt-get, which I bet the Red Hat project will ultimately adopt in some form). With the evolution of Red Hat Linux into a project, I wonder about Debian’s niche.
Debian is free software run by a community.
Red Hat Linux is free software run by a community, BUT the community is reinforced by at least 10 full time employees of RH Inc.
At this point, I just don’t understand the niche held by Debian.
aol : mozilla
sun : openoffice
redhat inc : redhat linux ???
my analogies are a bit too simplified, because for example Red Hat and Sun and other companies also contribute to Mozilla
which brings me to my next point…
I hope other companies feel compelled to contribute to this project (eg Ximian, or a company wanting to use Linux as a vehicle for selling hardware)– so as to not duplicate effort, and to make a nice broadly standard good technology
redhat is not going to touch mplayer/xmms(w/mp3) with a 10′ pole.
how can you even suggest it?!
SCO is a huge reminder of the lawsuit happy environment we live in, yet you want Redhat to do what?
why not add the nvidia binaries while they are at it.
“apt-get install mplayer”
boom your done.
how hard is that?
redhat already has apt
http://www.freshrpms.net/
download, install, enjoy.
i want to play some armegetron?
#apt-get install armegetron
enjoy game.
I use apt-get in RH, BUT it’s not the same as Debian’s other than the obviouse of .deb & .rpm there isn’t a lot of structure to it. Any one will through one up and it can mix & blow your system up. Try using Fedora’s and Freshrpms and see what happens. In Debian, there is a structure to it.
“I think there is good reason to compile for only i686 or ATHLON instead of leaving i386 compatibility with i686 optimizations: You end up with a bigger binary which takes up more RAM and more CPU cycles which makes your system slower. ”
Oh yeah fscking wonderful idea – non-installable on a K6 ala my box, which happens to be i586 arch