| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 beta, crashes, burns |
Sep. 25, 2006
Over at our sister publication, eWEEK, the Labs people just tried to take an early look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1. In was brief, but ugly.
Now, you don't expect much from a beta. What the Labs found, though was much more serious than the kind of fit and finish problems you usually find in a beta. What you really don't expect are show-stoppers -- problems so big that it's clear there's no way the product's going to ship anytime soon. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they found.
RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5 Beta 1's biggest problem was "RHEL 5's thoroughly broken software management system. In RHEL 5, Red Hat is moving from up2date-the software installation and update front end to RPM (Red Hat Package Manager)-to yum, the software tool that's fronted the past few Red Hat Fedora Core releases."
That sounds all too familiar. Novell also recently updated its software management system, with similarly awful results. The main difference is that Novell went through its misery with its community distribution, openSUSE 10.1, not its commercial Linuxes.
The default package management software in SUSE 9 and 10 and openSUSE 10 was YOU (YaST online update) and the susewatcher system tray applet. This, however, was replaced by Libzypp in 10.1.
Libzypp is a backend program for SUSE's administration tool, YaST, that uses RPM (RPM Package manager) packages for installing, removing, and querying program packages. This new program is an attempt by Novell to marry the best features of SUSE's yast2 package manager and Ximian's libredcarpet.
The new SUSE software management system didn't work well at all at first. Eventually, though, Novell fixed it.
Now, it's Red Hat turn in the mill.
Unfortunately, the Labs found more than just a broken software management system. They also found that both the Xen Virtualization Management application and the GNOME Sabayon user profile editor were broken.
Sabayon, GNOME's first serious attempt at a system administrator's user management program, is still in its early stages, but what Jason Brooks of the eWEEK Labs found went beyond anything I'd ever seen with Sabayon. He found that Red Hat's implementation of it caused his desktop session to lock up.
Whoops.
This isn't good. RHEL 5 Beta 1 was already late. It was originally due out in mid-July. Beta 2 was then to have appeared in September. Then, Red Hat's plan was, and still is, as far as I know, to get RHEL 5 into customers' hands by year's end.
At this point, it looks like Red Hat is going to have its work cut out for it to make that delivery date.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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