Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 released

[redman]

Although not officially announced by Red Hat, I can let you know that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 has been released.

QUOTE

$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3 (Santiago)

Nothing yet on DistroWatch, but that won't take long

Either way, it means that the wait for SL6.3 has begun

[Nathan]

Interesting, I wonder who will be the first to release 6.3 this time around, CentOS or SL.

[tux99]

QUOTE (Nathan @ Jun 20 2012, 07:38 PM)

Interesting, I wonder who will be the first to release 6.3 this time around, CentOS or SL.

I expect Centos to be first, they were first with 6.2 too.

[toracat]

Before more people start adding these "SL versus CentOS" type posts ...

I'd like to take this opportunity to present my famous quote

"There seem to be people who feel there is a "race" between CentOS and SL.

SL has always been following their routine of going from Alpha (1 or
2) -> Beta (1 or 2) -> RC (1 or 2) -> GA. Each release is separated by
1-2 weeks. So, it typically takes 2 to 3 months for them to do the
final release. This time scheme is not a problem for SL users because
security updates are made available in a timely manner (similar to the
CR repo by CentOS) and they have been doing this exercise from day one
(back in 2003??).

So, when CentOS had a [huge] delay, people say SL "beat" CentOS. When
CentOS gets the release out in 2 weeks, they say CentOS "beat" SL. As
far as SL is concerned there is no such race. I don't think SL would
ever change its release process to "beat" other clones."

[Nathan]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply there was some sort of 'race' going on on between the two (and/or between other RHEL clones, for that matter). It's interesting nonetheless, because whoever releases faster can and will receive a spike in users. Naturally, it won't have too large of an impact, considering the audience RHEL clones cater to tends to be more of the 'well, we'll upgrade someday' than the 'updates! nao! I angry!' kind, but it will be there.

EDiT: not that either one of the clones is better than the other, of course.

Btw, I'm pondering whether I should start writing 'derivatives' instead of 'clones' from now on, as 'clones' has a bit of a negative connotation to it. Then again, 'derivatives' isn't the most straightforward term either. Hrm.

[joutlan]

What Toracat said, but I understand the harmless curiosity Nice....thanks for the post Patrick!

[zxq9]

QUOTE (Nathan @ Jun 20 2012, 08:59 PM)

...whoever releases faster can and will receive a spike in users.

I hope CentOS gets those users and others of the sort for whom release speed feels important. I genuinely enjoy the smaller-town feel of SL.

[joutlan]

QUOTE (zxq9 @ Jun 20 2012, 07:40 PM)

QUOTE (Nathan @ Jun 20 2012, 08:59 PM) ...whoever releases faster can and will receive a spike in users. I hope CentOS gets those users and others of the sort for whom release speed feels important. I genuinely enjoy the smaller-town feel of SL.

I can get on-board with that given that human nature is what it is. I think most of us here are concerned with the process rather than speed anyway.

When RHEL 7 hits the streets, I think all heck will break loose in both camps. There's also ClearOS.

[zxq9]

If the direction Fedora is headed in is any indication, the release of RHEL 7 is going to signify a new chapter in the way Linux is viewed in the enterprise, I think. There are a bajillion factors in just what the view will wind up being -- a lot of it being whether or not Red Hat follows through deliberately or just incidentally on some of the things its got cooking.

As in, in my opinion some of the things happening in Fedora are beyond the ability of the unwashed community to just "happen" to complete to a polished, presentable level, mainly because "the direction" hasn't been spelled out and therefore reaching consensus on anything is currently impossible, both in subsystems like systemd and on the decision to pursue Gnome 3 instead of KDE despite the fact "Gnome 3" is not in any way a "Gnome 2++".

Of these two systemd is the one that is shaping up to make the most sense soonest because though a lot of people (including me on many points) disagree heavily with some (or all) of Lennart Poettering's decisions, he put the effort in to actually build an implementation of his main idea before presenting it to the community. It was a crap implementation, but it was a conceptual beginning that others could grasp and build on (and today its not crap, its showing real progress and even, dare I say it, promise).

Gnome 3 is still a steaming pile which has, as a project, simply flipped and flopped around aimlessly because its original direction was deemed unworthy of consideration by anyone at the outset, and they've abandoned nearly all of their original guidelines and goals. One staggeringly huge example of this was the original mandate to not let anyone write mods. You read that correctly. That's right, there was a "community" Linux project the stature of Gnome that decided user mods would be discouraged.

So yeah, that idea was as big a hit as sausage-flavored ice cream, but with it most of the critical underpinnings of the system had to be reworked long after release, which is... well, a longer story than I'm going to write here. Anyway, I'm confident that enough money will eventually get dumped into Gnome 3 that it will become a usable alternative that is a sexy competitor to other tablet faces -- and I'm equally confident that we won't see a big rush to put RHEL 7 on tablets everywhere -- but that the updated KDE and XFCE environments in addition to the presence of a Gnome 3 default will give the enterprise a reason so say "Wow, this is in RHEL?" I have no doubt.

And of course, all the server nerds out there will probably throw fiery hate at systemd for a month or so until they get used to it and realize there really are some slick benefits (such as when it comes to nailing down exactly what processes are doing what where, simple multi-seat configuration and assignment, effectively multiple device allocation, etc.), and that parallel boot is the most trivial enhancement of all despite being the most hyped, most flamed element of all (and distracted nearly the entire community for quite a while, in the interest of what?).

Anyway, all that is me speaking from a face-having-been-rubbed-in-it perspective and I may not be seeing the forest for the trees, but I'm pretty sure that the userland effect of RHEL 7, whether userland is the command prompt for admins or the GUI for real people, will be pretty profound.

[PaulPreston]

Hi All,

Despite the fact that there was no official announcement, red hat 6.3 packages are available on rhn.

CODE

rpm -qa | grep release redhat-release-server-6Server-6.3.0.3.el6.x86_64

I assume that red hat will announce it today or tomorrow.

[toracat]

See here:

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/6/red-rat-enterprise-linux-63-lobally-available

(Read the URL carefully. You'll find something amusing )

[zxq9]

QUOTE (toracat @ Jun 21 2012, 05:26 PM)

See here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/6/red-rat-enterprise-linux-63-lobally-available (Read the URL carefully. You'll find something amusing  )

Aw, looks like someone noticed the funny and killed the URL.

Was that the real original one?

[toracat]

It is the original one. The URL still works with "red rat" and "lobally" in it ...

[zxq9]

Weird, I get a 404, all prettied up corporate-site style. Only the corrected one works for me.
(?.?)

[toracat]

Perhaps some geographical thing. I just selected "Japan" and got the 404 page. Try "United States" and the funny URL will work.

[zxq9]

QUOTE (toracat @ Jun 21 2012, 10:06 PM)

Perhaps some geographical thing. I just selected "Japan" and got the 404 page. Try "United States" and the funny URL will work.

Awww, now that's not cool!

I'VE BEEN CHEATED!

Of course, I'm probably the one guy in Japan who would ever see the link, but still...

[toracat]

I'm beginning to feel this is an Easter egg laid by an employee at RH. Easter is not really big in Japan, so ...

[scottro]

I think zxq9's earlier statement is quite accurate. What I see is this: Fedora becomes more and more aimed at the inexperienced desktop user--as someone said in an entirely different context, perhaps a step between Ubuntu and Arch.

This is all fine and dandy, though it seems that many of the Fedora developers don't think like sysadmins. There was the famous quote, a year or two ago--the GUI package manager was allowing all updates by anyone, as long as a package was signed--on the bug report, the developer said, You haven't given me any reason why there's a problem with this. The bug reporter said, Well, you're changing the way Unix has done it for 40 years. The developer said, I don't really care how Unix has done things for 40 years.

At any rate, the whole Unix-style of thinking, one small program to do one thing well, seems to be getting lost in Fedora, Ubuntu, and probably all the desktop distros. They now all copy OS X's idea of not having root, but just using sudo. PackageKit and pulseaudio are now almost impossible to get rid of.

I remember in around 2009, sound used to just work. Then, suddenly, it stopped working for non-root users who didn't use Gnome. Turned out that they'd tied it into ConsoleKit. So, the decision, rather than remove this, was to make ConsoleKit impossible to disable.

This year, in one of the F17 betas, sound stopped working, because it still needed ConsoleKit, which had been dropped. Quickly fixed, but just showing the WIndows-ization of Linux.

I'd love to see RH get slapped for doing things like crippling text install mode and generally getting more and more Windows like, but I suspect that just like Windows, those who are using it aren't going to change--the cost of changing is almost always more than the cost of adjusting.

On the other hand, what I do see, though only to a minor extent, is more job offerings asking for Ubuntu experience. Not in any major sense--if looking for sysadmin jobs in the Northeast US, RH and its derivatives are still FAR ahead, but these changes might make people start looking more at alternatives.

On the other hand, compare the popularity of Fedora and Ubuntu with say, Arch, one of the more popular distros that expects its users to have brains.....so, maybe the Fedora/Ubuntu types are making the right choice, more people want that. And, lastly, in fairness to them, I can think of several Unix gurus I know who switched to Ubuntu as they got older and busier, and just wanted things to work out of the box. My lovely wife, a confirmed Mac user, has no trouble using Ubuntu on a netbook. (Though I'm not even sure if she uses it anymore--I think she gave it to her sister after getting her Macbook Air.)

[log69]

@scottro:

I think what's happening here for some time now is getting from admins to the average user. The point is the balance: when you make it better for sysadmins, surely it will be worse for normal users in comfort, and vice versa.

I think the best choice would be to keep 2 clear versions: one for the server side and other with separate efforts for the desktop. What you wrote also shows that you feel that the efforts and interests are stronger now in the desktop area. Unix always had a clear server side philosophy. Now that seems to be changing.

I notice a tendency in bringing things to upper layers too. Just as you mentioned the audio: pulseaudio is a resource hungry bastard for example. In older days, alsa worked without a hitch for ever, but you couldn't set different audio levels for different apps. Pulseaudio can do that, but the price is that it's the 2nd process eating the most CPU resource on my systems (first is browser "of course"). Well, something for something, but I still think it's a bad design, because it's not fast enough, so even if it can do more things, it's less efficient in my view point. As if putting a rocket on your car: it can go faster but its body is just not strong enough for this sort of load.

While the devs throw new things pretty frequently in the pot and mix it rather often, I expect and hope that TUV will take only the reasonable things out of all this and always come up with a great EL system in the end.

[zxq9]

I started to write a response, but as redman knows well, once a thread here starts wandering I tend to take it a bit further... so I wrote a blog post instead.

If anyone is interested, its here: Racing to remove the last Nix

[redman]

QUOTE (zxq9 @ Jun 24 2012, 06:14 PM)

I started to write a response, but as redman knows well, once a thread here starts wandering I tend to take it a bit further...

Agreed

QUOTE

And that’s the core problem. Folks show up in Linux land thinking they know everything, willing to break over 40 years of tremendous computing success and tradition. Some people even going so far as to arrive with prior intent to break things just for the social shock value.

This says it all...

Nevertheless, a good moment to end the discussion in this thread.
Topic closed. If you like you can continue here.