What does a computer geek do over vacation? An OS upgrade, of course! The fact that Red Hat Software had just released version 5 of their popular Linux distribution last December made this one a no-brainer for me. Some of my friends back home were also eager to take this much-hyped software for a spin, so we it was decided that since I had lots of free hard drive space and a T1 at school, I would download the whole thing, store it on my hard drive, and bring a pristine distribution back for everyone on the LAN to leach.
All appeared to go well initially; I downloaded the installation tree from Red Hat, brought my PC back home, and began to install. Alas, Red Hat's installer failed to recognize that my hard drive contained a distribution tree. It was only after a couple hours of agonizing over error messages, moving files around, and testing different options, that I finally discovered the problem. Upon comparing my files with those at Red Hat again, it turned out that I had only obtained 93 out of the 250 megabytes that were required for the installation. We figured that I must have been unlucky enough to have downloaded my copy before the complete package was posted. Since it takes forever for stores in our area to stock new Linux releases, buying it on a cd-rom was out. It seemed that our dreams of a quick and painless installation were shattered.
All hope was not lost, however. After analyzing the situation and performing a few calculations, we decided that downloading the remaining files over our 33.6 connection was not entirely infeasable. The downloading began.
Around 20 hours later...
With all the files this time in tact, I again booted with the installation disks, hopes high once again. When all the files were in their proper places, Red Hat had no trouble detecting their presence. For experimentation, I wiped out my new partition and re-installed a couple more times. Most of it went smoothly each time, with one glaring exception: The program refused to install the "noarch" files, claiming they were for a different architecture. I expect that Red Hat will fix this in the near future, if they haven't already.
After giving the installer a few test runs, I finally decided to go with a base-only installation and install each RPM as needed. This proved to be the optimal solution for me, as one of my biggest pet peeves is having multitudes of unwanted files sitting around on my hard drive. Running individual rpm installs took some extra time, but I do not regret it. It feels better knowing that every package on my system was placed there by me.
After I had Red Hat 5 up and running on my system, my brother installed it on his via ftp. This worked as expected, except for the "noarch" problem stated above. My dad followed with a similar procedure, as did our friend Ted. Soon, every machine in the house was running Red Hat 5.
A few of the programs exhibited buggy behaviour at first, which I suspect was caused by Red Hat's decision to switch from libc to glibc in this version. Most bothersome for me was the fact that ncurses programs did not display text properly inside xterm windows. Days after we installed, however, bug-fixes for this and other problems appeared on Red Hat's ftp site.
The most notable improvement over previous incarnations of Red Hat were the new control panel modules. The were so cool, in fact, that I finally decided to give in and use them to configure my network settings, instead of going with the more familiar command-line setup.
I have now been using Red Hat 5 for more than a month. Despite a few bugs at release time, this is definately a release worth having. I would recommend it for anyone using 4.2 who is thinking about an upgrade. And for those who haven't experienced Linux, all I can say is, "You don't know what you're missing."