Red Hat 6.2 preview

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April 14, 2000
Web posted at: 10:15 a.m. EDT (1415 GMT)

by Joe Barr

(IDG) -- Red Hat has improved its graphical installer in 6.2 to the point that I actually used it to do the install. Twice, as a matter of fact. And I'm getting to be an old hand at wiping out my desktop installation and installing a new distribution. I had only been running Corel Linux on the machine for a week or two when I received an early copy of RH 6.2. To speed and ease the process, I simply tarred the contents of my home directory and copied it to another partition. Among other things, my home directory contains a couple of years' worth of email, so it is a sizable archive.

That done, I sat down in front of kanga (my desktop machine) and began the initial install. It was 9:24 a.m. I booted from the CD and took the default graphical install route, choosing Custom Install to give me maximum control over things such as which partitions to format and which to leave alone.

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DiskDruid allowed me to assign mount points to the existing partitions on my primary and secondary hard drives, and I very carefully unselected the partitions from the secondary drive when the installer presented me with the list of partitions to format. I had made a backup of my home directory's tar archive and copied it to the second drive as well, but I didn't want to have to use it.

Five minutes into the install process, I had unselected Configure DHCP, the default setting, and entered my static IP address, gateway, and DNS servers. Then I went through the list of packages to install and chose to select individual packages within the various groups.

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My monitor, a Samsung SyncMaster 955SL, is too new to show up on the list of available monitors when configuring X in the graphical install, so I selected another Samsung SyncMaster with identical specifications.

The installer probed for and detected my Voodoo3 video card and memory correctly, but when I clicked Test This Configuration for the recommended setting (32-bit color, 1600x1200 resolution), all I got was a partially deformed, mostly blank screen. I manually selected 16-bit color at 1152x864, but I got the same result. Rather than spend more time on a broken process, I selected Skip X Config and continued to the next step, formatting and installing selected packages. At 10 a.m. the install was completed, and I booted RH 6.2 for the first time.

But I still had a few chores to do before I could resume my normal desktop activities. My first priority was to get rid of unwanted services. Red Hat decided my install required running apmd, atd, crond, gpm, identd, inet, keytable, kudzu, lpd, netfs, network, nfslock, portmap, random, sendmail, syslog, and xfs. I disagreed with that list, so I started the linuxconf program to prune it a bit. It took me only a minute or two to remove apmd, identd, netfs, nfslock, portmap, and sendmail.

The next step was to properly configure X. I started Xconfigurator, set it at 16-bit color and 1280x1024 resolution, and I had it working in less than a minute. I'm not sure why the graphical install and the command line configure program don't get the same results, but they didn't when they should have.

I also ran into a minor nit in Xconfigurator: you have to scroll through the long list of monitors to find the monitor you want, but the selections are at least arranged alphabetically. You can enter the first letter of a monitor name and the list will jump to the first item that begins with that letter, but you can't scroll up or down from there. If you hit Return, it selects that monitor and you move on. So unless your monitor is the first one listed, you're out of luck using the fast method. Granted, that isn't a serious problem, but it is a PITA that should be addressed.

After configuring X, I was set to start the X server. When I did, the familiar GNOME/Enlightenment appeared before me. Good news for KDE users: the Desktop Switching tool works correctly in 6.2. I selected KDE, shut down X, and then restarted it. There was KDE. So far so good.

The last thing left on my plate was to put my home directory back in shape after the install. I extracted it from my tar file on the carefully preserved partition on the second drive, and I was home again. It was 10:20. The complete install and restoration of my work environment took less than an hour, including the time it took to take notes as I went along. Red Hat has made good progress on the install process.

Since solving a few hardware problems, Red Hat 6.2 has performed flawlessly, just as you would expect from a Linux distribution. Please note that if you use KDE as I do, Red Hat doesn't take the same care with installation and appearance as do others. Corel provides better fonts, for example, and a more functional interface. One example: the first time I tried to spellcheck an email in kmail I got an error message complaining that ispell was not installed or configured properly. Sure enough, it had not been installed by default. It only took a second to install, but I'd bet that if it had been a GNOME client, Red Hat would have known it was required and would have made it part of the default install for KDE.

On the other hand, Corel doesn't let you get down to the bare metal during the install, and it is also more difficult to get there after it installs. I never puzzled out, for example, how to prune the list of services under Corel Linux as easily as I did with linuxconf. But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself. Comparative reviews are coming in the future, not today.

Before I sign off this week, I need to tell a tale on myself.

I had serious system problems after installing RH 6.2 the first time. Every day for three days in a row, I suffered a hard crash in X server. After X crashed, I could not even shut the system down. I had to use the BRS to reboot. I crashed one day in Netscape, the next in kmail, and the third in emacs. My first suspicion was that there was a problem with Red Hat 6.2 and X. I explained to Red Hat support people what had happened and asked if they wanted to see the core dump. They said yes, so I compressed the file and sent it to them.

At the same time, I was getting internal compiler errors in gcc, as I tried to do a make on the beta QT lib, which I needed to compile LICQ. I sent in a bug report to the GNU/gcc support team. When I heard back from them -- in short order -- they said they could not reproduce the error on their equipment and suggested that I install the latest version of gcc. So I downloaded gcc-2.95.2 and tried to compile it. Same thing: Internal compiler error. I began to wonder if my first hunch had been all wrong.

Just before installing Red Hat 6.2, I had replaced the mainboard and CPU in my desktop system with a new Epox MVP3G2 ATX style motherboard with 1 MB of onboard cache, and a 500 MHz AMD K6-2 processor. I got a good price on both. Everything else in the system -- the memory, video, sound card, and the NIC, CD, and disk drives -- remained as before. Having problems with both X and gcc at the same time made me think my difficulties were caused by hardware not software.

Sure enough, through a process of elimination, I found that my CPU was defective. I traded it for a new one and immediately saw an end to the crashes and the mysterious internal compiler errors. The moral of the story is never upgrade hardware and software at the same time. That greatly complicates the resolution process if you run into problems afterward.

Joe Barr is a contributing editor at LinuxWorld and a recovering programmer. In addition to writing for LinuxWorld and The Dweebspeak Primer, he is currently working with Nicholas Petreley on a Linux documentation project called The Essential Linux Open Book.

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