upgrade to RH 9??

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I haven't been around much lately. It seems that I'm at the stage of Linux learning where I don't have a million stupid questions to ask, and don't yet know enough to answer questions I see posted. Anyway...

I've seen that RH 9 will be available in another couple of weeks. I'm currently running RH 8, and everything seems to be working fine. But I am considering ordering RH 9 and doing an upgrade. I've never done an upgrade before and want to know if I'm likely to run into any difficulties if I do.
For example:

Will I have to redownload and install NVidia drivers for my video card because of the kernel upgrade?

Will programs that I've downloaded and installed be likely to get messed up if I upgrade since library and other files that those programs depend on will be changed?

Will there be any adverse changes to the IPTables rules I set up? I do know that I'll have to update my Tripwire database, but that's trivial.

Will outdated files be deleted or
Any other unforseen problems?

As I said, my system is working beautifully. I have two of my Linux computers networked and will be tying my other three computers in to my network as soon as I can figure a way of getting cable between the two computer rooms. I am a bit worried about hosing a good setup with the upgrade.

Also, I've been doing Google searches and searching Red Hat's web site and haven't seen a whole lot written about the upcoming release. Anybody know of a site that discusses it?

TIA,

Jim

[Void Main]

Why upgrade if you are happy with your existing system? If you are like me you probably have been upgrading key components (Mozilla, Evolution, etc) so there isn't much of a need to upgrade. Of course you'll get the new version of X and Gnome, etc but that's not of huge importance to me (but then how would I really know without trying the new stuff?).

As far as how will an "upgrade" installation go that's really hard to say without RH 9 actually being here. In my experiences with Red Hat (as far back as pre 3.0) it is almost easiest to back up your data and do a fresh install on a "user" machine. For servers that don't have local users sometimes upgrades would work well but the biggest problems I ever had on upgrades were user stuff (Gnome/KDE profiles etc). So for user machines I just save of my data and configs (/home, /etc, etc) and do a clean install of the new version, create my users and selectively copy my data back in. It takes a little time setting up user profiles (mail settings etc) but I find it's the most reliable. Just my personal opinions...

You certainly will need to recompile your nVidia kernel drivers (or download/install the binary drivers whenever they become available for RH 9). I don't know if the current nVidia drivers work with XFree v4.3 but I think I heard that they do.

[Linux Frank]

There is a review available here which should help a bit.

You will have to wait for NVIDA drivers, again there is no MP3 support, you will have to install that yourself (again). and there is improved support for laptop chipsets. The opinion expressed by the reviewer is that upgrading is not a real requirement, there are no real must haves included now, apart from more recent versions of apps. which would obviously improve your security. And I think they have reversed some of their butchering of KDE last time out.

[Void Main]

I don't believe you will have to wait for the nVidia drivers. The article said you just have to compile them as you do whenever you upgrade your kernel. In RH9 you likely will just download the SRC RPM and do an "rpmbuild --rebuild NV*src.rpm", the same as you would have to do now if you followed my instructions to upgrade to kernel version 2.4.20.

They said the MP3 issue is the same as it was with RH8, just have to install the mpg123 RPM. The omission of MP3 is intentional as was in 8.0. Apparently they are still not clear whether they will be sued at some point in the future for including it so I don't blame them for not including it. It takes 2 seconds to install the MP3 RPM so I don't see it as a big deal.

[Tux]

Anybody know why they are jumping a whole major version. Will we be seeing significant changes. Or is this just part of the 12month product lifecycle approach?

[Void Main]

I don't believe there are any significant changes. I have read that this version is not binary compatible with previous versions which is the primary reason for the major version number increase. But I don't know if that entirely makes sense.

[Calum]

it's a shame if it's not binary compatible, that'll be the cat among the pigeons a bit.

and maybe they are trying to keep up with mandrake and slack in the 'whose got the highest version number' game.

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

Thanks for the input and the link. After reading the link, I guess I'll just sit tight for now with RH 8. It doesn't appear that RH 9 offers a lot of advantages over 8. And I may buy myself some problems. I was thinking that with a new version number and not just a point release that there might be some bigger differences and advantages. I guess I'll wait for the next release.

Thanks again to all!

Jim

[bazoukas]

i will DLoad it and istall it,,,,but i wont use it as my primary OS.
Ill stick with8.0 for a while since I have gone kinda far by configuring it.
I need to learn the base first andby jumping from version to version will kinda delay me from doing that.

Am also playing with Suse 8.1 and even though RH is a bit harder to configure I prefer RH for just that reason.
Not to say that Suse8.1 is bad. Its an awesome distro if you ask me. Suse 8.1 and RH8 share alot of the same apps as well

[TheQuirk]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[Void Main]

If it ain't fixed, don't break it.

Actually, I just shrunk my Red Hat 8.0 partition on my laptop and installed a new Debian SID partition (network install). Just wanted to see how the desktop side of it has changed (the UML install wasn't enough for me).

I first installed blackbox (what a sweet little Window manager), then I installed Gnome 2.2 followed by KDE 3.1. KDE is just too much for the 64MB of RAM in that laptop but Gnome seemed to run fairly well and blackbox screamed. There are many many things that I really like about Debian but there are a just a few quirks here and there that just can't pry me away from RH8 as of yet (on the desktop side).

I have to go with SID (unstable) because Woody (stable) is just too outdated for my taste. I would suggest giving Debian a look if you haven't already. Download a 30MB CD image for doing a network install and only install what you need. I would suggest getting "synaptic" installed if you are unfamiliar with Debian as it is an outstanding graphical package installer. If you install KDE "kpackage" is a nice wrapper for apt as well but it's slower than a dog on my laptop, synaptic is not.

The first time you install it the installer may seem difficult compared to other distros that you may have used but I had no problem figuring everything out without looking at any documentation (documentation is for wussies). I guess I have had prior experience installing Debian though, but that was on Sun Sparc 20 servers a few years back, and the installation was quite different.

[ZiaTioN]

I have considered going through the dreaded re-configure in order to upgrade myself but from what I have read not much seems to have changed. I am somewhat happy with 8.0 but have just now got it that way. initially I was dissapointed with it compared to 7.3 but dealt with it because we can't live in the past. =P

Anyway I had a question here somewhere, oh yeah, on RH 8 when I boot into Xserver and it is all up and happy I try to launch Mozilla first thing and it takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes to even open the window. That is no exaggeration either. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this. My system consists of a p3 733 and 512 MEG of SDRAM so I do not think that my system is the cause of this.

Of course 733 isnt that fast anymore these days but for Linux is should be screaming. This is of course my slowest system and I know friends who still run Linux off of old 200 and 300 MHZ cpu's.

I have also never had any luck in setting up the print sharing with a windows box that is hosting the printer in this distro either. Just for a little background of my network I have a 733 MHZ Linux box (the one is question) , 1.4 GIG AMD (windows box) , 1.8 GIG P4 (Windows box) , 2.0 GIG P4 (Windows laptop) and a 1 gig iMAC running MAC OS X.

The 1.8 GIG p4 is the host of the printer and I have of course set up printer sharing amongst all the windows boxes fairly easy and have even managerd to set up the iMAC for printer sharing with the Windows box also. The process of setting up the MAC to printer share is very very simialr with the process to set up the RH bax but I still could not get it to work.

They are similar because as I am sure you guys know the new MAC OS X is BSD (UNiX) based.

Anyway those are my probs, hope they are not too demanding for a first post!

[Void Main]

Sounds like you have problems if Mozilla takes that long to start. It takes just a few seconds on my system. I have an AMD 1600 w/512MB and Red Hat screams on it. In fact I think my P-100 Laptop with 64MB of RAM would beat that time.

Don't know what to say other than do you have any other processes hung up eating all of your CPU? Is your hard drive tuned properly? RH usually sets up hard drives pretty well on the latest releases so you shouldn't have to fine tune it but if you run "# hdparm -tT /dev/hda" it will tell you how your drive is performing. You can run "top" to see if any processes are hung up and how much idle time you have. Another thing where I have found noticable performance increases are in a kernel upgrade (but nothing that will fix the kind of problem you are having).

For printing I run a JetDirect network device to run my HP DeskJet printer. I have a queue for it on my RH9 box where all my other machines print to. I have Samba configured on it so my Windows VMware sessions can print to it (the Windows VMware sessions that I rarely start any more).

[Linux Frank]

Ouch... I have an AMD 450 and it takes seconds to bring up mozilla.

I'd suggest having a look at your network card configurations, although that doesn't seem to make sense, as far as I know mozilla doesn't rely on the hardware to start up. But I think I had something similar beause I had a network card configured but the ISA slot was faulty, so it would hang until timeout of the hardware startup.

Question : Does it always take forever to start mozilla, is it just first time, or is it just first time directly after a startup. Are you running lots of services in the background?