[TriLUG] RedHat Linux 7.2

[Ed Hill]

acoliver wrote:

> Sooo.. . has anyone ventured the inevitable and tried RH 7.2 or has everyone
> switched to mandrake ;-) ?  I'm especially interested in upgraders..



Just installed it on my new laptop (ThinkPad A22p) this weekend.
I like 7.2.  It auto-detected and auto-configured everything
(except the LCD where I had to specify "Generic LCD 1600x1200")
and (for everything I've tested so far including PCMCIA, APM
suspend-resume, sound the w/extra volume buttons, etc.) it works
*very* smoothly.

The latest GNOME that they ship (v1.4.0.4) doesn't play as nicely
with Enlightenment as it did in previous versions--but that has
little or nothing to do with Red Hat.  So I set E in my .Xclients
file and run the gnome panel in the background.  That gets me the
WM that *I* want...  ;-)

I like GRUB so far.  I used to forget to run Lilo after editing
lilo.conf and that itsn't an issue with grub.  Also, grub has
optional passwd protection to keep wiseguys from adding "single"
to the boot options.  Cool.

The latest XFree86 v4.1.0 seems great with this chipset.

I like having more than 80x25 on my consoles and was annoyed that
rc.sysinit kept resetting the console to 80x25 when it set the
system font (in spite of my having added "vga=1" to the boot
options).  I tried to edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n to change the
font to something that would work at 80x50 or 80x60 but eventually
gave up and just renamed the file so that it doesn't try to set
the system font anymore.

I'm happy that 7.2 ships with the new GCC v3.x as an option.  I 
haven't had much time to play with it but supposedly the C++ libs 

have been rewritten and will (hopefully) do a better job with 

templates.


And 7.2 its working well with some commercial apps that I use (ie.
LabVIEW) that were originally targeted at RH v6.x or perhaps even
older.  Thats not a surprise, but it is nice to see old stuff not
broken by new versions of <insert-package-name-here>.

cheers,
Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
Post-Doctoral Researcher	    |  Email:	ed at eh3.com
Division of ESE			    |  URL:	http://www.eh3.com
Colorado School of Mines	    |  Phone:  	303-273-3483
Golden, CO  80401		    |  Fax:   	303-273-3311