|
|
Last update: 26 September 2002 16:14 Follow up article A follow up article to this can be found here. It tells about a server installation from scratch using NFS. Summary After the release of Mandrake 8.2 and SuSE 8.0, Red Hat is shipping an operating system upgrade of Red Hat 7.2, called Red Hat 7.3. Below I will give my experience of the upgrade of a Red Hat 7.2 system to 7.3. In the coming days/weeks I will add new information on how RH 7.3 is doing in day to day work. The version I downloaded consists of 3 discs with a supplemental documentation disc. Hardware
The PC consists of the following hardware: Start of the install At 22:20 I rebooted RH 7.2, and the installer booted from disc. I pressed enter to go the a graphical install mode. Anaconda probed for the hardware in the machine, and at 22:21:30 a graphical welcome screen appeared I pressed the next button and selected English as the install language. I selected the Generic 101-key PC keyboard, which is at least 10 years old, but has a nice keyclick that is not available with modern keyboards. The selected keyboard layout was U.S. English, and I enabled dead keys to be able to enter special characters. Then a 3 button ps/2 mouse was selected. At 22:25 I chose to upgrade my existing RH 7.2 installation. I selected partition hde5 on my 80GB hard drive as the root file system, and selected to customize the packages to be upgraded. After that I got the possibility to upgrade ext2 partitions to ext3. I choose not to upgrade, because all RH 7.2 partitions are already ext3, and the other partitions are on other hard drives which are nominated to be cleaned. I use grub as a boot loader, and was given to update it, skip the update or create a new boot loader configuration. I choose to update it, as recommended by the install procedure. At 22:33 the packages were read, after that it was looking which packages needed to be upgraded and at 22:38 I got the possibility to select individual packages. I added additional packages which looked useful, and ended up with 3,822M as the total install size. I used the flat view, and missed the possibility to select all packages. When the tree view is used, it's possible to (un)select a total group, like documentation. At 22:58 it was checking the dependencies for the selected packages. The installation of the packages A couple of packages were needed to satisfy the dependencies, which increased the total install size to 3,867 M. At 23:00 the actual upgrade started. It first transferred the install image to the hard drive, after which the RPM transaction started. 1,325 packages will be installed, and after a long installation preparation time the the first package was installed at 23:13. It estimated that it will take an hour to install all packages. At 23:38 the second disc was inserted, and the upgrade continued. More than half an hour later, at 00:15 the last disc was inserted. Selection of installed software A random selection of the software installed includes KDE 3.0 (3.0.3 released), Qt 3.03 (3.05 released), XFree86 4.2, GNOME 1.4 (GNOME 2.0.1 released), Mozilla 0.9.9 (security update available, released on 14 May 2002, 1.1 released), Evolution 1.03 (security update available, 1.08 available from Ximian), nautilus 1.06, gimp 1.2.3, gphoto2 2.0, vim 6.1 (unpatched, current version 6.1.197), kernel 2.4.18 (already two times updated by Red Hat, currently 2.4.18-5 released on 18 June 2002), glibc 2.2.5, netscape 4.79 (7.0 released), OpenMotif 2.2 (not recommended, please use 2.1.30 for development. Contact us for more information), apache 1.3.23 (updated to 1.3.23-14 on 20 June 2002 to fix a serious security problem) etc. The reboot At 0:29 all 1325 packages were installed. Thereafter the boot loader was updated and a boot floppy was created. At 0:31 the system rebooted. I enabled the booting from the hard disc again, and the system booted without a graphical boot screen to my relief. After that the graphical login screen appeared at 0:35. It had a clock on it like I had seen on other distributions. KDE 3.0 started and the package manager Gnome RPM started, don't know why. The internet connection by cable was still working. In /var/www/html some files were added, e.g. index.html, leading to the fact that my own index.php was not used. The RealPlayer still worked so I could look at the latest news broadcast as I was used to. Printing I have a HP OfficeJet 3200m, which can be connected with an USB cable to the PC. It's a PostScript level 2 compliant printer. I installed it using setup, Printer Configuration, and it prints ok. The test page was correct, it had lines on it and distances, so you could see quickly if everything appeared on the right spot. Pricing Red Hat 7.3 can be downloaded from the internet. It exists of 3 application discs which are all used during installation, and a documentation disc. The personal edition for individual users has a MSRP of $59.95, which includes 30 days of Red Hat Network Basic Service and Web-based support. The professional edition for small businesses has an MSRP of $199.95, which adds a systems administrator's CD, 90 days of Red Hat Network Basic Service, 60-day Web-based support and telephone support. Red Hat is also offering competitive and customer upgrade rebates, including $20 off Red Hat Linux 7.3 Professional and $10 off Red Hat Linux 7.3 Personal. The rebate is only applicable for North America (obsolete link removed, offer valid till 15 October 2002) and UK or German versions (offer valid till 31 October 2002). You will Need Red Hat 6.2 or newer, SuSE 7.3 or 8.0 and Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2 to qualify for the upgrade. Download If you want to try Red Hat 7.3 your self, you can download it or buy it online or in your local store. All the information you need if you want to download it yourself can be found here. Updates The first security fix for Red Hat 7.3 is already available from Red Hat. The update closes a security issue in mod_python which allows the publisher handler to use modules which have only been indirectly imported. The advisory can be found here. All Red Hat 7.3 updates can be found below, updated 10 September 2002: To update your Red Hat system when you are on line on the internet, up2date can be used which retrieves needed packages for you and installs them. The last few days the service was not available because I don't pay for it and the server was under high load, but on May 10th it worked again. The email service is not very quick, after having updated Mozilla on May 15, an email about the availability of updated packages only arrived at May 18. Probably this had to do with giving mirrors the chance to be updated before the advisory arrives, but with security problems a 2 or 3 day delay can be fatal. Problems
I didn't find many problems so far. One was with passwords that expire: The Linux Documentation Project HOWTOs and FAQs are no longer on the Red Hat 7.3 documentation CD. The LDP can be found at http://www.tldp.org. Remarks When using "setup" to configure the X server (Xconfigurator is started) inside a X Window System environment, this is not detected. A new X server is started next to the current X server, and Xconfigutator thinks that the startup didn't work. Expected behaviour: Xconfigurator will issue an error when it is started inside a X Window System environment. To do: write a problem report about it. Conclusion Everything I tried still worked, if I will have other experiences I will add it to a new article. Looks like the risk of updating to a new version of a distribution worked well this time.
Aschwin Marsman Please mail your updates/questions/reaction on your own install experience, then I can add them to this page if the information is also useful to others. Links
Follow up article A follow up article to this can be found here. It tells about a server installation from scratch using NFS. Author background In 1990 I started using UNIX systems during study, and did my first Linux installation in Febrary 1993, a SLS distribution on several floppy discs with a 0.9x kernel. After SLS was no longer maintained, I switched to Slackware, which was followed by Red Hat as the main operating system. Also other distributions were tried and used like Debian, Mandrake and SuSE, of which version 7.3 was recently installed on my new acquired laptop. I worked on a project basis at several projects in the Netherlands on e.g. wafer stepper software, software for cancer treatment, SCADA software, industrial software, military software etc. In 2001 I started my own company called aYniK Software Solutions, which delivers software development expertise on Linux and UNIX systems using C and C++ among others. I am currently working on air traffic control software for airports in Europe and Asia. A profile (currently dutch only) can be found here. |
|
Linux ® is a registered trademark of Linus
Torvalds. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.
aYniK Software Solutions make no guarantees, explicit or implicit,
about the contents of this site. Use at your own risk.
Copyright © 2001-2008 aYniK Software Solutions. All rights reserved.