I keep two harddrives in my system so I can test different OSes while keeping one I can trust. After playing awhile with RHEL 6.0 Beta, I let it go and went back to using Ubuntu Lucid. I had some projects to work on and didn’t want to spend a lot of time building everything from scratch. Today there was some sort of botched update which killed the DNS resolution in Ubuntu. I suppose by tonight or tomorrow I could find others with similar complaints, but I didn’t have time to wait or try to diagnose it myself. After a few attempts, I gave up and rebooted back into RHEL 6.0 Beta.
After the article was posted, I had time to check and see if the full release of RHEL 6.0 was significantly different in package version numbers. I noticed a kernel update, among other things. I decided to try it with the SRPM, since I can’t yet afford the RHN fee.
It took awhile, but some of the packages didn’t build. After some quality time with my favorite search engine, I learned there were some non-default switches necessary to get a default kernel. In this case, you have to run the rpmbuild command so:
rpmbuild -bb --with firmware --with perf kernel.spec
Otherwise, when you try to install the product of this long hard build, you’ll get an error demanding the unbuilt kernel-firmware package. And I don’t really understand what perf does, but the RHSA message indicated it needed updating, so I worked out how to get that, too. I’m sure it’s possible to edit the SPEC file to activate those switches, but I can’t parse the code.
Having so much fun, and now more time to play with it, I’ll be adding a few favorite packages over the next few days, along with catching up on the rest of the RHSA listed replacements. This will be good practice until CentOS 6.0 is released. I’ll be installing that on my laptop and using the experience as the basis for a series of articles on using it as a stable replacement for Windows.
Update: Well, pref didn’t build. I don’t know how the fix that, and I don’t know what difference it makes. Since things are working fine with the new kernel otherwise, I’m not going to worry about it right now.
