With the first beta I ran into problems I could not resolve, having to do with display instability. So I wiped the drive and used it to test a few other things. Yet, I was haunted by what I knew could have been. So yesterday I decided to give it a second try.
The Beta2 came out back in July, and developers still haven’t fixed a bug in the installer. On Dells in particular, but other system like mine as well, the installer freezes at some point and refuses to proceed. With Dells at least there seems to be a way to bypass this using the mem=[number of bytes] on the boot line. You calculate your RAM in gigabytes times 1024 cubed to get the correct amount. On my system, none of the various incantations I tried did any good. It froze every time right before the big blue console screen comes up and allows you to choose your language, etc.
So I installed the older Beta1. Of course, it would not update. That’s because the product has been split between workstation and server package sets. After installing and getting things set to my liking, I changed the lines in my /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel-beta.repo file like this:
#baseurl=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/$releasever/$basearch/os/
baseurl=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6Workstation-beta2/$basearch/os/
This allowed me to download the Beta2 as an update, which amounted to a huge 850+ packages. According to posts on the Red Hat lists, this is because Beta2 is now based off Fedora Core 13, instead of FC12 used on the first beta.
I decided to test it by building mostly FC13 SRPMs to get Xine, a much shorter route than going with the Gstreamer stuff and rebuilding Totem. However, the build on Xine-libs puked. I’m not a developer, but the errors indicated to me something was missing from the source packages I could get, so the build was incomplete. So I switched to Mplayer, which was only slightly longer in terms of how many packages it required. I noticed some of what I had to build previously is now included in the RHEL repo. It all seemed a lot less painful, and works just fine. I discovered I had to build gnome-mplayer and gecko-mplayer (replaces mplayerplug-in) to get Firefox to recognize Mplayer.
My point is RHEL 6.0 runs faster than anything I’ve tried on this hardware. As noted previously, it also offers the sharpest font rendering I’ve ever had on my LCD monitor, once I rebuilt the Freetype library with bytecode hinting, and tweaked the fonts-conf stuff. For those of you impressed with eye-candy, the Beta2 has much better artwork, too. They’ve also stabilized the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package and it works very well. Finally, I’ve not had to tweak a thing to play CDs without a hint of popping, distortion or any other problems.
I’ve made a couple of missteps following the wrong advice on setting up Sun/Oracle Java (crashed the system; wouldn’t reboot until I undid it using Ubuntu), but it’s working fine now, and I intend to do my best to keep this working as my preferred workstation OS. Don’t know if I will be able to afford the annual minimal support contract, but I’m pretty sure I can track the updates on the RHSA mailing list and build them from SRPMs. I think it would be worth it.
