(Note: This is not about server use, but desktop use and building custom packages for such use.)
The long-awaited beta for RHEL 7 has arrived. You’ll have to wade through some stuff to get an account so you can apply for a free test drive, but I think it’s worth it. The test drive means free access to the RHEL repository for a month while you evaluate it.
This thing is fast! I find KDE the lesser of evils, so I selected that as my default desktop. Already I’ve rebuilt the Freetype library for bytecode hinting, along with Joe, GKrellM and GKrellWeather. I’m not sure I am ready to face building the means to play MP3 files just yet, but I may do that later. I suspect the EPEL Project won’t support this release of RHEL for a couple more months yet, but the source RPMs for FC19 build just fine so far. This is based on FC19.
The graphical installer is pretty nice, but you’ll need to be ready for the usual elitist assumptions about things. This is not for a common user; it’s a commercial industrial system that can be adapted for desktop use. Sane defaults do exist but not for every detail of the process. The partition manager has all the usual controls, but they aren’t displayed where you might expect. The simplest thing to do is, when the installer tells you there is no room, select “reclaim” and this opens a rather simplified dialog for deleting old partitions, etc.
You must allow the installer to check the install media each time or it won’t let you proceed very far. By default this is done the first time you boot. While you can hit ESC to stop it, you’ll run into a barrier later in the process when you select your install source. You can run the check then, but you will do it one way or another.
Be sure to change the default software selection. It gives you the most basic CLI and little else. Pick a DE: KDE or GNOME. At the time of install, there weren’t any full Yum groups for development libraries. The group lists had not been populated on the repo or the disk. Still, I was able to download and install whatever I needed to fulfill the dependencies for the few things I’ve built so far. That includes a lot of GTK2 stuff for GKrellM.
In past incarnations there had been an option to set up networking during installation, but this time I couldn’t find it. I had to wait for the desktop and enable networking through the Network Manager and set it to start automatically. Once that was done, it was a bit of tussle to authenticate the registration so I could connect to the repositories.
Kmail is clobbered by a patch in the default package build for KDE-PIM. Instead, Evolution is installed. As usual, it is buggy and locked up the moment I tried to download mail. It was pretty hard to kill, but I finally found the process number and had to use “-9” before it would die. I built Alpine for the moment and will attempt to rebuild KDE-PIM after changing the patch. There may be bugs in it, but I have never liked Evolution.
I’d have to build Chromium from source, but with such frequent updates, I decided to just take Google Chrome and let someone else worry about it. You have to keep in mind the whole process for RHEL is corporate thinking. I love the stability and longevity, but I also want what I want. I would be building an awful lot of other stuff from source were I to keep this. You can get Flashplayer as before, but serious media player support for everything else would be quite an undertaking.
Not too sure I want to keep this, but I’ll give it a shot. If I can get things working suitably, I’ll try to save up for a license to keep it.
Update: Busted. I was unable to rebuild the basic KDE-PIM package because the SRPM had a truncated patch file that wouldn’t build. There was nothing I could do to find an alternative, since FC19 has both an older and newer version, but nothing compatible. Then RHN started giving me a bunch of static and I gave up. Nice try, but it’s unusable and I blew my freebie for the year with Red Hat.
