Redhat Enterprise Linux Sucks!

[Kenazo]

EDIT:
OK, If you plan on running using onboard SATA on something like the SK8V, don't bother thinking about it. Having a ah heck of a time getting it working, using either the promise or the via SATA raid onboard. Looks like we'll be downgrading to Redhat 9, which does have driver support for the RAID this board comes with. Just a word of warning.


<- Linux newbie that isn't going to be doing the install, just needs to make sure if this works (for selling purposes)

the important system specs:
Asus Sk8V
2x36gig Raptors
radeon 9200se video
Opteron 144


Here's the question, will the x86 version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS work on this system, or does it need to be the AMD64 version? Or, is linux like Windows where you can run the 32 bit version or the 64? Would Red Hat WS have drivers (or whatever linux uses) for this board?

Also, I've been reading in a few places that Red Hat seems to have poor support for gigabit lan and SATA (not sure if just for this board), is this the case, and if so where would I find driver support for it?

 

[drag]

Well I can't be certian about the WS edition since I have no experiance with it, but I try my best.

Redhat should have a AMD64 version of it aviable, if not they soon will be. Opteron is pretty much the same as the AMD64 for this purpose, just differently marketed cpu's mostly. Maybe with some extra reliability features and support for multiple cpus I am guessing.

Linux has had good support for AMD64 for a long time now. Suse was the first distro to release AMD64 versions and has been doing it since Opterons have been publicaly aviable. The unix-like nature of Linux makes porting to other archatectures much easier then something like Windows and has been using in 64-bit native modes on several other more obscure types of 64bit proccessors in the past, such as the Alpha or the Sparc-64's.

Redhat 9.0 would have some issues with SATA, but Redhat 9.0 is pretty much obsolete nowadays and nobody should be installing it unless they have to. The pace of developement of Linux OSes is just to fast. The free version is now known as Fedora to diferentiate "official" and supported versions like the Redhat WS and server editions.

The newer versions of Linux that have come out should have little issue with the SATA drives.

The main one (I think) is going to be your motherboard. Is the Asus Sk8V a VIA chipset or a Nvidia chipset? I think your going to have a easier time if it's ViA, but Nvidia stuff should work too. The difference is that, maybe, you may have to download extra drivers for it from Nvidia's website.

But I realy don't know about WS, it could include stuff that the free versions don't. Sometimes stuff like Nvidia's drivers can't be given away for free because of liscencing restrictions. I just don't realy know for certian.

Either way if your realy curious, and since your buying a officially supported product your best bet is going to come from talking to Redhat directly. After all that support is what your paying for when you get a liscence from Redhat.

Also, like Windows, tradititional 32bit Linux has no trouble at all running on amd64/opterons in compatability mode. Also as long as you have 32bit binaries aviable, linux can run 32bit software even when the rest of the OS is native 64bit with no performance penalty. (except the normal things like file size and memory limitations due to the nature of 32bit computers)

 

[CTho9305]

First off, normal x86 OSes should work out of the box on AMD64 processors.

Originally posted by: drag
Opteron is pretty much the same as the AMD64 for this purpose, just differently marketed cpu's mostly.

AMD64 is an instruction set, implemented by the Athlon 64, Athlon FX, and Opteron processors. Something that runs on one will run on all.

Maybe with some extra reliability features and support for multiple cpus I am guessing.

Extra hyper transport links, extra cache, up to 8-way SMP, etc.

Linux has had good support for AMD64 for a long time now. Suse was the first distro to release AMD64 versions and has been doing it since Opterons have been publicaly aviable. The unix-like nature of Linux makes porting to other archatectures much easier then something like Windows and has been using in 64-bit native modes on several other more obscure types of 64bit proccessors in the past, such as the Alpha or the Sparc-64's.

I don't think it's the "unix-like nature", but rather the whole goal of portability of the kernel, and the fact that it's written mostly in C (which can be compiled on pretty much anything). For what it's worth, NT (and even win2k betas) actually ran on a variety of architectures.

Redhat 9.0 would have some issues with SATA, but Redhat 9.0 is pretty much obsolete nowadays and nobody should be installing it unless they have to. The pace of developement of Linux OSes is just to fast. The free version is now known as Fedora to diferentiate "official" and supported versions like the Redhat WS and server editions.

No reason you can't update the kernel on an older distro. It's pretty easy.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
First off, normal x86 OSes should work out of the box on AMD64 processors.

Originally posted by: drag
Opteron is pretty much the same as the AMD64 for this purpose, just differently marketed cpu's mostly.

AMD64 is an instruction set, implemented by the Athlon 64, Athlon FX, and Opteron processors. Something that runs on one will run on all.

Maybe with some extra reliability features and support for multiple cpus I am guessing.

Extra hyper transport links, extra cache, up to 8-way SMP, etc.

Linux has had good support for AMD64 for a long time now. Suse was the first distro to release AMD64 versions and has been doing it since Opterons have been publicaly aviable. The unix-like nature of Linux makes porting to other archatectures much easier then something like Windows and has been using in 64-bit native modes on several other more obscure types of 64bit proccessors in the past, such as the Alpha or the Sparc-64's.

I don't think it's the "unix-like nature", but rather the whole goal of portability of the kernel, and the fact that it's written mostly in C (which can be compiled on pretty much anything). For what it's worth, NT (and even win2k betas) actually ran on a variety of architectures.

Windows realy hasn't run on a lot of stuff. The NT system was ported to run in Alpha, but it ran in 32bit mode, not 64bit. W2k had a beta version that ran on Aplha proccessors, but had the same limitations of NT and it never went mainstream.

Unix by design was specificly made to be portable. It's not so much the physical layout or whatnot by it has a sudo-philosophy that dictates that (for instance) compatabilty and portablity outweighs performance and ease of use. So that if a programmer had to make a choice between making a program or system portable vs performance they would always choose portability. Computers get faster so slow programs today will seem fast tomorrow. (for instance the enlightenment window manager was considured hardcore feature-rich when I first started using Linux. It ran pretty doggadly on 200mhz and 400mhz proccessors, but now it's considure a light-weight window manager)

That sort of thing is what makes unix unix. And it pays off when you have situations like AMD64 were you have Suse working with AMD to release enterprise-editions server OSes even before the CPU's were aviable vs Microsoft which still hasn't released a stable version of Windows to run on AMD64. And Suse is absolutely tiny comprared to the monolith that is MS.

Redhat 9.0 would have some issues with SATA, but Redhat 9.0 is pretty much obsolete nowadays and nobody should be installing it unless they have to. The pace of developement of Linux OSes is just to fast. The free version is now known as Fedora to diferentiate "official" and supported versions like the Redhat WS and server editions.

No reason you can't update the kernel on an older distro. It's pretty easy.

Well for enterprise editions you have to be carefull. Redhat does a lot of work customizing and tweaking kernels to make sure that their OSes are certified to run certian software, like Oracle or other closed source software. Stuff like 100% posix compliant threads and backports of advanced features from experimental kernels into stable kernels.

That sort of thing.

So if your using a enterprise edition on a perfessional level your going to have to do some carefull testing to make sure that your kernel is going to work well with all the software that your going to run before you take it to production.

 

[n0cmonkey]

NT ran on x86, Alpha, PPC, and MIPS.

 

[Nothinman]

Unix by design was specificly made to be portable

Which explains why it' so easy to install Solaris on a MIPS machine or Tru64 or a x86 machine or Irix on an Alpha machine...

Well for enterprise editions you have to be carefull. Redhat does a lot of work customizing and tweaking kernels to make sure that their OSes are certified to run certian software, like Oracle or other closed source software. Stuff like 100% posix compliant threads and backports of advanced features from experimental kernels into stable kernels.

Actually some of RedHat's patches have broken things too, I believe they even changed/broke an API at one point with their patches. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but the fact remains that software made to run on RH kernels may not run at all on stock or other vendor's kernels.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Unix by design was specificly made to be portable

Which explains why it' so easy to install Solaris on a MIPS machine or Tru64 or a x86 machine or Irix on an Alpha machine...

Well for enterprise editions you have to be carefull. Redhat does a lot of work customizing and tweaking kernels to make sure that their OSes are certified to run certian software, like Oracle or other closed source software. Stuff like 100% posix compliant threads and backports of advanced features from experimental kernels into stable kernels.

Actually some of RedHat's patches have broken things too, I believe they even changed/broke an API at one point with their patches. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but the fact remains that software made to run on RH kernels may not run at all on stock or other vendor's kernels.

Ya redhat had some major f-ups in the past with this sort of thing. Hopefully with 2.6 mature then they wouldn't have to do this sort of thing very much any more, because I suppose it's irritating to deal with.

 

[lowpost]

Essentially, Fedora is the preview of newer red hat releases. Fedora has an AMD64 release out already, so if redhat doesn't support it yet, I doubt it will be too long before they do.

Well, googling has shown me that it is already supported by RH EL WS.

 

[Panther505]

It will run (I say as I sit here typing on one -- AMD64 dualie that is). There may or may not be some issues with SATA. If the SATA coontroller is a discrete part (ie not on the AMD Southbridge) then you will have to make sure that it is supported. If you are using SCSI then you will just have to ensure that the SCSI is support. The only problem that I have found is the PITA way that RH 'stay back' when they release the updates to the RHEL line. <rant> I *really* wish that they had updated (or would update) KDE to 3.2.1 as it would save a lot of my time having to install and compile it </rant>. But other then that ...


Yes the 32 bit version will run BUT if you step up in the RAM dept > 4GB you may see some strangeness if you are running the 32Bit as the MMR tables sometimes get flakey and that can cause issues.


Panther

 

[Kenazo]

Originally posted by: Panther505
It will run (I say as I sit here typing on one -- AMD64 dualie that is). There may or may not be some issues with SATA. If the SATA coontroller is a discrete part (ie not on the AMD Southbridge) then you will have to make sure that it is supported. If you are using SCSI then you will just have to ensure that the SCSI is support. The only problem that I have found is the PITA way that RH 'stay back' when they release the updates to the RHEL line. <rant> I *really* wish that they had updated (or would update) KDE to 3.2.1 as it would save a lot of my time having to install and compile it </rant>. But other then that ...


Yes the 32 bit version will run BUT if you step up in the RAM dept > 4GB you may see some strangeness if you are running the 32Bit as the MMR tables sometimes get flakey and that can cause issues.


Panther

The onboard SATA is:

2 x SATA using VIA SouthBridge
2 x SATA using Promise PDC20378 RAID controller

 

[Panther505]

The VIA *may* work... but I know know as I am not using VIA on this system. Promise may be hit or miss either. Sorry that I can't be more help but my suggestion would be to try a knoppix on the system and see if it boots. Then lspci and spend some quality time with google. That is the only way, short of installing the AMD64 version to see if it is supported..

 

[drag]

The best bet is simply to ask redhat. They will know exactly weither or not it will work easily.

Unless somebody here is running Redhat WS and Via 64bit motherboard with sata already.

 

[Kenazo]

added edit

 

[drag]

Instead of using Redhat 9 try to use Fedora, it's better.

 

[Kenazo]

Originally posted by: drag
Instead of using Redhat 9 try to use Fedora, it's better.

isn't that basically a community version of RHEL? In which case, I'd still be stuck for drivers.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Kenazo

Originally posted by: drag
Instead of using Redhat 9 try to use Fedora, it's better.

isn't that basically a community version of RHEL? In which case, I'd still be stuck for drivers.

RH 9 is almost dead.

 

[drag]

Redhat 9 is obsolete, or at least on the way their

With Fedora you are going to have much more freedom to change the OS around and not worry about breaking anything as compared to RHEL, since it remains truer to it's free software roots. RHEL has to worry about maintaining 100% compatablity with many of the closed source companies that has their software certified and is supported to run on RHEL.

For instance if your Sata stuff doesn't quite work out you can download and compile your own custom kernel and install it without having to worry about it so much. Or you can install a older kernel, or a newer kernel. It's up to you completely.

If you want go ahead and install Redhat 9, it won't kill you.

But you can leave your options open like this:

check out this page

If you check that out they have Redhat 9 repositories along with Fedora Core1's. Eventually when Core2 comes out then they should have that aviable on the ftp servers, too.

So install Redhat 9. Install Apt, check your /etc/apt/source.list and make sure that all the entries are the ones for Redhat 9.
Then upgrade Redhat 9 against the repositiories. Like this:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

That will get your OS current. It will install any patches or security fixes easily. This will repair things like the ssh vunerabilities or the SSL vunerabilities, and bring your system up to date.

You can also use Yum if you want. The admins I work with are big Redhat guys and they use Yum, but I like debian so I am partial to apt, so whatever you want.

The only thing to watch out for is it will install newer kernels, so pay attention to your bootloader (I think the default is lilo so you look at /etc/lilo.conf) and make sure that you have entries for older kernels incase one of the newer ones doesn't like you SATA setup.

Then later when your comfortable you can modify the entries in /etc/apt/source.list to fedora repositories instead of Redhat 9 ones and do a:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

And that will upgrade your system to Fedora from Redhat.

Personally I used Apt to update Redhat 8 to Redhat 9 and that went smoothly, so going from nine to core1 shouldn't be that big of a deal, I think. I am going to try to do that tonight once I get my hands back on my parent's old computer. (I installed Redhat on that when their WinME install took a crap and I replaced it with Redhat 8.0 when the Compaq recover disks refused to work. I used the repositories from Freshrpm.net, however the Fedora reposities are of higher quality then Freshrpm's since these are "official packages")

The only thing I am shaky about is trying to using Apt to upgrade from a 32bit version to a 64bit OS.

Fedora Core1 does have a AMD64 bit port aviable.


I have nothing against Redhat 9.0, its a great OS. Just keep in mind that with Linux it's a good idea to use the latest versions that are practical.