[aclug-L] RedHat 7.2

[Bruce Bales <bbales@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Been hearing good things about RedHat 7.2, so I thought I would try it.  Made 
some
notes as I went along - they may be of interest to some of you.

First, it's a big down load, even with cable.  Two CDs worth, each is about 650 
MB.
The mirrors seem pretty busy - best I could manage on the first disk was about
15KB/sec for over 12 hours.  Second disk I found a mirror running ~50KB/s and 
got it
D/Led in less than four hours.

They were both iso images so I made a couple of coasters before I figured out 
how to
burn a usable disk.  An iso CD is worthless.

Picked the 166MHz Pentium with 64 Meg, 1.6gig disk that had RH 6.2 on it and 
tried
to upgrade.  df with 6.2 on / was 889Mb and only 59% used before I started and I
thought it had plenty of room.  Asked if I wanted to change to ext3 FS and I 
said
yes.  Didn't have enough disk space.  First, RH says it needs at least 95MB 
swap.
Then it banged around for 20 or 30 minutes and said it needed 171MB more disk.
There were no options on what to load or not load, so I went for a full install.
(The previous system was still intact, by the way.)

Install for a Gnome workstation with games and entertainment packages defaults 
to
126MB swap and 48MB /boot and needs 1104MB disk - installed 475 packages.  
Kernel is
2.4.7-10.  Ninety percent of the install was from the first CD, but you do need 
the
second one.

Probed for video card and got it right.  Couldn't probe monitor (it's and old
Tandy).  After the install it went back to talking about probing the monitor and
came up with a pretty good 800x600 picture - just not quite in the center and 
not as
big as it could be.  Never did ask for hor. or vert. timings.  I'll work on
XF86Config later.

The install was very easy - easier than 6.2.  On the install, it didn't ask 
about
ext3 so I suppose it converted to that.  Xwindows uses sawfish window manager
(optional twm) - may change to windowmaker later.  Default to select anything 
is two
clicks (UGH! shades of Win95), but it is selectable.  df on / is 1015MB for 74%
used.  Should be room for opera and  a network card and maybe abiword.  (abiword
requires 7.2 and is the main reason I decided to upgrade.)

Xwindows is pretty slow.  When I hit the "start" button it takes 19 seconds to 
get
everything up.  Click on documentation and wait 35 seconds before it is all 
there to
choose from.  Mouse action and even freecell were very slow at first, but seem 
to be
allright now.  Of course it isn't the fastest machine in the world, but 35 
seconds
to bring up a menu?

It has gimp, mozilla, glade, imagemagic, lots of games, and more I'll find 
later.
They got rid of linuxconf and netscape 4.X.

They give you lots of preferences on screensavers, desktops, and themes 
(whatever
they are), but this all seems like painting your attic - who needs it?

This may be wasted on most of you, but someone may find it interesting.

If one decides he wants 7.2, the CDs are worth the $39 RedHat charges - unless 
you
are retired.

bruce


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