back to article Red Hat spruces up 2011's enterprise Linux with RHEL 6.6 Beta

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 hit general availability in July, but that doesn't mean Shadowman has stopped polishing the version 6 branch of its flagship Linux distribution, despite it being nearly four years old. RHEL 6.6, which went into beta testing on Tuesday, is a long-promised maintenance release that will be the …

  1. asdf
    Mushroom

    flame on

    Was going to rant how all the freedesktop.borg and systemd hairball shit RH is pushing is destroying Linux but I will just end up deleting this post after I get massively down voted. Oh well guess there is still *BSD until it becomes impossible to port Linux originated OSS anymore due to massive dependencies on everything else just as RH wants.

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Re: flame on

      You don't have to use a distro that has adopted systemd you know.

      You have the choice.

      RHEL 6 does not (AFAIK) use systemd so you can carry on as before for a number of years with RH support (if that is your choice)

      Then there is the fact that RH does (like the other distros) release the sources.

      That means you are free to engineer a version of RHEL 7 (minus the RH branding) that does not use systemd if you feel so inclined.

      You have that choice.

      1. asdf

        Re: flame on

        >You don't have to use a distro that has adopted systemd you know.

        >You have the choice.

        For now. But that will change. Slackware and Gentoo will probably be one of the last to convert but it will happen due to the tangled dependency web that is being built. I agree this doesn't belong here though as you mention it doesn't even apply to RHEL 6. Just throwing monkey poo at RH because I don't like the direction they are heading. Wolf wearing a wool sweater and all.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Systemd bloat

          I have to agree with you on systemd bloat and tangled dependency. I had switched to arch a few years ago, and when the devs decided to force systemd down on everyone it was a huge pain. Since then, I've cringed every time I had to fight systemd to manage my systems.

          I've since tried to use openrc instead, but systemd is like a parasitic vine, it is so entangled with other modules that it is extremely difficult to replace without breaking dependecies. And as the maintainers of other packages have actively removed sysinit scripts, it is now nearly impossible to replace.

          I do like arch for the quick, rolling updates, but it seems like the only hope now is of either going to slackware for a binary distribution, or to gentoo.

          /rant

          1. asdf

            Re: Systemd bloat

            >but systemd is like a parasitic vine,

            Yep RH named the wrong software kudzu.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Re: flame on

      I've been playing with RHEL 7 since the first public beta and have just finished migrating all of my servers from RHEL 6.5 to 7.0 (I typically try and coincide hardware and OS upgrades so these were all clean installs on fresh hardware). So far so good.

      Having said that, yeah, RHEL moving to systemd was quite an annoyance. Admittedly I haven't actually run into any systemd-specific issues yet and half of my gripes really boil down to me having been deeply rooted into playing with init scripts while the other half being the well-documented nature of the systemd devs (after Linus went on a big rant against one of said devs quite a number of other individuals also expressed their displeasure with the way the systemd maintainers handle bugs).

      The only issues I've had with RHEL 7.0 to date were all installer related. Anaconda kept crashing at random and the interface with its nonsensical tab order was aggravating to navigate keyboard-only (especially when choosing NOT to have your partitions automatically created for you). Which really does suck as I typically do not have a mouse on hand when working on my RHEL systems. At times the installer would initialize not detecting one or more of my network interfaces. Other times it would simply crash when navigating from one menu to another.

      Really. Here's a piece of advice to anyone installing RHEL 7.0; get out of the installer ASAP. Go in, partition your arrays, and get out (sticking to the standard minimal install). Which is what I usually do but I do at times like to also quickly get my hostname, network interfaces and clock configured.

      Annoyingly the RHEL 7.0 installer also seems to omit some options which I am quite adamant were in the RHEL 6.x installers. You no longer have the option of configuring a boot-loader password during install and neither are you asked whether or not you want your clock to be UTC. Minor issues but annoying nonetheless as it just adds onto the number of config files I need to dig into post-install.

      Once I'm out of the bloody installer though it's all smiles. Happy to have finally moved onto newer revisions of numerous packages. It really is frustrating when you're left out on new and useful features because you're a number of versions behind... and I really try to stick with the standard/optional RHEL packages on my mission critical systems in order to ensure hassle-free updates.

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