Info for this document came from RedHat 8.0 RELEASE-NOTES RedHat 9.0 RELEASE-NOTES Installation Changes o isolinux is now used for booting the CD. o It is now possible to specify the boot order of your drives. To access this function, choose to configure advanced boot loader options from the graphical installation program. o It is now possible to install from an IEEE-1394 (FireWire(TM)) CD-ROM device. It requires being able to boot from the CD-ROM device. Installing to a IEEE-1394 hard drive is not supported. o The mkbootdisk utility now supports creating a bootable ISO-9660 image. This is useful if the boot image is too large to fit on a floppy (for example, if LVM is used). See RELEASE-NOTES for more info. o Text mode installations using a serial terminal work best when the terminal supports UTF-8. Under UNIX and Linux, Kermit supports UTF-8. For Windows, Kermit '95 works well. Non-UTF-8 capable terminals will work as long as only English is used during installation. An enhanced serial display can be used by passing "utf8" as a boot-time option to the installation program. For example: linux console=ttyS0 utf8 o There have been issues observed when upgrading Red Hat Linux 6., 7., 8.0, and 9 systems running Ximian GNOME. The issue is caused by version overlap between the official Red Hat Linux RPMs and the Ximian RPMs. This configuration is not supported by Red Hat nor Fermi. Kickstart o Two commands are available in the installation environment which can be useful for creating dynamic kickstart files. The list-harddrives command will list the available block devices by device name, with the size (in units of 1k) in the second column. This command enables the creation of a kickstart include file with partitioning commands based on the probed hardware. The other command is kudzu-probe, which lists all the common types of hardware that are detected. This can be useful to adjust the behavior of a kickstart script through kickstart include files based on the detected hardware configuration. Distribution General Notes o Red Hat Linux 9 includes the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL), a new implementation of POSIX threads for Linux. This library provides performance improvements and increased scalability for i686 or better processors. This thread library is designed to be binary compatible with the old LinuxThreads implementation; however, applications that rely on the places where the LinuxThreads implementation deviates from the POSIX standard will need to be fixed. See RELEASE-NOTES for more info. o Red Hat Linux now installs using UTF-8 (Unicode) locales by default in languages other than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. This has been known to cause various issues: - Line drawing characters in applications such as make menuconfig do not always appear correctly in certain locales. - On the console, the latarcyrheb-sun16 font is used for best Unicode coverage. Due to the use of this font, bold colors are not available. - Certain third party applications may not work with UTF-8. o The OpenOffice.org office suite is now included. o Due to patent licensing, and conflicts between such patent licenses and the licenses of application source code, MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 (mp3) support has been removed from applications in Red Hat Linux such as XMMS and noatun. Red Hat suggests the use of Ogg Vorbis(TM), an open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free compressed audio format. We have added xmms-mpg123 to give mp3 support. o dhclient (from the dhcp package) is now the default DHCP client. o GNOME 2.0 is now included and contains the following improvements and features over previous versions: - User-configurable support for anti-aliased fonts - Fixes to address flickering application window issues - Images are composited onto backgrounds with full alpha blending - Usability improvements, including dragging application windows to other workspaces using the Workspace Switcher applet, support for scrolling in long menus, and more - New, streamlined help application - Rewritten terminal application supporting tabs and personal profiles - Considerable performance improvements, particularly in the Nautilus file manager - Control panels have been simplified considerably - Full keyboard navigation of the user interface - GNOME 2.0 uses Unicode natively, allowing users to create and manipulate documents in multiple languages o The GNOME Display Manager is now the default login and session manager. If you are upgrading from Red Hat Linux 7.3 or earlier and want to continue using your configured display manager (such as KDM or XDM), then you must add the following line to your /etc/sysconfig/desktop file. For KDM: DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE" For XDM: DISPLAYMANAGER="XDM" o Red Hat Linux now uses Xft for fonts in GNOME and KDE, which uses fontconfig for configuring fonts. There are two font subsystems, each with different characteristics: - The original (15+ year old) subsystem is referred to as the "core X font subsystem". Fonts rendered by this subsystem are not anti-aliased, are handled by the X server, and have names like: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1 The newer font subsystem is known as "fontconfig", and allows applications direct access to the font files. Fontconfig is often used along with the "Xft" library, which allows applications to render fontconfig fonts to the screen with antialiasing. Fontconfig uses more human-friendly names like: Luxi Sans-10 At the present time, applications using the Qt 3 or GTK 2 toolkits (which would include KDE and GNOME applications) use the fontconfig font subsystem; most everything else uses the core X fonts. In the future, Red Hat may support only fontconfig in place of the XFS font server as the default local font access method. NOTE: Two exceptions to the font subsystem usage outlined above are OpenOffice.org (which uses its own font rendering technology), and Mozilla (which uses fontconfig, but not GTK 2). o New features in XFree86 include: - Xcursor - New mouse cursor code, allowing color, antialiased, alpha blended (translucency), animated, themeable, multi-size mouse pointers to be used. - ATI Radeon 9000, 9100, FireGL 8700, 8800 3D/2D/Xv support is now available. ATI Radeon 9500 Pro and 9700 Pro, as well as ATI FireGL X1 and Z1 are now supported 2D-only. Support for over 30 additional ATI Rage 128 chipsets have been added to this release, which should cover all existing Rage 128 chipsets now. - Intel i845, i852, i855, and i865 integrated video support (2D/3D/Xvideo), and improved Intel i830 video support. Many bugs have been fixed, as well as many workarounds for broken laptop and motherboard BIOSs that limit memory to 1Mb. - New support for NVIDIA GeForce 4, nForce, GeForce 2 Go, and various other NVIDIA hardware. Also, the nv driver has been enhanced to attempt to autodetect unknown NVIDIA chips that aren't officially supported, but can probably be coaxed to work anyway (albeit not officially supported) by treating them similarly to one of the other supported chips in the same family. The nv driver, as in previous releases, remains 2D only. - Updated Savage driver which supports the newest Savage video chipsets, and fixes various bugs. - A brand new driver for the National Semiconductor Geode chipset, nsc, is provided. - Many new input drivers including fpit, palmax, ur98 and others have been added. - Legacy XFree86 3.3.6 video hardware support has now been removed from the distribution and is no longer supported. XFree86 4.3.0 is now the only X server shipped with Red Hat Linux. Hardware which has previously defaulted to using XFree86 3.3.6, now defaults to the native XFree86 4.x driver for the given video chipset if XFree86 4.x has any native support for the given chip. If there is no native driver in 4.x for a particular video chip, or if the native driver does not work properly, then the "vesa" driver will be used by default which uses the VESA Video BIOS Extension support present in the card's own BIOS to provide minimal 2D video support. Hardware for which neither of the above will work properly, are configured to use the VGA driver. - The XFree86 4.x configuration file is now /etc/X11/XF86Config, which replaces /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 which was used in previous releases. The XF86Config-4 file is a backward compatibility feature that XFree86.org added to XFree86 4.x in order to allow distribution vendors to be able to ship both 4.x and 3.3.6 and and allow them to coexist even though the config file formats are different. - The Mesa libGL and libGLU shared libraries previously included as part of the XFree86-libs package are now separated into two new sub-packages, XFree86-Mesa-libGL and XFree86-Mesa-libGLU. o The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been updated to version 3.2.2 and features the following improvements and features: - Block reordering using branch prediction - Profile-driven optimizations - Further ISO C99 and ISO C++98 feature additions - Tree inlining of the C front end for further optimization during compilation - Improvements in AMD Athlon(TM) CPU and Intel IA-32 code generation performance - the preprocessor is 10-50% faster than the GCC 3.0 preprocessor - Dwarf-2 (which includes Dwarf-3 extensions) has replaced Stabs as the default debugging format for most ELF platforms - Support for debug information for macros has been added Note that because of significant ABI fixes, the C++ compiler included in GCC 3.2 produces code that is not binary compatible with previous versions of GCC, including versions 3.1.x and 2.96. Additionally, there are ABI fixes for the C compiler related to long long bitfields and where __attribute__((aligned (xxx))) type definitions used as base type bitfields work differently than using __attribute__((aligned (xxx))) directly on the bitfield. Note also that binary compatibility is not guaranteed for future C++ compiler releases, as the need for standards compliant compilers may result in changes to the ABI. o The GNU Compiler for the Java(TM) Programming Language (GCJ) has been updated to version 3.2 and includes the following improvements and features over previous releases: - Overall improvement in compiler performance and compatibility as well as parallel make support - Support for RMI, java.lang.ref.*, javax.naming, and javax.transaction - Property files and other system resources can be compiled into executables which use libgcj using the new gcj --resource feature - Support for built-in functions for known methods, such as Math.cos - JNI and CNI invocation interfaces are now implemented, so gcj-compiled Java code can now be called from a C/C++ application - Automatic removal of redundant array-store checks in some common cases - The --no-store-checks optimization method is now available. This can be used to omit runtime store checks for code that is known not to give ArrayStoreException - The org.w3c.dom and org.xml.sax third-party interface standards have been added - java.security has been merged with GNU Classpath. The new package is now JDK 1.2 compliant, and is much more complete - java.lang.Character has been rewritten to comply with the Unicode 3.0 standard as well as improve performance - Support for several additional locales have been added to libgcj - Socket timeouts have been implemented - libgcj has been merged into a single shared library. There are no longer separate shared libraries for garbage collector and zlib - libgcj includes support for hash synchronization (thin locks), a special allocation path for finalizer-free objects, Thread-local allocation, Parallel GC, and other GC modifications o GDB has been enhanced to allow debugging information for applications to be read from separate files. This makes it possible to extract debugging information from binaries and place them in a supplemental package. o The GNU C Library (glibc) has been updated to version 2.3.2 code base and includes the following major improvements and features over previous releases: - new locale model - performance tuned malloc - locale archives - rewritten standard conformant regex for performance increase - additional robustness in addressing multiple bugs o The GNU C++ Library (libstdc++) has been updated and includes the following improvements and features over previous releases: - Additional C99 support - Bug fixes - I/0 performance tuning - stdio_filebuf that takes fd, FILE - __cxa_demangle is now defined in cxxabi.h for C++ demangling - Wide-io support - Tuning for executable size and memory allocation - Support for symbol versioning for exported symbols and include files - Doxygen documentation has been extended, including man pages - basic_string optimizations and MT fixes - Full named locale support for all facets, choice of gnu, ieee_1003.1-200x (POSIX 2), or generic models o The GNU binutils has been updated to 2.13 and includes the following improvements and features over previous releases: - size: Add --totals to display summary of sizes (Berkeley format only) - readelf: Add --wide option to not break section header or segment listing lines to fit into 80 columns - strings: Add --encoding to display wide character strings - objcopy: Add --rename-section to change section names - readelf: Support added for DWARF 2.1 extensions. Support added for displaying the contents of .debug.macinfo sections - New command line switches added to objcopy to allow symbols to be kept as global symbols, and also to specify files containing lists of such symbols - New command line switch to objcopy --alt-machine-code which creates a binary with an alternate machine code if one is defined in the architecture description. Only supported for ELF targets - New command line switch to objcopy -B (or --binary-architecture) which sets the architecture of the output file to the given argument. This option only makes sense, if the input target is binary. Otherwise it is ignored o The Oprofile system-wide profiler has been added to Fermi Linux. OProfile is a programmer's tool for analyzing system performance, using special hardware built into many modern computers. Documentation for OProfile exists in the oprofile package; after installing Fermi Linux, issue the command rpm -qd oprofile to obtain a listing of the available documentation. See the OProfile website at http://oprofile.sourceforge.net for more details. o Experimental prelink support is included Prelink is a utility that modifies ELF shared libraries and executables. This results in no symbol lookups at startup time and fewer relocations to be applied, which allows programs to start faster and occupy less memory. o Perl has been updated to version 5.8, and includes the following new features and improvements over 5.6.x as shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.3: . Threading and multiple interpreters . Full Unicode/UTF-8 support . Large file support Note that though source compatibility with previous versions of Perl has been preserved in this release, any binary modules will need to be recompiled. o Python has been compiled with UCS4 support (Unicode characters represented on 4 bytes) as opposed to UCS2. UCS4 allows one to represent characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane. Certain third-party libraries may stop working because of this change; recompiling these libraries should be sufficient to resolve the problem. Please note that "pure" python modules (whose code is written in python) or compiled modules that do not directly use Unicode are not affected by this change. o The Apache HTTP server has been updated to version 2.0. The updated package replaces version 1.3 and has been renamed to httpd. - The auth_ldap, mod_put, mod_roaming mod_auth_any, mod_bandwidth, mod_throttle, and mod_dav modules have been removed. - WebDAV functionality is now included with the httpd package. - Some changes to existing configuration files are needed. Refer to the migration guide at /usr/share/doc/httpd-/migration.html for more details. o The main sendmail configuration file has moved from /etc/sendmail.cf to /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. o The Sendmail mail transport agent (MTA) has been updated to version 8.12 and is no longer setuid root. Because of this, the mail queuing functionality needs to be able to connect to the mail server running on the local machine. Hence, DAEMON=no in /etc/sysconfig/sendmail is now ignored. o By default, the Sendmail mail transport agent (MTA) does not accept network connections from any host other than the local computer. We have provided a rpm that will change sendmail to accept network connections. A "yum install zz_sendmail_accept" as root will enable this. o The Netscape(TM) Web browser has been removed. o The semi package, which provides MIME features for Emacs mail client access, has been merged into the wl (Wanderlust) package, since there are no other packages which require the semi library. Wanderlust is an IMAP4, POP, and NNTP client for Emacs. o The RPM Package Manager (RPM) functionality has been separated into two packages with distinct functionalities. The rpm package is for installing, querying, verifying and removing RPM packages from your Red Hat Linux system; the rpm-build package is for building and creating RPM packages for your Red Hat Linux system. Refer to the manual pages for both rpm and rpmbuild by typing man rpm and man rpmbuild at a shell prompt for more information about these commands. o RPM verifies digital signatures when reading packages during installation. In order to verify signatures for packages after installation, the package's public key must be imported into the rpm database. We have provided a rpm that will install the RedHat key into rpm. A "yum install zz_rpm_keys" as root should install the keys. o GNU Ghostscript has been upgraded to version 7.05. o By default, top and ps only display the main (initial) thread of thread-aware processes. To show all threads, use the command ps -m or type H in top. o The junkbuster proxy filter package has been replaced by the privoxy package which can now filter animations, pop-ups, refresh tags, and webbugs. o If you are upgrading from Red Hat Linux 7.2 or earlier and have an older version of PostgreSQL installed than PostgreSQL 7.2, you must dump your database to a file before upgrading. You can then restore the database after the upgrade. Information on dumping a database to a file can be found by typing man pg_dumpall at a shell prompt. o CUPS is now the default print spooler, and redhat-config-printer is the recommended tool for configuring it. It may be launched from the System Settings menu, using the Printing menu entry. LPRng is still provided, and upgrades from previous installations using LPRng will continue to use it. o GNOME Print Manager, a simple graphical print queue management tool, is now included. It may be launched from the System Tools menu, using the Print Manager menu entry. In addition, when a print job is in the queue, an icon will appear in the panel's system notification area. o Red Hat Linux 8.0 added the following new configuration and system tools: Log Viewer (redhat-logviewer) NFS Configuration Tool (redhat-config-nfs) X Configuration Tool (redhat-config-xfree86) Sound Card Configuration Tool (redhat-config-soundcard) Language Selection Tool (redhat-config-language) Keyboard Configuration Tool (redhat-config-keyboard) Mouse Configuration Tool (redhat-config-mouse) Root Password Tool (redhat-config-rootpassword) Security Level Configuration Tool (redhat-config-securitylevel) Package Management Tool (redhat-config-packages) o Some of the configuration tools use pam_timestamp, a module for implementing sudo-style authentication timestamps via PAM. The authentication function checks for the existence of the timestamp file. If the file exists and is less than five minutes old (the same default as sudo), authentication succeeds without prompting for the root password again. If a program with pam_timestamp support is started from the Main Menu button or Nautilus and successfully authenticated, a key icon will appear in the panel notification area to show that an authenticated user has cached root authentication. When the authentication expires, the icon is removed. o A new system message has been added : application bug: () has SIGCHLD set to SIG_IGN but calls wait(). (see the NOTES section of 'man 2 wait'). Workaround activated. This message (which is displayed on the system console and/or in the system log files) indicates that the application is not completely standards compliant with respect to its handling of child processes. If you see this message, you should alert the application's developers. o The RPMs containing the Network Administration Tool have changed names and functions. The RPM redhat-config-network contains the tool's graphical user interface, while redhat-config-network-tui contains the tool itself (along with its text-based user interface). Package Reorganization The following packages have been added : bluez-libs - Libraries for Bluetooth(TM) utility programs bluez-utils - Bluetooth utility programs bogl - Graphics library for framebuffers; used by the installation desktop-printing - Drag-and-drop printing and print job icon devlabel - Support for persistent storage device access fontilus - Font viewer for Nautilus gnome-icon-theme - Icons for base GNOME environment gnome-themes - Collection of themes for GNOME environment gstreamer - Multimedia framework library gstreamer-plugins - Input and output plugins for gstreamer gthumb - Graphics viewer hpoj - HP OfficeJet support libgnomeprint22 - Updated libraries libgnomeprintui22 - Updated libraries libgsf - Library for reading/writing structured files nautilus-cd-burner - CD burning support for Nautilus nautilus-media - Audio playing support for Nautilus openssl096b - Compatibility maintenance package postgresql-odbc - ODBC support for PostgreSQL postgresql72-libs - PostgreSQL 7.2 compatibility libraries printman - Print queue management redhat-config-samba - Samba configuration tool soup - SOAP implementation library startup-notification - Support for busy cursor subversion - Version control system tsclient - GUI client for VNS and Windows Terminal Server ttmkfdir - Separated from XFree86 vconfig - VLAN (802.1q) configuration program xhtml1-dtds - XHTML1 support The following packages have been replaced: Xconfigurator - replaced by redhat-config-xfree86 ucd-snmp - replaced by net-snmp ee - replaced by eog gtop - replaced by gnome-system-monitor gkermit - replaced by ckermit console-tools - replaced by kbd coreutils - Replaces fileutils, textutils, sh-utils and stat junkbuster - replaced by privoxy libelf - replaced by elfutils orbit-python - Replaced by pyorbit python-xmlrpc - now part of python ncftp - is still available to install, but lftp is now the default FTP client installed. whois - Replaced by jwhois The following packages have been renamed: redhat-switchmail - renamed redhat-switch-mail redhat-switchmail-gnome renamed redhat-switch-mail-gnome. apache, apache-devel, and apache-manual - renamed httpd, httpd-devel, and httpd-manual apacheconf - renamed redhat-config-httpd bindconf - renamed redhat-config-bind dateconfig - renamed redhat-config-date ksconfig - renamed redhat-config-kickstart printconf - renamed redhat-config-printer printconf-gui - renamed redhat-config-printer-gui serviceconf - renamed redhat-config-services sysctlconfig - renamed redhat-config-proc The following packages have been removed from this release of Red Hat Linux: alien auth_ldap blt dip fvwm2 elm extace glms gnomeicu gnome-pim gnorpm gphoto gq ical jikes kaffe kontrol-panel metamail micq mm mod_auth_any mod_bandwidth mod_dav mod_put mod_roaming mod_throttle netscape playmidi pump rpmfind rpmlint rxvt sliplogin smpeg smpeg-xmms snavigator taper xbill xdaliclock xlockmore xmailbox xpilot WindowMaker - Developer resource constraints Xft - Integrated into XFree86 Xtest - No longer required by Anaconda anonftp - functionality pulled into vsftpd package bdflush - No longer required (needed by 2.2 kernels only) fileutils - Replaced by coreutils fortune-mod - Unclear copyright status gkermit - Replaced by ckermit ipvsadm - No longer part of Red Hat Linux product profile kbdconfig - Replaced by redhat-config-keyboard kernel-uml - Experimental package, removed ksymoops - No longer required by kernel libelf - Replaced by elfutils librpm404 - No longer required compatibility library libxml10 - No longer required compatibility library mouseconfig - Replaced by redhat-config-mouse openldap12 - No longer required compatibility library openssl095a - No longer required compatibility library orbit-python - Replaced by pyorbit php-dbg-base - Not used within distribution php-dbg-client - Not used within distribution php-dbg-server - Not used within distribution redhat-switchmail - Renamed to redhat-switch-mail rhmask - Red Hat no longer distributes rhmask files rpm2html - Deprecated by author sh-utils - Replaced by coreutils stat - Replaced by coreutils textutils - Replaced by coreutils timeconfig - Replaced by redhat-config-date whois - Replaced by jwhois wine - Developer resource constraints wmapm - Part of Windowmaker removal wmclock - Part of Windowmaker removal wmix - Part of Windowmaker removal wu-ftpd - vsftpd is the recommended FTP daemon xtoolwait - Not used within distribution The following packages have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Red Hat Linux: pine - License-related issues LPRng - CUPS is the recommended printing solution Glide3 - Multi-platform issues lilo - GRUB is the recommended bootloader sndconfig - No longer required by mainstream hardware ncpfs - No longer part of Red Hat Linux product profile mars-nwe - No longer part of Red Hat Linux product profile Kernel Notes o HZ=512 on i686 and Athlon means that the system clock ticks 5 times as fast as on other x86 platforms (i386 and i586); HZ=100 has been the Linux default on x86 platforms for the entire history of the Linux kernel. This change provides better interactive response, lower latency response from some programs, and better response from the scheduler. We have adjusted the /proc file system to report numbers as if using the default HZ=100. o The kernel now supports up to 256 scsi disks (the previous limit was 128). o The latest aacraid driver now includes 64-bit support. o The network console and crash dump functionality from Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1 has been ported to this release. o The apic boot-time option allowing installation on systems with the Intel 440GX chipset has been removed because it caused a conflict with many newer systems: it caused SMM (System Management Mode) not to function, or to function incorrectly, causing installation on those systems to fail. A different workaround has been provided that allows at least some systems with the Intel 440GX chipset to boot; this workaround is automatically enabled. o The kernel support for the new NPTL feature changes several internal kernel programming interfaces significantly. As a result, several external kernel modules may not compile without modifications to match the new interfaces. Examples include any modules that use kernel threads and/or signals.