Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

The technical side of what’s new in RHEL5

Sure, we all see the press headlines but rarely do they dive deeper to say what’s actually different in a new rev of a distro. For that you have to rely on release notes that may be in disparate places. I found this article on RHEL5 quite comprehensive in giving an overview of what’s new compared to RHEL4. It doesn’t go deep on any of the features, but is a nice starting point for where to go next.

After about a week with RHEL5, I’ve found the auditing support in RHEL5 is VERY nicely integrated and setup as is SELinux. Red Hat has included an SELinux Troubleshooter which is very helpful (already fixed an issue I ran into using it), and there’s an improved SELinux Management interface to complement. Kdump is not only improved but was fully integrated into the install process, I’m starting to think they should have renamed it something new. Heck, there’s a button in the Gnome Control Center to enable/disable and configure Kdump.

As I continue along with RHEL5 I’ll keep posting some of the surprises I find. My greatest complaint thus far is the abismal user experience setting up support for all those “illegal” codecs/multimedia programs (mp3, wmv, etc) which we’ve all had to put up with for some time. I’d like to pay someone to mass convert the internet to Ogg…