Suggestions for flavour of RedHat please?

[SoulKlekta]

As a Mandrake user for the last few releases,the last release of Red Hat I tried was 6.2 and it was a nightmare from the word go!.
However,I'm considering giving it another go by installing Red Hat 8.0 but I'm not sure as to what 'flavour' I should d/l?.

I see psyche available in most ftp sites 'current' directory,in fact the psyche d/l I have located consists of 5 discs with the filenames psyche-i386-disc1.iso thru psyche-i386-disc5.iso.

I also noticed a version called phoebe-i386-disc1.iso,it is a 3 disc set but again i386,which would the general choice be,psyche or phoebe? (or none of these!?)

Also my Mandrake files are all i586,will the i386 in relation to the Red Hat d/l work on an Athlon T-Bird?

I have been warned away from RH RawHide unless I'm a glutton for punishment.

Also,O.T. but,has anyone tried Peanut Linux?,a 339Mb iso d/l,it has a gui,and will run on a 386,24MbRAM,500Mb-HD :)

Regards,Andy

[redcane]

"psyche" Is the name for Red Hat 8.0
I'm not sure what "Pheobe" is.

i385 generally means it requires a 386 compatible processor. Intel processors are "backwards" compatible. So the 486 can run any software for earlier CPUs, as can the pentium. So in summary your Athlon is 386 compatible, and will run this fine.

REdhat will also run on a 386 with 8mb of ram and I tihnk down to 200mb hdd, depends on how many features you want installed. On a 386 I imagine you'd be using a fairly basic GUI or doing a lot of waiting.
Red hat comes with a *lot* of useful, but optional packages.

[Master Ki Adi Mundi]

Redhat 8.0 ( psyche ) introduces a range of changes, most are a good move in the right direction.

A _lot_ of the older configuration tools like Xconfigurator have been replaced with the redhat-config-xxx set of tools, these are reasonably useful for new and seasoned users.

I have had some trouble upgrading Redhat systems ( 7.2 ) that used LILO and have been upgraded to GRUB. This doesn't seem to work all that well, as I ended up having to do it by hand. Future versions of Redhat will no longer include LILO in favour of GRUB.

I don't think I'll miss the good ole no boot LI

[spankmeister7]

RedHat release tend to released with anywhere from 3 to 5 iso files. You don't really need 4 and 5 because they mostly contain development and documentation that standard users don't really need. They are addendums. Any RedHat release is given a name before its release and then keeps that name afterward - Valhalla, Psyche, Phoebe, whatever. RedHat 8.0 was psyche, and the RedHat 8.1 beta is Phoebe. Phoebe contains a newer kernel, KDE 3.1, Gnome 2.2, qt updates, yadda yadda. It also has performance gains from whatever source. You can find all of this out at RedHat.com and snooping through the beta sections.

Note: RedHat is increasingly geared toward the server market so when you install be aware of a couple of things. It's blindingly easy to install in that you can choose one a few standard install options: workstation, server, mobile, Everything. But if you want (and should) to take a closer look you can choose to pick every last package you want to see. Take a look through them and remove what you'll never use and install what you think you might realistically use. This is especially important because of the common complaint about RedHat's bloat. This is where you can take care of that. There's a ton of thing s you can remove if you never plan to use them. What if you screw up and remove the wrong things? The installer will tell you if your missing any package dependencies and you to install them if necessary. Besides, you can install any missing packages later.

Next, when you set up your partitions (I like RedHat's disk druid much more than either Mandrake's or SuSE's partition setup tools) think about which filesystem you want to use. RedHat defaults to ext3 because that's typically what you want for servers. TYPICALLY. Mandrake and SuSE default to Reiser. Both are nifty in that they are journaled - that is, they keep a file called a journal that keeps track of what state the filesystem is in at any given time and tables to know basically what's where. So if you your system crashes and burns or hardlocks or you get a power surge or whatever, then you don't have to wait 3 hours for the filesystem to be checked and picked through when you restart. In the old days this wasn't so bad because hard drive sizes were much smaller. Anyway, the horrible simplification of it all is that Reiser is much faster for systems with lots of small files - like a desktop user system without giant databases or video editing (things you might do if you were reading Doom9's forums) - but ext3 is more efficient at tackling systems with huge files like sql databases, IMAP databases, 26-gig AVI files, yadda yadda.

On my main system I'm using RedHat 8.1 (phoebe) with Reiser on my system disk (SCSI ultra 320 73-gig) and I keep all of my video editing stuff on a cheap huge drive (special edition WD 120gig) with ext3. I think that this has really kept my system about efficient as it can be for the work I'm doing.

As ever, your mileage may vary.

[kastro68]

thanks for the info on the recommended file system.

I've already settled for reiser though.


Reiser is much faster for systems with lots of small files - like a desktop user system without giant databases or video editing

I found this sentence to be a bit ambiguos. Is reiser bad for video editing???

[Ivion]

Originally posted by kastro68
I found this sentence to be a bit ambiguos. Is reiser bad for video editing???
No, this sentence only meant to demonstrate that ReiserFS is exceptionally fast on small files. It doesn't say that it's slow on big files, or the like, but just performs very well on small ones. ReiserFS is also fast with big files, tough XFS ussually beats ReiserFS on that point (never tested it myself, only from other people experiences :D). Tough I haven't had problems with both of them, I prefer ReiserFS. ^_^