Red Hat may be one of the few companies in the world that really get open source. Red Hat builds its products on open source, is very liberal with its source code and actively supports important projects with developer hours. On top of that, Red Hat has proved to be profitable in a market where commercial offerings usually struggle to break even. For years the Red Hat brand was widely viewed as "the Linux", rather than "a Linux" distribution. Even Hollywood recognizes the name. It's been nearly four years since the last major Enterprise Linux release (5.0) came out and I've been curious to see what Red Hat has been quietly working on these past several months. To that end, I got in touch with my local account manager who kindly set me up with a copy of RHEL 6 (Desktop Edition).The data on the install DVD takes up approximately 2.8 GB of space and boots into a simple boot menu that offers the user the options to install RHEL, rescue the system or boot from the local disk. Taking the installation option brings up a screen asking if we would like to perform a media check to insure the disc is uncorrupted. Once the check passes, the Red Hat graphical installer, Anaconda, loads and begins the usual series of questions. We're asked to supply our preferred language, keyboard layout and to provide a hostname. Anaconda asks for the local time zone and a root password before moving on to partitioning. I found the partition manager to be both intuitive and flexible, allowing us to work with regular partitions, LVM and RAID configurations. The list of supported Linux partitions is limited to the ext family (ext2, ext3, ext4) with no sign of XFS or Btrfs.
Encrypting any of these partitions is as straight forward as putting a check in the appropriate box. Once the drive is divided up we're given the option to tweak the boot loader settings and then we move on to package selection. There are three different pre-configured bundles on the package screen (Desktop, Minimal Desktop and Minimal). I selected the Desktop bundle and then accepted the option to further customize the selection, adding a few packages and the KDE desktop. I found it interesting that GNOME is not listed by name, but is in the package list as "General Purpose Desktop". Additionally, the package screen allows us to add third-party repositories, but I put that aside for the moment. All that is left for the installer to do is copy over the requested software to the local drive and then we can reboot.
Upon rebooting I discovered that, if the DVD is left in the drive, selecting "Boot from local drive" from the boot menu results in an error, apparently the disc has trouble handing control over to the installed boot loader. Removing my DVD caused my freshly installed system to boot normally and I was passed on to the first-run Setup Agent. This wizard walks us through the Red Hat license agreement, creating a regular user account and setting the date & time. With this all done, we're presented with a graphical login screen. Signing in brings us to a GNOME (2.28) desktop with the menu bar along the top of the screen. A task switcher sits at the bottom of the display and a few navigation icons are displayed on the desktop. The background reminds me of a sunset viewed through a streaked windscreen. Up in top-right corner of the screen is a network status icon which indicated to me that I was off-line. Clicking the icon and selecting my network interface enabled the connection. A quick check of the Network Manager settings showed that my wired connection was set to not automatically connect, which is a bit unusual for Linux distributions.
RHEL comes with the usual collection of popular open-source software. The application menu contains Firefox (3.6.9), OpenOffice.org 3.2, Evolution, Pidgin, a CD ripper, disc burner, webcam app, a video player, a music player and system monitor. Though multimedia players are provided, most popular codecs are not supported out of the box. Nor do we find Flash (or Gnash) on the system. Further these items don't appear in the repository. I had hoped to find these additions in RPMFusion, but that repository and Fedora's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux don't support Enterprise Linux 6 at time of writing. Also in the application menu there's a bug reporting program, the GIMP and a document viewer. We also find an archive app, calculator and text editor. The GNOME desktop comes with its regular array of configuration tools for adjusting the look & feel of the desktop. Under the Administration menu are Red Hat's handy management programs for working with user accounts, configuring services, setting up printers, tweaking the firewall and dealing with packages.
Also included in the menu are Red Hat's release notes. These notes are surprisingly detailed compared to most other distributions and the notes frequently refer to other manual pages on Red Hat's website. As an example, when reading about storage and the Logical Volume Manager there is a link to further Red Hat documentation on the subject, which goes into deeper detail. Underneath it all, we find the Linux kernel, version 2.6.32. Though old news to many community distributions, 2.6.32 carries improvements over the 2.6.18 kernel found in Enterprise Linux 5.0 such as the Completely Fair Scheduler. Users who work in mixed operating system environments will no doubt be happy to learn that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 includes the ability to easily authenticate against Active Directory. And, further simplifying the entry into mixed networks, the Evolution e-mail program comes equipped to talk with both Exchange servers and GroupWise accounts.
RHEL 6 - working with the bug reporting application
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By default Red Hat uses the GNOME desktop, however KDE 4.3 is also included on the DVD. I logged into KDE a few times and found the experience to be well balanced against GNOME. Sometimes installing multiple desktop environments on a distribution will result in full and poorly organized menus, but Enterprise Linux handled the duality well. KDE's menus were laid out in the same fashion as GNOME's and I found performance to be similar under both environments. This made switching between the two as seamless as possible. The sole feature I didn't find while logged into KDE was a graphical package manager.
Before getting into package management on RHEL, the administrator is first required to register the system with the Red Hat Network. It's important to perform this registration, otherwise the system will not receive security updates. Of course we can only register as many systems as we have subscriptions. If we want to move our installation from one machine to another then we'll have to login to the Red Hat Network and remove the old entry. Registration is performed via a GUI app that asks the user for their RHN login information and a nickname for the machine. The whole process takes just a few seconds. Once registration is completed, packages can be installed or upgraded using YUM from the command line, or through Add/Remove Software (gpk-application) if the administrator prefers a graphical interface. There's a software update tool which will place a subtle notification of available updates on the menu bar and walk the user through applying those updates.
On a default installation the distribution runs the secure shell and Sendmail network services. A firewall is in place, blocking most incoming connections, the exception being connections to secure shell. I found that secure shell accepts root logins out of the box, but (unlike RHEL's close relation, Fedora) remote users are not allowed to shutdown the system unless they have administrator privileges. The SELinux technology is installed and enabled right out of the box, though there aren't any GUI configuration tools in the application menu. Programs to manage SELinux can be added later via the package repositories.
RHEL 6 - adding packages and configuring services
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During my trial I found RHEL handled my hardware well. I ran the distribution on two physical machines, a generic desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card) and all of my hardware was picked up and worked fairly well. I didn't perform any benchmarks, but I found that the operating system was a little more responsive on the desktop machine. I also tried RHEL in a VirtualBox virtual environment and found it worked well there too. The operating system doesn't integrate with VirtualBox, meaning the guest OS would capture the mouse and didn't automatically pick up my host's screen resolution. While using VirtualBox I tried running Enterprise Linux with lower memory resources. I found the system would run smoothly doing most day-to-day tasks with 512 MB of RAM. When attempting to run with 256 MB of RAM Anaconda refused to attempt an install. However, if installed with a higher amount of RAM the distro would later boot and operate with just 256 MB of RAM (logged into either GNOME or KDE). Though it would work, trying to run with such limited resources caused the machine to rely on swap and performance degraded. This release of RHEL supports fingerprint readers and smart cards for account authentication. I don't have either of these items on my machines, so I was unable to test the features. Nonetheless, it was good to see the alternative login methods offered.
There are some who say Red Hat isn't interested in the desktop market and I don't think that's true, not entirely. Red Hat has shown itself to be uninterested in the consumer home desktop market and with good reason. There isn't much money to be made from home users. Most of them are either content with their proprietary solutions or are tech-savvy enough to hunt down free alternatives -- a lesson several commercial Linux vendors have learned the hard way. What Red Hat does focus on is the enterprise desktop market, a field where their combination of conservative packages, excellent documentation and support is desired. It occurs to me that Red Hat doesn't have much competition in this arena. Ubuntu's long term support release almost fits the bill, but Ubuntu is a much more dynamic platform than Enterprise Linux, a trait not often valued in the business ecosystem. Ubuntu's three years of support also fall short of Red Hat's (up to) ten years. Novell has their SUSE Linux Enterprise product, but with Novell's future in the balance their distribution becomes less attractive. In fact, right now, I think Red Hat's closest enterprise desktop competitor is CentOS, which offers the same technology without the cost/support that comes with it.
RHEL 6 - documentation introducing the new release
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After a week of running Red Hat's latest offering there are some aspects I've really enjoyed. For instance, I think the product is a good mixture of modern and tried-and-true. Nothing here is cutting edge, but the included software is new enough for me to get work done without any problems. Following that line of thought, the stability has been top-notch and I have yet to experience a system or application crash. The documentation is well laid out and the administrative programs are excellent. The Red Hat Network is a great asset and can be useful for monitoring machines. In some ways the RHN is proactive. For instance, one day during my trail I lost my Internet connection during a storm and, the next day, I received an e-mail letting me know one of my machines hadn't checked in during the past twenty-four hours. A helpful thing to know if you're maintaining a large network of machines.
Anaconda continues to be one of the best installers in the Linux community, combining flexibility with ease of use. It looks like Red Hat has done some work with their fonts since the 5.x series and I found reading text on this release to be easier on the eyes. Though I didn't encounter any bugs while running RHEL, there were a few items which bothered me. The graphical package manager is sluggish and performing tasks with it feels like trying to run though water. Fortunately it's not a problem shared by the command line package manager, YUM. My other complaint is concerning the lack of multimedia and Flash support. Some might argue these are technologies better suited to home users, but I have yet to work in an office which doesn't occasionally make use of Flash or videos for training and presentations. It's a gap I'm hoping will be filled by RPMFusion in the near future.
Now that I have spent some time with RHEL 6 I have to say that, over-all, it's a good release. It's solid, polished and comes backed by a great support infrastructure. Home users may be put off by the smaller repository, older packages or, for that matter, the price tag. Businesses though, Red Hat's target customers, should be very happy with this release.
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