RedHat 6.0 install experience...

["Brian Macy" <bmacy sunshinecomputing com>]

Well I pulled it down and burned a CD. This was with an upgrade install from
RedHat 5.2 on an SMP machine. So far I've been less than impressed:

- The aic7xxx driver included is one of the broken ones... I had to
disconnect my tape drive to get it to load properly with my onboard AIC-7895
controller (I know you must hate these controllers by now Doug :). It just
kept timing out and resetting the buss.... I assume this is a 2.2.5 problem
without the ac patches (I never ran stock 2.2.5).
- My bootable SCSI CD drive is on a different controller than my SCSI HD...
the initrd image was created incorrectly so I got an VFS panic on my first
boot (I rebooted with the CD and set LILO up to use my 2.2.6-ac1 kernel
instead). I must admit I didn't expect the install to get this right... it
hasn't for any of the previous versions.
- KDE is included but only GNOME is actually prompted for. To get KDE you
have to selectively install each of the RPMs which are spread out in many
different groups.
- It didn't even attempt to upgrade my official KDE RPMs and what it
installed doesn't appear to support the "usekde" setup program properly
(skeleton files don't seem to exist in the correct location).
- The install doesn't support autofs so my home directory wasn't mounted
properly during the install so my root directory was awfully crowded
- It installs that darn Xwrapper thing as the XServer... I've yet to get
that thing to work and just linked it to XF86_Mach64. I'm sure there is
something I need to set to get Xwrapper to work right but the install
certainly didn't do it for me.
- The new start-up scripts add pretty colors... ooohhh... ahhh.
- I now get a bunch of startup warnings about System.map not matching the
kernel... I know it is and I don't think it is such a big deal as to double
the number of start-up messages with the same warning over and over.
- The amount of space needed was miscalculated for the root partition and
lilo ended up failing at the end of the install and gave no useful
information as to why
- For some reason the RPM package wasn't upgraded but /bin/rpm was blown
away. Fortunately the instimage on my RedHat mirror had it so I copied it
down and used it to upgrade the RPM package.
- KDE certainly runs faster with the RedHat 6.0 rpms than the official KDE
version I was using.
- Something really strange.... 'ls' behaves differently... 'ls /mnt/cdrom/'
behaves identical to 'ls /mnt/cdrom' (gives list of directory/link not
contents). Is this a new glibc 2.1 "feature"?

Brian Macy