Distribution General Notes

• There are known issues upgrading Red Hat Linux 6.x, 7.0, and 7.1 systems running Ximian GNOME.

  The issue is caused by version overlap between the official Red Hat Linux RPMs and the Ximian RPMs. Please be aware that this is a configuration unsupported by Red Hat. You have several choices in resolving this issue:

  • You may remove Ximian GNOME from your Red Hat Linux system prior to upgrading Red Hat Linux.

  • You may upgrade Red Hat Linux, and then immediately reinstall Ximian GNOME.

  • You may upgrade Red Hat Linux, and then immediately remove all remaining Ximian RPMs, and replace them with the corresponding Red Hat Linux RPMs.

  You must resolve the version overlap using one of the above choices. Failure to do so will result in an unstable GNOME configuration.

• GNOME has been updated to 1.4 and includes the Nautilus graphical shell.

• The GNOME Control Center has been replaced by the preferences: folder in Nautilus. Running gnomecc manually should still work.

• The PowerTools CD is no longer being produced. However, the most widely-used packages which were in PowerTools have been included in Red Hat Linux.

• Firewall Configuration — For added security, you can configure a firewall as part of your system installation. You can choose from two levels of security, as well as choosing which common system services should be allowed or disallowed by default.

  Please note that both medium and high firewall settings will cause RPC-based services (such as NIS or NFS) to be blocked, and thus fail.

• XFree86 updated to 4.1.0, and includes improved hardware support. 3D hardware acceleration for the ATI Radeon is now included. Most video drivers now support the RENDER extension, providing anti-aliased font support to a wider range of hardware. The old XIE and PEX (Phigs) X extensions are now officially deprecated by the XFree86 team, and will be removed from a future release of Red Hat Linux.

• XFree86 3.3.6 is now deprecated and will be removed from a future release of Red Hat Linux. It is currently included for compatibility.

• The initscripts now use /sbin/ip (from the iproute packages) for most operations. /sbin/ip requires the netlink and netlink routing features of the kernel to function properly; it is impossible to make use of the kernel's full routing functionality without these features. If you are building your own kernel, make sure that CONFIG_NETLINK and CONFIG_RTNETLINK are enabled.

• Initial unified support for Korean has been added.

• Binutils and gcc now support merging string constant duplicates across whole binaries or shared libraries (previously duplicates have been merged within a single compilation unit only).

• gcc-3.0 is included for those who need standards-compliant C++ or STL support, and for those who want to use the Java features of gcc. Note that the supported system compiler for C and C++ is still gcc-2.96 (Red Hat).

• The VNC package now supports a new encoding type for low-bandwidth connections.

• Red Hat Linux now includes the first release of the Gnome XSLT processor (xsltproc) using version 2 of the associated XML library.

• ODBC-support has been added to php, postgresql have been updated to 7.1.2, python interfaces have been added, and perl interfaces updated.

• Several new configuration tools are included. With these tools you can configure:

  • network (redhat-config-network)

  • time/date (redhat-config-date)

  • system control (redhat-config-services)

  • users/groups (redhat-config-users)

• The following packages/features are deprecated, and may be removed in a future Red Hat Linux release:

  • Netscape 4.x

  • Qt 1.x

  • KDE v1 compatibility libraries/build environment

  • Red Hat Linux 6.x build environment

  • Enlightenment window manager

  • linuxconf

  • ncpfs

  • mars_nwe

  • XFree86 3.3.x

  • kaffe