[rhelv6-beta-list] why rhel-6 still not a good choice for a programmer

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 07/15/2010 05:24 PM, Farkas Levente wrote:
> - virtualization is only supported on 64 bit. why? why kvm is
> supported on i686 on fedora but not supported on rhel? it was not
> supported on the rhel 5.4 product line. it can be ok. but why still
> not supported rhel-6? is there _any_ good technical reason? if yes why
> it's not a reason on fedora?
>   

Fedora is not a commercially supported product.  It is a free and open
source project.  Different constraints apply in general.  In the case of
virtualization,  there are restrictions on resources such as the
hardware limitation on how much RAM can be on the system.  So if you are
using virtualization,  it is highly recommended that you use x86_64. 

> then if we choose x86_64 as an arch which is an obvious chose after
> the above statement, what we've to face:
> - skype not working. imho skype is a must in these days. most
> collaborative work on the net use skype. let's search a bit and it's
> turn out that we can use skype, but we've to install a few (about a
> hundreds of) other i686 packages. ok. can we do it easily? i don't
> think so. first of all if we use skype's yum repo, then it'll install
> it _without_ any of it's dependencies. ok it can be the fault of skype
> packaging which was done by skype, but still annoying. even ldd not
> working on 32bit binary just after install glibc.i686. after that a
> quick
> for i in `ldd skype|cut -f1 -d' '`; do yum provides */$i; done|grep i686|sort -u
> be able to find the required packages which are dozens of packages.
> now comes the bad part. these packages include packages which are in
> conflict with the same 64bit packages.
> imho redhat should have to work closely with skype team to be able to
> release a working skype version for 64 bit. and it's not just the goal
> of skype but should have to be rh too.
>
> - no flash for 64 bit
>   

Red Hat has no control over proprietary software like Flash and Skype
and yes it is unfortunate they the vendors engage in poor packaging as
with the case of Skype but this is not something programmers worry about
primarily.   In the case of skype,  the package fails to enumerate
dependencies properly and needs a workaround.  Download the package and run

yum install libXScrnSaver.i?86 libX11.i?86 libv4l.i?86
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i?86 qt-x11.i?86;yum install
skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm --nogpgcheck

Flash, use nspluginwrapper as described in
http://www.happyassassin.net/2010/06/26/a-quick-reminder-on-64-bit-flash/

Rahul