[conspire] ISOs of Red Hat "phoebe" beta

[Rick Moen]

This past Monday, Red Hat Software released its first post-8.0 beta. 
Quoting from the announcment:

 "You know, Chandler, you being here is the best gift I could ask for
Christmas."
  
 "Aww. Thanks Pheebs."
 
 "Ok, now where's my real present?"
 
Red Hat, Inc. has a holiday gift for you - PHOEBE, a new beta release of
Red Hat Linux.

PHOEBE is 6 CDs of software (3 binary, 3 source), including, among
other things:
 - the latest in bleeding-edge desktop and XFree86 technology
 - Mozilla 1.2.1, with Xft antialiased fonts
 - glibc-2.3.1, with the new Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL),
   for performant and scalable threading

PHOEBE is, of course, not intended for use on mission critical or other
production systems.

As always, we do not recommend the use of beta software on mission
critical or production systems. In fact, we may laugh at those who try. 



Most packages are said to have been rebuilt between 8.0 and this beta;
differences are said to be "large".  No beta-level docs, this time.

Further notes:  

o  Window Maker has been removed completely from the
   distribution.  Presumably, one can/should add it back using apt-rpm / 
   Synaptic.  Also, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> says he's making
   an RPM specifically for the phoebe beta, and will post a notice to
   the phoebe-list mailing list.  Or, you can just do "rpmbuild
   --rebuild WindowMaker-0.80.1-1.src.rpm" using the RH 8.0 version.
   But that version is very outdated and strange, and has an exploitable
   buffer overflow.

   Apparently, all you get is GNOME/metacity and KDE, in any event.

o  Sometimes, under some (so far unidentified) circumstances, starting 
   Apache w/SSL enabled tends to induce a kernel panic.

o  On at least some laptops, _reporting_ for ACPI (battstat GNOME applet) 
   doesn't work.

o  ext3 formatting is not offered as an option.  (Trivial workaround
   exists.)

o  Wireless ethernet is said to be broken.

o  "init 0" no longer works to do a shutdown.  (I'm sure they'll fix
   this.)

o  If you do an installation from loopback-mounted ISOs on the hard
   disk, X11 installation isn't available.  In such cases, network
   device autodetection probably won't work, either.



In any event, I have all three of the binary ISOs, and people are
welcome to make copies on Saturday.  Bring blank CDRs, or pay me $1 each
to use mine.  We can also test-install the thing, if people wish.

-- 
Cheers,            There are only 10 types of people in this world -- 
Rick Moen          those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick at linuxmafia.com