This page follows from my
installing and upgrading Red Hat Linux on a
Sony Vaio PCG N505X.
It details significant differences in the truly excellent
Red Hat Linux
that a
relatively-sklled but nonetheless non-professional user might
encounter in installing and using upgraded versions.
I use GNU/Linux not just on the Sony Vaio, but also on a
couple of Dell desktops, so what's below describes the
software, and is not specific to any machine hardware.
Obvioulsy, many (many) changes permeate each significant upgrade
(doh!).
But the following are the ones that likely hit and perhaps puzzle the
user.
If this document saves the reader a bit of time, well, it'll have
served its purpose.
Significant differences in Red Hat Linux 8.0 [from 7.x]
- The audio player xmms no
longer ships with the
mpg123 plugin.
Get the plugin directly instead from the
xmms organization. Read Red Hat's
statement
on its decision.
Understand the law and stop having governments spend billions of
taxpayer dollars fighting your battles for you.
- From RHL 7.1 on, the mail transport agent
sendmail ships with a default
configuration that disallows external machines from delivering email
by SMTP.
Red Hat (and others) have chosen to do this in an attempt to
minimize spam.
You can either modify sendmail.mc if you need
own-machine email delivery. Or, perhaps better, use
an email client that pulls email off a mailserver for
you.
See also Carla Schroder's
article
under Services;
sendmail.org's FAQ
question
5.3.1;
the email threads on
Boulder CO's LUG,
Mumbai
India's GNU/Linux Users Group,
and many others.
- The
8.0
distribution comes with a firewall, configurable with
redhat-config-securitylevel. The default setting
lets almost nothing through; so you might need to
customize to allow, say, ssh and
X requests (this last through
6000:tcp perhaps, depending on your
setup).
Customization changes don't show
(see Red Hat explanation why this is a feature, not a bug) but they
do take effect.
- Other useful references:
Carla Schroder's
review
in Linux Planet.
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