I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ES (RHEL 4 ES) on March 9, 2005.

My experiment with SuSE 9.2 did not work out. At one point I needed to reboot and SuSE failed to boot. So I installed Red Hat using the "install everything" option. After using it for a few weeks as a work station, I ported my oceanpark.com server to it. I use it both as a Desk top and server (mostly low volume web, mail, and file server). SuSE was impressive in the shear array of software available but "install everything" did not work on SuSE since there are incompatible packages on the install DVD. With Red Hat, "install everything" still works.

I retract my previous statement about disliking Red Hat's decision to no longer support a retail version like they did with Red Hat 9 and its ancestors. RHEL 4 ES is everything and more that the old Red Hat was and well worth the $350 annual fee.

How I use Linux

I have used Linux as a server for ten years and programmed on UNIX for 30 years. I am using Red Hat Enterprise both as the oceanpark.com server and as my work station. It took only a few hours to move my server from Red Hat 8 to RHEL 4. I am the software architect for a growing start up and we will shortly upgrade all of our old Red Hat servers to Red Hat Enterprise.

Server applications I admin and run, generally speaking, include: Apache, Tomcat, Oracle, SSH, LDAP, DHCP, Samba, NFS, imapd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, djbdns, a custom SMTP server programmed in CLISP (actually, ap5), Squirrel Mail, NNTP servers, and some other custom applications.

Client applications I run include Firefox/Thunderbird, SSH, emacs, vi, Open Office, myriad X clients of all kinds, and programming tools such as Perl, gcc, cvs, etc.

Positives and Negatives about RHEL 4

Positives:

Install involved a small number of mouse clicks except that I use expert mode for disk partitioning. Install went perfectly.

Excellent overall default appearance (after changing background to a flat color)

Concise economical choice of menu hierarchy. No idiotic 'Edutainment' menu item that annoyed me on SuSE

Open Office continues to improve. At my level of need, I am able to open Microsoft Word and Excel documents so far without incident.

The Red Hat Network update feature works very well.

Red Hat Network package management GUI has improved

The gFTP application provides a good GUI for Secure FTP

ATI Radeon 9600 card was supported out of the box.

Plugging in USB devices such as cameras works seamlessly

Linux Screen Savers kick ass. It is almost worth setting up a Linux box just to see the screen savers, which are works of art.

Default file managers are getting really good, with features such as showing scalable icons for graphics files, with medium size pop ups on mouse-over, etc. (but there are too many different file managers in different contexts - see below)

Negatives:

One thing that is not a Red Hat issue, per se, is that Linux cannot yet entirely replace Windows for most people, including me. I live in my RHEL Desktop but still keep a Windows box around when I have to use IE for some Active X thing or for hassle-free audio and video.

For the masses, Linux is still not ready to supplant Windows. Here are some of the reasons:

* Microsoft DOC, XLS, and other file formats are not open standards
* Lack of cross-application file manager to select/open/manage files
* Lack of applications for the masses (games, CAD, fancy audio, etc.)
* No alternative to Microsoft Access (MySQL+PHP is working on it)
* WINE is a pipe dream, people. (C.f. VMWare = Awesome)

But there are some problems with RHEL ES4 that need to fixed by Red Hat...

The Help menu item is worthless and man pages do not always correspond to what is installed. My current pet peeve is that I run an IMAP server. There is no GUI to configure it, there is a confusing number of servers installed. Red Hat Tech support suggested that I run dovecot but the man page talks about Cyrus. Very frustrating to know how to configure and run dovecot. An IMAP server is something that ought to be part and parcel of the most basic Linux server so it should be installed, documented, and ideally provide a GUI. RHEL 4 ES does not provide anything approaching those desiderata.

WARNING (bug): Do NOT run the Adobe Acrobat Viewer as an application (OK to use the Firefox Acrobat reader plugin). Adobe Acrobat freezes up X and I had to use Ctl-Alt-F1/F7 plus some guessing about what to kill in order to get X back alive. Very annoying.

Unable to listen to music from Firefox out of the box. The default offers to save file to disk. Have not had time to figure this out. Totem appears not to be installed in spite of my having installed "everything". I still listen to http://di.fm via Winamp on my Windows machine.

Thunderbird has a very annoying bug that intermittantly refuses to save sent mail to my local Sent folder. (and see next item) Thunderbird also suffers amazingly from the inablity for the authors to correctly implement word wrapping for plain text mail. This problem has plauged Mozilla mail for years.

No clue if my Red Hat Network update feature (which does work very well, per se) will or will not eventually fix my Thunderbird application. What gets updated? Security patches? Yes. Bug fixes? Yes. But do I get upgrades to applications via Red Hat updates? Hard to tell. If you know the answer to this (and have read this far), please drop me a note.

Worse, I have noticed that the little blue checkbox stays blue but when I explicitly go to the Red Hat Netowrk site and log on, I find that my system is not up to date. It is not comforting to know that my little icon is giving me a false sense of security.

Wish List:

Cross-application common File Manager for selecting, opening, and managing files.

Extend file systems so a directory can contain an URL as a kind of symlink.

Out-of-the-box web browser configued to play music from music sites.

A Microsoft Access alternative.

Microsoft would adopt open standards for its file formats.

Better pre-configured browser download functions to install software. I find that sometimes I do things like ask Firefox to update itself, it prompts me to save an update file but does not inform me where the file gets saved! Very irritating.

Easy-to-set-up server-side bookmarks and address books. (See next item).

Out-of-the-box LDAP server configued to support server-side bookmarks and address books. Larry Elison had it wrong. The Network computer is not a client, it is a server. Servers everywhere. So let's start acting like it. Why, in 2005, do I still not have an easy server-side bookmark and address book solution pre-installed on my Linux server? I once tired to set up an LDAP server. Totally arcane exercise. I would prefer it just come ready to go out of the box. I still do not have one running. Not enough time to hassle that yet.

Configuration Tips

Installing Red Hat Linux and configuring components has become a truly point and click exercise, with no problems to speak of. I manually partition my drives, but otherwise just use the point and click install off the single RHEL DVD. I would still like to see the configuration tools become better at informing you what system files are changed when you modify configuration parameters. But by now I too have probably succumbed to guru-itis such that I have so much knowlege about Red Hat Linux and UNIX in my head that I no longer know what a newbie would need or want to know by way of tips about UNIX commands and configuration files.

However, Red Hat configuration at the command line level has changed little over the years. For some tips, see my configuation notes for Red Hat 8.0.

File partitionning is pretty much a matter of superstition. I naivly think that I can "help" the disk head by putting certain less often used things or more often used things in separate partitions. And I guess I still don't want /tmp to overflow the disk. The only rule I use that I do recommend is to keep /home on its own physical drive so that you can reinstall the entire OS without having to touch /home. From my current `df` output:

  Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
  /dev/hda9            148884636  84661908  56659732  60% /
  /dev/hda1              1035660     49776    933276   6% /boot
  /dev/hdb2            191240280 124553140  56972636  69% /home
  /dev/hda8             10325748     55876   9745352   1% /opt
  /dev/hda5             10325748     92388   9708840   1% /tmp
  /dev/hda7             10325748     66448   9734780   1% /usr/local
  /dev/hda6             10325748    358700   9442528   4% /var

On RHEL 4 I chose the ext3 file system, as I had good experience with it in RH8. I moved my old ext3 /home from Red Hat by simply mounting it, copying over home directories and assuring that all uid and gid of all users to be retained were the same by creating new users via groupadd and useradd.

One glitch was figuring out how to run imapd. I called Red Hat tech support. Their answer: dovecot. `/etc/rc.d/init.d/dovecot start` and `chkconfig dovecot add`. Worked with zero configuration although at first I could not see my folders on the server so I had a bit more configuration of imapd to do. I am not acutally sure how I got dovecot/Thunderbird to talk together completely. I had some strange group ownerhip bits in my mail files so fixing those might have helped. The changes I put into /etc/dovecot.conf included the following, to inform it that I have Mail subdirs in user home dirs to contain IMAP mail and about a couple other technical details:

protocols = imaps
#dga imap_listen = [::]
imap_listen = *
#dga default_mail_env = 
default_mail_env = mbox:%h/Mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
#dga mailbox_check_interval = 0
mailbox_check_interval = 60

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