

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now available - Uncle_Sam
http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv6-announce/2010-November/msg00000.html

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Rantenki
This is fantastic news for virtualization:

1\. Memory deduplication on kvm machines: matching memory pages are COWed.
Hopefully there is a re-spin of the virtio drivers too (which rock, btw).

2\. Way newer kvm/libvirt (the old ones sucked)

3\. Python 2.6. They skipped 2.5 entirely, which is nice.

Just keep in mind, they'll be supporting it for a VERY long time, so RHEL6
will be looking pretty tired in another 3.5 years (the current age of RHEL5).

~~~
listic
I wonder, will I be able to use Xen on RHEL6 servers? Should I?

I'm learning to use virtualization and I picked Xen because seemed to me like
solid technology - it's good for Amazon, Google and prgmr.com, so surely it
will be good enough for me? On the other hand, it is not included in the
kernel, its usage tends to lead to using anscient kernels, Red Hat and Ubuntu
are moving away from it. I'm in doubt what virtualization technology should I
be using.

~~~
wmf
Xen is dead. KVM is now equally "solid", easier to use, better supported, etc.

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nwatson
That means I'm looking forward to CentOS 6 soon. I hope.

QEMU/KVM virtualization is very nice and hopefully I won't need to rely on
bleeding edge (though surprisingly stable) Fedora 13+ for a good stock
deployment from now on.

~~~
wmf
CentOS people are saying 4-6 weeks.

~~~
epo
Nice, something to do over Christmas as I am teetotal this year.

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blantonl
_This truly is a milestone release for Red Hat that is putting a stake in the
industry as the foundation for the next decade._

Am I the only one that took a double-take at that sentence?

~~~
seiji
I was fond of: _This is a milestone event for Red Hat as we once again push
forward and upward our leadership position in the market._

The message seems to have manifested from the collective will of all redhat
employees. There's no human signer or sender.

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jhancock
Does anyone know if they removed all the X11 dependency garbage for a server
install? An RHEL5 was approaching the bloat of a Solaris install. There was no
"click here to install a slim server" option.

~~~
freiheit
From some investigation, I think the simple answer is "yes", as long as you
leave out devel, java, and a few specific tools. And totally yes for all the
Xserver stuff.

I've got a kickstarted system with "@additional-server-devel @base, @compat-
libraries, @core, @development, @network-tools, @performance, @server-
platform-devel, @system-admin-tools" package groups and a few specific package
tweaks. Fits in under 2GB. Looks like there's no X server stuff, but there's
libX11, a few other libX* packages, and gtk2 installed... It's being pulled in
by some of the java stuff, seekwatcher, latencytop, python-matplotlib and a
couple other devel things I probably don't care about. There's only 29
packages it wants to remove if I tell yum to remove libX11-common.

Looks to me like with a few more tweaks to my kickstart I'll be able to get
all the X11 deps out.

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foobarbazetc
PostgreSQL 9.0 would have been nice, but I guess that's understandable.

Otherwise, a great release. RHEL is awesome. :)

------
cowmixtoo
I hope the standard version of Python is upgraded beyond 2.4.X.

~~~
forkqueue
Python 2.6. Also PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1.

~~~
avar
But only Perl 5.10.1, they didn't upgrade to 5.12.* for some reason.

~~~
rwmj
Only having Perl 5.10 is a problem, and it comes down to timing. 5.12 was
released upstream in April, didn't get into Fedora until mid-June, by which
point it had missed the deadline for entering RHEL 6 (because of the extensive
QA that we would require).

If you're a customer and you need 5.12, be sure to open a support ticket
and/or talk to your TAM.

