Red Hat Linux 7.1 Release Notes ------------------------------- This document describes features that are new to Red Hat Linux 7.1, but may not have been available prior to our documentation being finalized. For the very latest information, please read the RELEASE-NOTES file on the Red Hat Linux CD #1. Last-Minute Changes ------------------- o iSeries boot configuration has changed. The kernel chosen by the installation program will be installed on the B and C sides, and a rescue boot image will be installed on the A side. o The scripts installkernel and installcmdline have been renamed to installkernel.iSeries and installcmdline.iSeries, respectively. It is now only necessary to run these scripts after installing a new kernel or if you wish to IPL from somewhere other than the B side. It is not necessary to run them after installing the system if you wish to IPL from the B side. o Software RAID configuration from within the installation program is no longer allowed. o Native DASD (ibmsis) support is not included in this release. o Reminder regarding NFS, FTP, or HTTP installations -- Because the Red Hat Linux 7.1 installation program is capable of installing Red Hat Linux from multiple CD-ROMs, if you intend to support NFS, FTP, or HTTP installations it is no longer possible to simply mount a single Red Hat Linux CD-ROM, and install from it. Instead, you must copy the RedHat/ directory from each CD-ROM comprising Red Hat Linux 7.1 onto a disk drive: - Insert CD 1 mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom cp -var /mnt/cdrom/RedHat /location/of/disk/space umount /mnt/cdrom - Insert CD 2 mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom cp -var /mnt/cdrom/RedHat /location/of/disk/space umount /mnt/cdrom You must then make /location/of/disk/space accessible to the installation program (for example, exporting it for NFS installations): - Export /location/of/disk/space Important Updates and Corrections to the Installation Guide ----------------------------------------------------------- Please review these notes about the Installation Guide before starting your installation. The text mode of the installation program does not properly display some German characters on a terminal window that uses a UTF-8 locale. For instance, you may see this problem when connecting to the guest console from a Red Hat Linux 8.0 system. If your terminal window does not properly display German characters, run xterm in an environment where the value of the LANG variable is "C", such as: LANG=C xterm Then connect to the LPAR's guest console from that xterm window. Section 2.3 suggests a 4MB PReP boot partition. The PReP boot partition should be at least 8MB. Section 2.5 begins with a warning about installing over another Linux installation. In this release, an "upgrade" class installation is supported when installing over a previous Red Hat Linux release. The upgrade installation will not format any partitions. It will install the packages provided by the new release if they are already installed on the system (the equivalent of the "rpm -F" command for each package) and install any new prereqs for those packages. Section 3.1 states that a graphical installation is not available. See the README file for an explanation of a graphical installation method involving an X server on another system. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 and other parts of the Installation Guide refer to the ibmsis SCSI driver. This driver and Native SCSI are not supported in this release. Section 3.8.2 talks about the suggested amount of swap space. See the section called "Swap-Related Issues" in this document for updated information. Section 3.16 shows how to select the "Hardware clock set to GMT" option while configuring the time zone. Selecting the "Hardware clock set to GMT" option is recommended. Section 3.22 describes how to install the kernel after the initial reboot. These steps are no longer necessary if you want to IPL from the B side. Also, the names of the commands have changed to installkernel.iSeries and installcmdline.iSeries. The installkernel.iSeries command by default attempts to install the kernel that is currently booted. To install a different kernel, add a second command line argument that is the name of the kernel image file you want to install. The installcmdline.iSeries command by default installs a command line that consists of "root=" where is appropriate for the booted system. To install a different kernel command line, add a second command line argument (in quotes) which is the kernel command line you want to install. Installation-Related Enhancements and Changes --------------------------------------------- The Red Hat Linux 7.1 installation program includes a number of new features. For more information, please refer to the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide. o Swap-related issues -- The optimal sizing of swap space is dependent on the following: - The amount of RAM installed - The amount of disk space available for swap - The applications being run - The mix of applications that are run concurrently For a server class installation, a minimum swap space of two times your LPAR's memory, or 2GB, whichever is smaller, is recommended. (NOTE: In no instance will the Red Hat Linux 7.1 installation program create a swap partition or file larger than 2GB. Should your swap requirements exceed this size, you will need to address this after the installation has completed.) o Firewall Configuration -- For added security, you can now configure a firewall as part of your system installation. You can choose from two levels of security, as well as choosing which common system services should be allowed or disallowed by default. Please note that both "medium" and "high" firewall settings will cause RPC-based services (such as NIS or NFS) to be blocked, and thus fail. o Hard Drive Installation - ISO images are now required for hard drive installations, making it no longer necessary to copy and install the entire tree. Instead, simply put the required ISO images in a directory. During the hard drive installation, point the Red Hat Linux installation program at that directory. In addition, since Red Hat publishes MD5 checksums for all ISO images, it is now possible to ensure that you are using officially-released software by running the md5sum program against your ISO images, and comparing the checksums against the ones published by Red Hat. o Language Selection -- Language selection has been significantly re-vamped. It is now possible to install in one language, but specify that the system, after installation, will operate in another language. o Disk Druid Improvements -- Disk Druid now detects partition table inconsistencies, such as partitions that do not end on cylinder boundaries. This can be caused if the geometry of a hard disk drive is detected differently than when the drive was originally partitioned. In these cases, we recommend that you use the fdisk program to more closely inspect these inconsistencies, or choose to skip the drive entirely. o Improved Rescue Mode -- Rescue mode now attempts to mount the file systems listed in /etc/fstab (assuming the root file system can be found). The file systems are mounted under /mnt/sysimage. This eliminates a very confusing step for users using rescue-mode for the first time. o Miscellaneous Installation Program Improvements -- Overall, there are many additional tests and checks performed to catch potential problems which previously caused tracebacks (installation program crashes). This should reduce the number of poor out-of-box experiences for newer users. System-Related Enhancements and Changes --------------------------------------- There are many features new to Red Hat Linux 7.1 that are not part of the installation process. Some new features are server-oriented programs, while others are new applications or desktop environment changes. This list will provide a bit more information about what to expect from Red Hat Linux 7.1 once you are actually using the OS. o Removable media drives automatically added to /etc/fstab -- Red Hat Linux 7.1 now includes the ability for users to mount and unmount removable media drives. This is done by the updfstab program (which is part of the kudzu boot-time hardware configurator). It adds and removes the necessary entries in /etc/fstab. Note that each entry managed by updfstab contains the new "kudzu" option -- this acts as a token indicating that the entry may subsequently be removed; if you wish to permanently add such an entry to your fstab, simply remove the "kudzu" option. Hotpluggable devices are handled through a combination of cardmgr, hotplug, updfstab, and pam_console_apply. When the kernel notifies hotplug or cardmgr that a new storage device has been attached to the system, updfstab is run to add the new entries to the fstab. Then, updfstab runs pam_console_apply, which uses the rules specified in /etc/security/console.perms to give the current console user access to the device. o IMAP server changes -- The IMAP server now defaults to using its built-in SSL support instead of stunnel's tunneling support. Accordingly, the name of the certificate file used by imapd has changed from stunnel.pem to imapd.pem. Users upgrading from previous releases of Red Hat Linux will need to rename, copy, or create a symbolic link to their existing certificate. o Sendmail -- By default, sendmail does not accept network connections from any host other than the local computer. If you want to configure sendmail as a server for other clients, please edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and change DAEMON_OPTIONS to also listen on network devices, or comment out this option all together. You will need to regenerate /etc/sendmail.cf by running: m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf Note that you must have the sendmail-cf package installed for this to work. o Other package highlights: - Ogg Vorbis audio encoder/decoder - Mozilla Web browser - LSB-compliant SGML and XML packages - KDE 2.1 and KOffice - BIND 9.x with DNSsec support and remote named control - SSL support in links, slrn, OpenLDAP, and pine - Pine 4.33 - Quanta HTML editor (on Powertools) - Postfix and exim (on Powertools) include SSL/TLS support o Deprecated Packages -- the following packages are deprecated, and could disappear in a future release: - AfterStep - Netscape 4.x - Qt 1.x - KDE v1 compatibility libraries / build environment - elm - linuxconf - ncpfs - mars_nwe Documentation-Related Enhancements and Changes ---------------------------------------------- o Additional documentation regarding the /etc/exports file -- When the first entry is placed in the /etc/exports file to indicate a directory to be exported via NFS, the commands "service nfs stop" and "service nfs start" must be run. The command "service nfs restart" is not sufficient to start nfs for the first export. Alternatively, the system may be rebooted after the /etc/exports file is prepared. o Additional documentation regarding the /etc/sysconfig/vncservers file -- Due to time constraints, the following information was not available prior to the Red Hat Linux Reference Guide's print date. The /etc/sysconfig/vncservers file configures how the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server starts up. VNC is a remote display system which allows you to view a desktop environment not only on the machine where it is running but across different networks (from a LAN to the Internet) and using a wide variety of machine architectures. It may contain the following: VNCSERVERS=, where is set to something like "1:fred", to indicate that a VNC server should be started for user fred on display :1. User fred must have set a VNC passwd using vncpasswd before attempting to connect to the remote VNC server. Note that when you use a VNC server, your communication with it is unencrypted, and so it should not be used on an untrusted network. For specific instructions concerning the use of SSH to secure the VNC communication, please read the information found at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/sshvnc.html. To find out more about SSH, please refer to the Red Hat Linux Reference and Customization Guides. Known Problems and Corrections ------------------------------ When the Japanese locale is used, the dates printed by the "ls" and "dates" commands are incorrectly formatted. No solution is currently available. Disk partition formatting (the mke2fs command, or formatting done by the installation program) can fail for small primary partitions (at this writing, primary partitions smaller than 512MB are known to fail). Autopartitioning should not be selected for Server class installations, because of the disk partition formating problem mentioned above. Server class autopartitioning creates partitions that are small enough to cause this failure. Each virtual disk can have at most two primary and two logical (extended) partitions. Primary partitions intended to be formatted as Linux filesystems should be larger than 512MB. If you need to create more than 4 partitions, add another virtual disk to your NWSD. There are reports that an FTP installation can fail if the FTP server does not support passive mode. If you have any problems (such as hangs) during an FTP installation, make sure your FTP server supports passive mode. The KDE desktop environment does not run properly under the version of VNC included in this release. If you need a remote desktop environment, either use GNOME under VNC, or use XDMCP instead of VNC. The LTP program (Linux Test Project) is known to report errors when run on this Red Hat Linux distribution. These error do not indicate any known failure or reduced usability in this distribution. The extreme limits of a system's capacity are diffcult to quantify. Any Linux distrubution will show some failure when its process, open file, or memory limits (to name a few) are reached. This distribution is known to exhibit process failures if you start twenty telnet sessions into the partition, each logged on with a different user-id, from each telnet session execute vncserver to start a vnc session, and in each vnc session start the 'top' command. ppc 7.1