Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Beta Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Beta Released

Red Hat today announced the first public beta of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-RHEL9-Beta

[GraysonPeddie]

As I am already certified in CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and Cisco CCNA, I wonder what RHCSA 9 is going to be like compared to RHCSA 8? As RHCSA 8 is based on RHEL 8, RHCSA 9 is going to be based on RHEL 9. I've already studied for RHCSA 8, although I'm going to do some practicing before I take the exam. I did purchase an eBook for RHCSA 8 but I have not taken an exam yet due to pandemic last year.

Anyway, I'm an Arch Linux/Debian/Ubuntu type of guy, although it won't hurt to get my feet wet in RHEL land with Rocky Linux or Alma Linux.

[You-]

I dont think RHEL 9 will be as big of a leap in relation to changing how you to things as RHEL8 v RHEL7 v RHEL6.

[rmnscnce]

As weird as it is, I tried spinning up an RHEL 9 Beta VM just hours ago and set up the Workstation "edition"[?]

They have some -- let's say, interesting choices. For example, the wallpaper is non-existent (understandable, maybe it doesn't pass the trademark approval yet), and it's shipping GNOME Software 41.0, despite the desktop environment being GNOME 40. Also, they seem to patch GNOME Shell to boot directly to the blank desktop -- like the old days of GNOME 3.x, unlike the current default boot-to-overview behavior.

It's running a (to be) heavily backported-on Linux kernel version 5.14, following the weird tradition of RHEL shipping exactly one release version behind the mainline LTS (5.15)

[phylaz]

I've always wondered why they allowed root + password login via ssh as a default all these years. It's like the first thing you disable upon login in.

[birdie]

Since it's based on Fedora 34 which contains quite a lot of modern tech innovations and the fact that the pace of Linux development has slowed down recently, it might become a very long lived distro and quite suitable for the desktop at that considering the existence of EPEL.

[darkbasic]

the pace of Linux development has slowed down recently

LOL

(stupid character limit)

[Anvil]

wonder what DNF version it comes with?

[mroche]

GraysonPeddie Take a look through the release notes doc to see what is deprecated and what is new. Overall, it's not a big change at all. One example of a change is in the networking stack, you can't use network-scripts anymore [INCORRECT](e.g. ifcfg-<name>). You need to know how to configure things with NetworkManager and how it handles things in /etc/NetworkManager.~~[/INCORRECT]

Correction to above: legacy configs (ifcfg-<name>) still work, NetworkManager knows how to parse them just fine (with caveats noted by others later). You lose the ability to run the execution scripts, such as ifup*/ifdown*.

rmnscnce The workstation build doesn't install the redhat-backgrounds package as the art hasn't been produced. I don't recall previous RHEL versions auto-installing gnome-backgrounds, but I could be mistaken. GNOME Shell will have feature/fix backports from future GNOME releases, however the userspace applications can be rebased as desired to the actual upstream versions. If you look at RHEL 8 you'll see the same situation depending on the application.

The kernel situation isn't a weird tradition, it's just timing. The development freeze happened before 5.15 was released or even in RC phase; things have deadlines for the beta and other processes. And when it comes to the kernel, it really doesn't matter in RHEL's case as the kernel team will backport whatever they need from upstream (and shut off whatever they don't). A RHEL 5.14 kernel is not a 5.14 kernel for very long...

Cheers,
Mike

[GraysonPeddie]

GraysonPeddie Take a look through the release notes doc to see what is deprecated and what is new. Overall, it's not a big change at all. One example of a change is in the networking stack, you can't use network-scripts anymore (e.g. ifcfg-<name>). You need to know how to configure things with NetworkManager and how it handles things in /etc/NetworkManager.

...

Cheers,
Mike

Thanks. I will probably wait for new study materials and look over the release notes for RHEL 9.