[luau] Startup Disk for 7.2

[Warren Togami]

I do agree that Red Hat 7.2 + all Errata packages is very stable and usable,
but it takes a while to upgrade.  Do you normally apply all updates?  It is
very easy with Red Hat Network and up2date.

Red Hat 7.3 has a much newer kernel that supports more hardware, KDE 3.0.0
which is a big improvement over KDE 2.2.2, and also hundreds of other bug
fixes over Red Hat 7.2.  Linuxconf was removed because it is a poorly
written and unreliable tool.  Often it becomes unusable and freezes for
seemingly no reason if you have modified configs (like networking) either
manually or with other tools.  Notice that even Mandrake re-wrote all the
tools within Linuxconf within their new DrakConf.  I would suspect that
Linuxconf is slated for removal from Mandrake too.

If you REALLY want Linuxconf you can install the Linuxconf packages from Red
Hat 7.2, or from the official Linuxconf site:
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/linuxconf

Red Hat removed Linuxconf because it was a constant nightmare of bugs that
were unsupportable because it is so poorly designed.  They however made a
mistake in replacing it with a set of poorly organized tools that are
difficult to find, however functional.  I have criticized them on this
point, and I hope that they will fix this by the next (possibly 8.0)
version.  Mandrake's DrakConf or SuSE's YaST model is very good by
comparison.

Ultimately you shouldn't need to rely on GUI or TUI config tools.  You
become a better administrator if you learn about manually editing the text
config files, because your knowledge transfers to other Linux, BSD and Unix
systems which may have different configuration tools.  Your overall
understanding of how the system works too, meaning quicker diagnosis of
problems that you may encounter down the line.

This being said, I am willing to help anyone learn these skills.  Please ask
if you would like to learn about 7.3 (without Linuxconf) ways of configuring
certain things.  I'll write about the replacement config tools, and manual
config editing.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan George" <LinuxDan at hawaii.rr.com>
To: <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: [luau] Startup Disk for 7.2


> Warren
>              What is there to like about 7.3?  Its displacing all the
great
> Linux commands from the command line interface like Linuxconf.  In class
our
> instructor criticized 7.3 and instead of instructing in 7.3 he used 7.2.
> But unfortuneately the disk copy I have is bad of 7.2 and they dont sell
it
> anymore at CompUSA.
>
> Dan