The Author – Bart Busschots
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Sep
29
RedHat Need to Learn Some Common Sense
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on September 29, 2006 at 6:19 pm
I’ll hold my hands up now and say this will be a rant post. I’m annoyed. I’ve just wasted and entire afternoon at work because of pure and utter idiocy by the RedHat people. I don’t suffer fools well so that also adds to my annoyance 🙂
I just did an install of the RHEL ES5 Beta. Sure, it’s a Beta so expect some problems. I agree, but not stupidity! The installer all happens via X which is great. A nice point and click installer, great! In fact, partitioning, package selection and the bulk of the install all went flawlessly. Then, the very last part of the install process is a reboot followed by the first boot screens. This is where RHEL acted the utter idiot.
At this stage in the Windows installer the resolution is set at a safe level. Sure, it does not look very pretty but at least everyone can SEE it! RHEL did not do this. It would appear that they have set the last part of the installer to run at the highest settings the machine’s graphics card can pump out. In my case my graphics card would appear to be a lot better than any monitor I can find in here because after hauling as many different monitors as I can find into the machine room not a single one could display the output! All gave an error saying it was out of range.
What makes this unforgivable is that the X settings used in the first part of the installer worked fine because the settings were nice and low, then, half way through the install, they mess it up completely by bumping up the settings to make it shinier. I DON’T CARE IF THE COLOURS AREN’T PERFECT OR THE RESOLUTION ‘ONLY’ 1024×768 IN MY INSTALLER ….. I just want to SEE it!
But it gets even worse. The ONLY way I can find to get by these first boot screens is to fill them in. I can’t drop down to a command-line like I would on a regular Linux box where the X server is messed up, ctrl+alt+f1 etc will not get you a login prompt. All screens are waiting on the first boot screens to finish. Worse still, the network also appears not to be started yet, or if it is, the firewall is blocking everything. Either way I can’t ping the machine or SSH to it.
Basically, I am stuck. I have a 99% complete install that is utterly useless because RHEL put form over function and made an insanely stupid decision. If only they’d let us use Debian in here in work 🙁
Yeah, enterprise 4 would occasionally choose a mode that the kvm monitor ( particularly in the shared area ) did not like. The solution was to ssh in and change the config. I’m disappointed they’ve shut out the CLI completely like that, you have to presume that people who can afford the support contracts can use a CLI. Maybe you could push the debian issue again? I managed to get debian on one of the proxies for a while.
It worked great, but as soon as cheap rhel 4 licenses were found, of course it had to go.
Phil …. trust me … that boat won’t float.
A real pitty because the more experience I get with Redhat/Fedora the less I wish I had. I remember FC2 and FC4 just working and being generally great. Now I’m having nothing but trouble with FC5 and RHEL. RHEL4 almost made as much of a balls on install today as RHEL5 beta but was just within the range of a CRT I still had in the server room from Friday. It’s a real pain trying to install REHL on a server because the RedHat guys seem to have no actual clue of what a real server roon is like. We don’t all have big shinny monitors, we have old crappy ones and cheap LCDs! Give us 1024×768 at a reasonable sync-rate as a default PLEASE!
It’s a server, why are you installing a GUI anyhow? – if you want a gui server go install windows 2003.. =P (yes, that was a troll comment)
(that said, I totally agree, annoying features like that are reason number 4080 that Linux will remain a hobbyist OS, and never truly supplant any mainstream UNIX without _HEAVY_ build and install customization – and no, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that)
– G
Did you try changing the viewable resolution with Ctrl-Alt-keypad plus or Ctrl-Alt-keypad minus? It’s annoying to have to do that, but it may help you get to the point where you can set the resolution to something reasonable.
I didn’t know you could do that … will give that a go next time Red Hat acts the idiot. Cheers!
Bart.