RedHat Need to Learn Some Common Sense

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