On Wed, 14 Nov 2007, Connie Sieh wrote:

> Developers,
>
> Scientific Linux "SL 5.1"  ALPHA for i386 is now available for testing.

Just another datapoint for you.

I unexpectedly managed to get hold of a test Dell Optiplex 755 yesterday 
(I wasn't expecting it to turn up 'til next week when I'll be over in DC).

SL 5.0 network installs don't work on the 755 because of the new Intel 
pro/1000 chipset that Dell chose to use so I wasn't expecting 5.1 to like 
it but in fact anaconda auto detected the card and decided to use the 
e1000e driver which worked fine (apparently the e1000 driver needs to be > 
7.6.9 to support this chipset).

Anyway a couple of test kickstart installs of the i386 version worked 
flawlessly and it didn't even mind being pointed at our local yum repos 
which include SL50 updates as well as locally added packages.

When I get back from my holiday I'll be able to do some more significant 
testing (and probably on x86_64 too when that alpha is released).

Finally a question I'm not sure if I've asked before.  Is there a reason 
how/why /etc/yum.conf contains the line:

   distroverpkg=redhat-release

and while there isn't such a package $releasever in a repo config gets set 
to the version of sl-release (which does *provide* redhat-release).

Sadly $releasever doesn't match the directory names in the SL trees so one 
can't simply have a repo with a line like:

baseurl=ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/$releasever/$basearch/SL

btw is there a _good_ way to add something to tell yum that I have a local 
mirror of a repo without having to edit the repos.d/ files each time?

  -- Jon