On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Orion Poplawski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> FYI - The RHEL 7 Beta is public:
>
> http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/7/x86_64/os/
>
> so you can try it out now if you want.

I'd consider making a mirror of it, or of the ISO contents, to be able
to access the packages quickly. I'm afraid that RHN registered access
is no faster than it's ever been: the worldwide CentOS or Scientific
Linux mirrors continue to outperform the centralized, RHN repository
in speed of reporting  the dependencies of a a package, and in
actually serving the package, unless you've invested the significant
capital in getting an RHN Satellite set up.

Scientific Linux mirrors are much cheaper and notably more stable than
anything I've encountered with RHN: it's one of the reasons I like the
free rebuilds like SL and CentOS.

I'm afraid there's a great deal I *don't* like about the beta: Moving
the contents of "/bin" to "/usr/bin", and setting the PATH to
"/usr/bin:/bin" is going to break a *lot* of old tools in confusing
ways. They should leave "/bin" entirely out of the default PATH to
avoid confusion with the n ew layout. And the new installer is "a new
spoke and wheel paradigm" that looks pretty in a PowerPoint
presentation, and actually hinders sensible workflow. How many places
can we hide the "Next" or "Done" button, I count at least 4 in those
various screens, and they're all far too large graphically for a small
remote VNC or VMware console over a limited network pipe.

Do not get me *started* on NetworkManager and libvirt.

Overall, I'm pretty unhappy with  the release 7 beta. Upon review, the
only reason I want it, and will want SL 7 with it, is the
significantly updated Perl, PHP, and other libraries. I'd say that
Samba 4 is a big step forward but I've already tools for an up to date
backport of samba-4.x at https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo. And I'm
afraid that it's taking way too long. By the time it comes out, I'll
*already* have to bundle together a bunch pf backports from more
recent Fedora releases to get various Perl and Python and Java based
tools working.