XFCE on regular Red Hat
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on. Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories. Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done. Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else? Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro? What are you folks using for prod? --dave $uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
David, On my last Fedora install, I went... # yum install @xfce As far as I can tell, I got everything. Generally, I use FVWM2 as my window manager, but XFCE seems to work. My install notes are online at... http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson/Linux.html On Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:41:13 -0400 David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com> wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories. Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies
This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done.
Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else? Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?
What are you folks using for prod?
--dave $uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
--- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca howard.gibson@teledyneoptech.com jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:41:13 -0400 David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com> wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories. Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies
This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done.
Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else? Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?
What are you folks using for prod?
--dave $uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x
What I would do on Red Hat 6.5 (never tried on Red Hat 7.x): # wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.... # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # yum -y groupinstall Xfce # yum -y install xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-fonts-misc Also, tried in a Centos 7 (perhaps would work on Red Hat 7.x # wget http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/epel//7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-2.noarch.r... # rpm -ivh epel-release-7.2.noarch.rpm # yum -y groupinstall Xfce # yum -y install xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-fonts-mis Best,
Have you looked into Xubuntu (14.04.2)? It is "long term support". -- William On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 06:41:13PM -0400, David Collier-Brown wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories. Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies
This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done.
Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else? Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?
What are you folks using for prod?
--dave $uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
--- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com> | For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a | new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version | to host recent tools on. | | Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding | edge in kernel versions, I hadn't noticed that. Can you give an example of a package that mattered to you? I was under the (untested) impression that Fedora updates applications more frequently than Ubuntu. But maybe that's because, where I use Ubuntu, I usually use LTS. RHEL really does keep applications stable to a fault. That's what their mandate is. They've recently softened this with a new scheme that lets you choose to bolt on blessed updated subsystems ("software collections"). These are not replacements but additions. Keeping packages current, if it is done right, is a lot of labour. Doing it wrong causes grief for the user. I imagine only the well-resourced distros can do it themselves for a broad range of packages. Debian does it for many downstream distros. Stability vs quick adoption of change is a tradeoff. In my (limited) world, I put these as useful points on a spectrum: RHEL 6, RHEL 7, Ubuntu LTS 12.04, Ubuntu LTS 14.04, Ubuntu, Fedora I don't really have a feel for where to place the various Debian streams. I never end up using XFCE so I cannot address that.
On Friday, July 24 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on.
I think you meant RHEL-7.1, right? RHEL-7.2 has not been released yet.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux
Out of curiosity, why do you say that Fedora "tends to lag in app version"? The Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain are well maintained and up-to-date; popular desktop programs as well, at least in my experience.
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall,
Do you mean yum does not recognize the "groupinstall" command at all? As you have mentioned below, yum actually *can* do a groupinstall without problems.
and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories.
You have to enable the 'optional' and 'extras' repositories on RHEL-7 in order to get the necessary dependencies for EPEL packages. Take a look at: <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL>
Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies
Building from scratch may depend on other packages indeed, depending on the features you enable while configuring.
This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done.
I tested it here on a pristine RHEL-7.1, and all I needed to do was installing the EPEL repository and 'yum groupinstall Xfce' worked fine.
Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else?
No, Red Hat has not been degrading anything. However, you might take into consideration that RHEL is an Enterprise GNU/Linux edition, and as such its goal is to be as stable as possible while still offering important upstream features to the customers. Red Hat does not package XFCE for any version of RHEL; such packages have always been considered "third-party" and provided by EPEL (at least some of them).
Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?
You do not need to downgrade to RHEL-6 to get XFCE working. Using EPEL is more than enough for this. Cheers, -- Sergio GPG key ID: 237A 54B1 0287 28BF 00EF 31F4 D0EB 7628 65FC 5E36 Please send encrypted e-mail if possible http://sergiodj.net/
On 07/26/2015 01:54 AM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
On Friday, July 24 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on. I think you meant RHEL-7.1, right? RHEL-7.2 has not been released yet. The download page said 7.1, but I included uname -a in the message, as it had said something else... $ uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux Out of curiosity, why do you say that Fedora "tends to lag in app version"? The Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain are well maintained and up-to-date; popular desktop programs as well, at least in my experience.
At the time it's cut Fedora is up to date, but their stated policy is to not spend much time updating until the next release is cut. I'm constrained to use specific recent versions of Eclipse, Java and Scala for work, and I couldn't even get the previous (Luna) version of Eclipse until a kind chap created a custom repo of it for Fedora. Current release is Eclipse Mars, which installs without any pain on RHEL workstation. As you would expect.
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, Do you mean yum does not recognize the "groupinstall" command at all? As you have mentioned below, yum actually *can* do a groupinstall without problems.
No, I said *other folks* with earlier RHEL 7s could do a groupinstall: I get $ sudo yum groupinstall Xfce [sudo] password for davecb: Loaded plugins: langpacks, product-id, subscription-manager Warning: group Xfce does not exist. No packages in any requested group available to install or update Various other people reported this as well, and have suggested workarounds. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
On Sunday, July 26 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:
On 07/26/2015 01:54 AM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
On Friday, July 24 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on. I think you meant RHEL-7.1, right? RHEL-7.2 has not been released yet. The download page said 7.1, but I included uname -a in the message, as it had said something else... $ uname -a Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x
I see. The "7.2" you see there is an internal version number; this specific Linux kernel has been released for RHEL-7.1.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux Out of curiosity, why do you say that Fedora "tends to lag in app version"? The Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain are well maintained and up-to-date; popular desktop programs as well, at least in my experience.
At the time it's cut Fedora is up to date, but their stated policy is to not spend much time updating until the next release is cut. I'm constrained to use specific recent versions of Eclipse, Java and Scala for work, and I couldn't even get the previous (Luna) version of Eclipse until a kind chap created a custom repo of it for Fedora. Current release is Eclipse Mars, which installs without any pain on RHEL workstation. As you would expect.
Hm, I don't know about this policy (I am a heavy Fedora user and I maintain a few packages in the distro). The current release always gets tons of updates for the vast majority of the packages, and even the "older" releases also get a decent number of updates as well (assuming they have not been EOL'ed).
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall, Do you mean yum does not recognize the "groupinstall" command at all? As you have mentioned below, yum actually *can* do a groupinstall without problems.
No, I said *other folks* with earlier RHEL 7s could do a groupinstall:
Sorry, I was confused with your original sentence, and I thought you were not able to do a 'yum groupinstall' of any package.
I get $ sudo yum groupinstall Xfce [sudo] password for davecb: Loaded plugins: langpacks, product-id, subscription-manager Warning: group Xfce does not exist. No packages in any requested group available to install or update
Do you have EPEL enabled in your system? I could not reproduce this problem, but I am interested in helping you fix it. -- Sergio GPG key ID: 237A 54B1 0287 28BF 00EF 31F4 D0EB 7628 65FC 5E36 Please send encrypted e-mail if possible http://sergiodj.net/
participants (6)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
David Collier-Brown -
Howard Gibson -
Marcelo Cavalcante -
Sergio Durigan Junior -
William Park