[WBEL-users] White Box Enterprise Linux 4

[John Morris]

Yes it has been delayed a few weeks longer than planned, but this baby
is finally born!

White Box Enterprise Linux 4 is now moving to the mirrors.  The i386 iso
images are widely distributed as I type and the x86_64 and source images
should appear within 24 hours.  The rest of the tree will be populated
as bandwidth permits.  As usual a torrent is also running, currently
with two seeds and a dozen downloads already in progress.

  * This release is starting out with i386 (ia32) and AMD64
(x86_64/ia32e) ports built from the exact same source package set, which
is RHEL4 updated with all errata released through April 30.

  * The kernel is an exception to the WB naming convention. This is done
to allow 3rd party binary modules intended to be used on RHEL4 to load
on White Box Enterprise Linux 4. So while the SRPM in origSRPMS and the
SRPMS directory have the same name they are slightly different. 
Specifically, the WB package is modified to build a normal package
outside of RH's Beehive build cluster and to change the name of the
module signing key to say White Box.  The install media is also not
updated with the errata kernel for compatibility with driver discs.

  * Many packages are modified to change Trademarks and references to
Red Hat where such use might cause confusion. These changes go a little
deeper than on the previous 3.0 release.  Their name remains on packages
they claim authorship on, of course, and it also remains in places where
changing it would cost binary compatibility. For example the full arch
is still i386-redhat-linux-gnu since many things would break if that
were to be changed.

  * A few packages were modified to actually build on x86_64 instead of
importing the version that built on i386, specifically
perl-Convert-ASN1, perl-LDAP and Pyrex since a goal of White Box is to
be fully self hosted.

   * A newer version of dhcp was brought in from a link on bugzilla due
to the RH shipped version being known NOT to build on the supplied GCC.

   * Yum isn't part of RHEL4 but since White Box needs it, the version
from Fedora Core 3 is included.

   * tora isn't built from the unmodified srpm. A tweak was made to the
first line of the .spec to produce a tora-oracle package. Oracle 10g was
also installed prior to this. A side rant: installation of the Oracle
client is much harder than it needs to be (anyone at Oracle heard of
RPM?) and the download can't be accomplished with WBEL3's current
Mozilla. IE was required by way of CrossOver Office. Oracle also won't
install on either WBEL4 OR RHEL4, manually placing "Red Hat Enterprise
Linux release 3 (manifestdestiny)" into /etc/redhat-release was required
to successfully install the Oracle client.  A tora-oracle package is now
supplied for both i386 and x86_64.

   * Yes the artwork is still mostly the same weak stuff from WBEL3. I
had a volunteer promising better replacements but he didn't come through
in time for the initial release. Still hoping to get it in as an errata.

And it just couldn't be a White Box release without a stupid bug that
doesn't get caught before iso images are on the mirrors...  Yum won't
get installed as part of the base system so stick CD4 in and install it
before using either it or Up2date Network.