[WBEL-users] Observations on WBEL4

Jan-Albert van Ree javanree at vanree.net
Wed May 11 14:00:21 CDT 2005


It's been about a week since I started playing with the new version on my 
workstation and so far I can only say one thing : WOW!

Since I didn't trust the upgrade function to work correctly I started with a 
fresh install, only remounting data partitions and formatting OS partitions 
(although I learned a valuable one .... /var/lib/ is a good thing to back 
up too if you use MySQL! Luckily mine contained nothing but some krecipe 
data I still have stored elsewhere. Great time for a backup process check!)
I didn't install SELinux support yet, need to examine this further

First thing that struck me is boot time, the new WBEL4 is MUCH quicker in 
booting (I'd say around 40 sec. quicker, very noticeable) Most seems to be 
in the first part of booting, where all hardware is initialized. I guess 
the 2.6 kernel is good for something after all ;)

I wanted to go to KDE 3.4 immediately so I installed plain X, grabbed the 
KDE 3.4 source RPM's from a KDE mirror and started rebuilding. Some way 
cool things : most dependencies for KDE 3.4 are included in WBEL 4 (KDE 3.4 
failed to build under WBEL30, it needed LOADS of extra/newer libs) and 
rebuilding seems quicker too... due to newer gcc I suspect?

Overall I noticed that I will need to maintain WAY less packages (no more 
ALSA, no more hassle for the prism54 driver) than before, which is great!

The only issue I ran into was a non-functioning yum, so I built my own repo 
(using createrepo) on another box and added it to yum.conf so I won't need 
to fetch my DVD everytime to install something (I'm lazy ...)

A big thumbs up to John, for another awesome piece of work. I'll be 
upgrading / reinstalling all non-servers here over the next weeks, it's 
definately worth my time.

One question : given the fact that WBEL4 seems more suited to desktop 
useage, but is lacking in certain area's for that, any chance we'll see 
some sort of official contrib section on the mirrors for additional 
packages (Koffice, MP3 support through XMMS or recompiled kdemultimedia, a 
media player like xine, clamav to name a few important packages not 
included)? I wouldn't mind lending a hand...
-- 
Jan-Albert van Ree  | http://www.vanree.net/brickpiles/
VanRee IT Solutions | http://www.vanree.net


More information about the Whitebox-users mailing list