Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 desktop

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 desktop

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was branched from Fedora 12 and has many back ported features coming from Fedora 13 and Fedora 14. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is nicknamed Santiago released in November 10, 2010. It utilizes Linux kernel 2.6.32-71. Here are some of the modifications done in the major release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2.

For the hardware support, the package “biosdevname” has been upgraded to version 0.3.8. It now gives the command line parameters “nopirq” and “smbios” which will allow users to indicate lowest BIOS and be able to turn off or deactivate PCI IRQ Routing Table [PIRQ].

The compression format used for the file initrd.img was changed. Instead of using the usual Gzip as the compression format for the file, LZMA compression format is now applied. To decompress an image file, use the command “xz -d”:

• ~]# xz -dc initrd.img | cpio –id

To do the opposite or to compress an image, use the command “xz -9 –format=lzma”:

• ~]# find . | cpio -c -o | xz -9 –format=lzma > initrd.img

For unattended installations, you can now specify Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI [SAS] devices using a WWID or World Wide Identifier or a WWN or World Wide Name. The previous file name used ramdisk.image.gz for the initial RAM disk file on 64-bit IBM POWER Series and 64-bit PowerPC systems is now named as initrd.img.