Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 Red Hat, the world's most profitable Linux company, released a new version of the company's flag ship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), in the first week of May. The new release, RHEL 8, is based on Fedora 28 and introduces some interesting changes. RHEL 8 makes GNOME on Wayland the default desktop environment, provides the Cockpit remote management service pre-installed, and replaces the iptables firewall with nftables. Additional changes can be found in the distribution's extensive release notes, which I think are well worth a read.



Getting started with Red Hat's latest release took me through some difficult turns. RHEL is commercial software and requires the user to have a Red Hat account if we want to access the free 30-day evaluation ISO file. At first I went to the Red Hat website, went into the Downloads section, picked Enterprise Linux 8, and clicked the Try button. I was asked for my username and password at which point I discovered my old Red Hat account was no longer active (or I've lost the credentials). At any rate, I signed up for a new account, waited for the verification e-mail and, when it arrived, clicked the verification link. This took me to a page which read: "Unexpected error when handling authentication request to identify provider." I assumed several people were probably also signing up for new accounts on launch day, so waited a few minutes and went back to the first browser tab and requested a new verification e-mail. At which point I was told my account was already signed in and verified.



I went back to the download page, clicked the Try button and was offered a download called BinaryDVD. I clicked the link, downloaded the ISO and got to work. Booting from the media launched the Anaconda installer which has been lightly modified from Fedora's version of the installer to include some enterprise options and install-time customizations. I soon ran into a problem though as one of the installer steps demanded I provide a network URL for the source media and refused to proceed without a URL. The install steps on the website hadn't mentioned setting up source media and the built-in help documentation did not provide any clues.



I asked on-line about this and was told what I had downloaded was the Boot disc, not the full DVD. So I went back to the download page and noticed something interesting. The BinaryDVD download link showed it as connecting to the full DVD in my browser's status bar, but clicking the link redircted me to the net-install Boot disc ISO. I checked back a few days later and this had been fixed so clicking the BinaryDVD option would download the full DVD as expected. At the time I got around this issue by finding a second download page which listed all the different editions of RHEL for the various supported architectures and downloaded the full edition. There are quite a few editions from which to choose, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Workstation, Desktop, Atomic Host, Real Time, High Availability, and Container Development Kit. Selecting most of these indicates they are only available as older (7.x) versions. I went with the generic, default option which is an available flavour for version 8.0 and was a 6.6GB download.



Installing



Booting from the RHEL 8 media brings up a menu asking if we would like to launch the installer, boot from the hard drive, or run the media through a self-test. One aspect of RHEL I appreciate is the self-test is the default option and, assuming the media passes, the system then proceeds to launch the installer. This insures we start off from a position where we know the media has not been corrupted.



Once the Anaconda graphical installer launches we are asked to confirm our keyboard's layout. We are then given the chance to set our time zone and preferred language. There is a configuration screen which asks if we would like to provide links to media sources, with the installer defaulting to using the DVD. Another module asks us to pick the operating system's role. A role can be a Server (with graphical interface), a Server with just a command line interface, a Minimal Install, Workstation, Virtualization Host, or Custom. Each of these can further be customized with optional groups of packages. I decided to try the Workstation role, with some added packages.



Additional modules provide us with the means to enable and configure networking, create a root password, and optionally create a user account. The packages then copy to the hard drive which, in my case where I was installing the Workstation software and some extra items, took a little under an hour. The installer finishes its work and prompts us to reboot. An issue I ran into early on was, when the system reboots, the DVD stays in the drive. I found if I selected the option to boot from a local drive from the DVD's boot menu no suitable media would be found. Removing the DVD and booting directly from the hard disk did work.



The first time RHEL 8 boots, a graphical first-run wizard appears. The wizard asks us to accept Red Hat's license agreement and then asks for our Red Hat username and password so our installation can be activated. We then wait a minute while the system registers itself with Red Hat and confirms we have the proper license. The operating system then reboots. In my case, when it came back on-line, I was presented with a graphical login screen.



Early impressions



When I first started using RHEL 8 I noticed that, despite the release notes reporting GNOME and the GNOME Display Manager would use Wayland by default, both the GNOME Shell and GNOME Classic session that were available were run on X.Org sessions. I was not sure why at first, but I eventually discovered that RHEL will detect if the necessary video drivers are available for running Wayland and, if they are not available, the Wayland session options are hidden. This means people using some NVIDIA drivers and the default VirtualBox drivers will not be able to sign into a Wayland session. However, people running RHEL with Intel, AMD or VirtualBox add-on modules should see both the Wayland and X.Org session options on the login screen.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Running GNOME Shell

(full image size: 533kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I played with all four session options (GNOME Shell and GNOME Classic, each running on X.Org and Wayland). To the distribution's credit, there was little difference to be found most of the time. GNOME Shell running on Wayland performed a bit faster than the same desktop on X.Org. GNOME Classic offered the same performance, regardless of the display server, but the Classic desktop locked up a couple of times when I was using the Wayland session and would no longer respond to mouse or keyboard input. The Classic desktop running on X.Org did not present me with any issues.



The first time I signed into the GNOME desktop a wizard appeared and asked me for my preferred language and asked me to confirm my keyboard layout. I was then asked if I would like to leave the desktop's location services turned on, or turn them off. We are then offered a chance to connect GNOME with on-line account services such as Google and Nextcloud. The wizard then disappears and the GNOME Help documentation appears in a new window. The Help window presents new users with a good deal of tips and tutorials on how to navigate the desktop and will probably be quite useful for people new to GNOME.



GNOME Shell is presented in a fairly minimal fashion, as is typical of GNOME these days. The Activities menu is placed in the upper-left corner and a dock sits on the left side of the screen, providing quick access to application launchers. The dock also offers a button for opening a full-screen grid of application icons. For the most part I tended to use the GNOME Classic desktop which is presented with a two-panel layout and tended to offer me better performance. One of my few issues with GNOME early on was the desktop kept locking every five minutes if I was not interacting with it. This setting can be changed in GNOME's Settings panel under the Power module.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Running the GNOME Classic desktop

(full image size: 502kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Hardware



When running RHEL 8 on my workstation, the distribution ran smoothly. All my hardware was detected and the installer was able to enable a network connection over both wired or wireless networks. Both versions of the GNOME desktop worked fairly well, whether running under a Wayland or X.Org session.



Working with the distribution in a VirtualBox environment presented more challenges. RHEL does not automatically integrate with VirtualBox and cannot use the host's full screen resolution and could not run Wayland sessions. The default repositories do not offer VirtualBox add-on modules and trying to install generic add-on modules failed until I had located and installed the elfutils-libelf-devel package using dnf. GNOME Shell was too slow to be used practically in VirtualBox, but the Classic shell worked well.



Disk and memory usage will vary a lot depending on which packages and services we enable at install time. In my case, running RHEL in a Workstation role, I found the distribution consumed 5.8GB of disk space. Running GNOME Shell used 980MB of RAM and GNOME Classic used 1,020MB of RAM. This is nearly double the RAM usage I see on most other distribution/desktop combinations and about about 20% higher than Ubuntu running the GNOME desktop on the same hardware.



One curious aspect of running RHEL 8 I found was boot times varied a lot. Sometimes the distribution started up and shutdown very quickly, starting faster than most other distributions I have tried recently, getting to the login screen in well under 20 seconds. Other times it could take nearly two minutes to start.



Applications



RHEL ships with a fairly standard set of open source applications. The Workstation edition offers Firefox, LibreOffice, Pidgin for instant messaging, the Evolution e-mail client and the HexChat IRC client. The Boxes virtual machine software is included along with a document viewer, the GNOME Files file manager and Java. The GNU Compiler Collection is installed too.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Running LibreOffice and viewing images

(full image size: 238kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The distribution offers the Totem video player, the Cheese webcam utility, the Brasero disc burning software, and the Rhythmbox audio player. The available codecs are limited on RHEL. I was able to play audio files, including MP3 files, without any problem, but I was unable to play any local video files. Trying to open a video in Totem brings up a window letting us know the required codecs are missing and the system offers to search the repositories for the codec. This opens GNOME Software which reports it cannot find the necessary codec and invites us to read documentation about it. Clicking the documentation link opens Firefox to display a page from the Fedora website which discusses restricted codecs. That page, in turn, links to the Fedora Wiki, which then leads us to the RPMFusion website to get the missing codecs. RPMFusion does not have a repository compatible with RHEL 8, so the trail stops there.



In the past, I was able to get some third-party package support and restricted items through an extra Red Hat repository, but if it exists for RHEL it is not mentioned on any of the documentation pages we are shown, or mentioned in the software centre. When I searched for information on codecs on the Red Hat website all I found were documents for older versions which indicated media codecs could be downloaded from unnamed third-party repositories and were not supported.



Rounding out the collection of software, we find systemd is RHEL's init software and the distribution runs on version 4.18 of the Linux kernel.



One curious aspect to running programs on RHEL 8 was that, when I made a typo on the command line, the shell would pause for a few seconds (apparently trying to find a match for what I had typed in the repositories). The shell would then spew out the following error message: Failed to search for file: cannot update repo 'rhel-atomic-7-cdk-3.5-source-rpms': Cannot download repomd.xml: Cannot download repodata/repomd.xml: All mirrors were tried; Last error: Status code: 404 for https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/atomic/7/7Server/x86_64/cdk/3.5/source/SRPMS/repodata/repomd.xml I found this unpleasant for two reasons. The first is it slows down working at the shell every time a typo is made and, second, the error message makes it look as though the search function is looking in the wrong repository.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Trying to install Firefox extensions

(full image size: 130kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



When I first started using RHEL 8 I was unable to install any extensions in Firefox. This appeared to be a side effect of the Firefox certificate bug. However, after the Firefox update was installed a few days later I was still unable to install any extensions. Even with the certificate verification disabled I was still unable to install any extensions on Firefox, which may be the first time I have run into this problem on any distribution.



GNOME Settings



RHEL uses the GNOME Settings panel to customize and manage the desktop. The current Settings panel uses a two-pane layout with module names down the left side and specific settings on the right. The dual-pane layout makes it quicker to switch between modules and the whole Settings panel worked well for me. The options are generally well presented and easy to both understand and adjust.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Adjusting settings on GNOME Classic running on Wayland

(full image size: 274kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Perhaps the only issue I ran into while using GNOME Settings was with the user account manager. The account manager would allow me to create new accounts, but when it came time to set a password, I had only two options: make a long, complex password that was not based on a dictionary word, or set no password at all and let the user make up one when they sign in. This everything-or-nothing approach continues when the user first signs in. A new user can login without a password, but they need to make up a long, complex one and, if their choice is not good enough, the user is logged out of the account, so they need to sign back in to try again. This seems like an unusually harsh way to introduce new users to the system. It is possible to adjust the password restrictions, but these feel like awkward defaults.



On a related topic, I noticed early on that RHEL is set up with the OpenSSH service running by default. The system allows remote logins using the root account. This too can be changed or disabled, but it is a potential security weakness that administrators should correct once they get the system set up with a non-root account. (Red Hat's upstream, Fedora, plans to disable remote, password-based logins in Fedora 31.)



Software management



When software updates are available a notification appears in the upper-right corner of the desktop. We can apply new software updates through either the GNOME Software graphical software centre, or through the dnf command line package manager. Installing updates through GNOME Software forces a restart if core packages are updated. Installing new versions of packages through dnf does not require us to restart the computer. On launch day there were 73 packages totalling 173MB in size available for download. More updates slowly tricked in over the next week I was using the distribution.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Trying to browse available software

(full image size: 141kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I am sad to report GNOME Software did not work well for me at all. The software centre displayed no installed applications under its installed tab, and displayed no applications when I browsed through any of the available software categories. I also tried performing searches for common terms such as "firewall", "video", and "gimp" - each one returned no matches. At first I thought this strange behaviour might be a result of PackageKit not working properly (as it has caused problems on other distributions), but whether PackageKit was running or not, the software centre could not find any packages, installed or in the repositories.



This may be related to another problem I ran into. At first the dnf package manager could not find any packages either when I performed searches. I found dnf had to be run with sudo in order to return search results. For instance "dnf search firewall" would fail, but "sudo dnf search firewall" returned results. (I tried running GNOME Software with root/sudo privileges and it still failed to see any available or installed software.)



When run with sudo access, the dnf package manager typically worked well, successfully installing updates, downloading new programs and finding packages. Once, while installing the gimp package, dnf crashed before it was finished the installation and printed a Python traceback. Re-running the same install operation succeeded without further problems.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Searching for software

(full image size: 158kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Incidentally, the Red Hat release notes refer to the package manager as being yum, the previous generation of package manager on RHEL, rather than dnf. However, on RHEL 8, both yum and dnf are symbolic links to the dnf-3 program and trying to open the yum manual page redirects us to the dnf page.



For people who like to use portable package formats, Flatpak is installed on RHEL by default. Users will probably want to enable third-party repositories in order to get the most out of Flatpak options. Snap support is not included by default and not available in the repositories.



Other features



Apart from the default firewall changing from iptables to nftables and RHEL adopting Wayland as the primary display technology, one of the features to catch my attention was Cockpit. The release notes describe Cockpit as follows: Packages for the RHEL 8 web console, also known as Cockpit, are now part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux default repositories, and can therefore be immediately installed on a registered RHEL 8 system. In addition, on a non-minimal installation of RHEL 8, the web console is automatically installed and firewall ports required by the console are automatically open. While Cockpit is indeed installed, it is not enabled by default. I started Cockpit using the systemctl command line service manager and found Cockpit listens for incoming web browser connections on network port 9090. We can sign into the web interface using our regular username and password.



Cockpit starts off by showing us a status board where we can get an overview of the system and its resource usage. Down the left side of the page we can see links that provide resources such as browsing logs, checking for software updates, managing background services, and manipulating user accounts. We can also make networking adjustments. There is a page for working with installed applications, but as with GNOME Software, no packages were visible on this page. There are a few other screens, one for checking for software updates, one for managing Red Hat subscriptions and one for running a terminal in the browser.





Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 -- Viewing services with Cockpit

(full image size: 139kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Apart from the software management page, the other resources generally worked well. I particularly liked the log browser which offers filters to help us find entries by time and type. I had not used Cockpit before, despite it being available on Fedora for a while, and was pleased with how quick the interface was and how easy it was to navigate. This was definitely a highlight of the trial for me.



However, there were two issues I ran into with Cockpit. I could start Cockpit whenever I wanted, but I could not enable the Cockpit service directly. Trying to enable Cockpit so it would be available at each boot resulted in an error from systemctl saying the service is not meant to be enabled. The Cockpit manual page says the web service is started on demand by systemd when we try to use it, which did not appear to be the case at first. I eventually found out that enabling the Cockpit service directly does not work, but enabling its socket does. Running "systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket" will cause the Cockpit interface to be available on demand at boot time. The other problem I ran into was with SELinux. At one point I wondered if SELinux might be causing some of the issues I was running into so went into Cockpit and toggled SELinux off. The web interface then told me to reboot to complete the action. When my system restarted SELinux was still enabled, indicating the Cockpit control had no effect.



Conclusions



My experiment with RHEL 8 got off to a rough start. Going through the on-line registration process produced some errors and ended up with me getting the wrong ISO which, in turn, resulted in some confusion and delays in getting the distribution installed.



Things then began to look up as RHEL 8 did a good job of detecting my system's hardware, registered itself without incident and offered good performance on physical hardware. I was particularly pleased that the distribution appears to detect whether our video card will work well with Wayland and either displays or hides Wayland sessions in response. I did have some trouble with the GNOME Classic Wayland session and GNOME Shell on X.Org was a bit sluggish. However, the Classic session on X.Org and GNOME Shell on Wayland both worked very well. In short, it's worthwhile to explore each of the four desktop options to see what works best for the individual.



The big issues I ran into with RHEL were with regards to software management. Both GNOME Software and the Cockpit screen for managing applications failed to work at all, whether run as root or a regular user. When using the command line dnf package manager, the utility failed to perform searches unless run with sudo and occasionally crashed. In a similar vein, the Bash feature that checks for matching packages when the user types a command name it doesn't recognize does not work and produces a lengthy error.



There were some security features or design choices that I think will mostly appeal to enterprise users, but are less favourable in home or small office environments. Allowing remote root logins by default on the Workstation role rubs me the wrong way, though I realize it is often useful when setting up servers. The enforced complex passwords are similarly better suited to offices than home users. One feature which I think most people will enjoy is SELinux which offers an extra layer of security, thought I wish the Cockpit feature to toggle SELinux had worked to make trouble-shooting easier.



I was not surprised that RHEL avoids shipping some media codecs. The company has always been cautious in this regard. I had hoped that trying to find and install the codecs would have provided links to purchase the add-ons or connect us with a Red Hat-supplied repository. Instead we are redirected through a chain of Fedora documentation until we come to a third-party website which currently does not offer the desired packages.



Ultimately, while RHEL does some things well, such as hardware support, desktop performance, and providing stable (if conservative) versions of applications, I found my trial highly frustrating. Many features simply do not work, or crash, or use a lot of resources, or need to be worked around to make RHEL function as a workstation distribution. Some people may correctly point out RHEL is mostly targeting servers rather than workstations, but there too there are a number of problems. Performance and stability are provided, but the issues I ran into with Cockpit, permission concerns, and command line package management are all hurdles for me when trying to run RHEL in a server role.



I find myself looking forward to the launch of CentOS 8 (which will probably arrive later this year), as CentOS 8 uses the same source code as RHEL, but is not tied to the same subscription model and package repositories. I am curious to see how much of a practical effect this has on the free, community version of the same software. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.9/10 from 15 review(s).

Have you used Red Hat Enterprise Linux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.



