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When the Athena base OS was updated to Red Hat Enterprise 4 (RHEL 4) from RHEL 3, the installer was not. Instead quick and dirty amendments were made to get the old installer to work specifically on the new hardware. Much calendar time elapsed waiting for an opportunity to "go back and fix it up right".
Issues
- While Red Hat maintained a committment to keep updating RHEL3 with new hardware support, these updates were slow (and sometimes incomplete) to a problematic degree.
- Red Hat is no longer updating RHEL3 with new hardware support at all
- Much hardware supported under RHEL 4 was not back ported to the Athena installer.
- The RHEL 3 code base is very much unsupported these days.
Deliverables
- Bug fixes and cleanups to the install script used by present Athena install media. :
- Ambiguity on some hardware about whether the disks are really old-style ATA or are new SATA disks which are being used (due to the old media) in legacy mode, leading to occasional misconfiguration
- Faulty logic in dealing with SATA legacy.
- Failure to use calculated swap space size on some installs.
- Prompting for the root password in the middle of an install as part of X server configuration.
- Updates to add extra functionality required by the addition of VMware player to the release.
- Updates to account for the release now defaulting to an SMP kernel installIssues relating to integration of ATI proprietary graphics driver.
- New RHEL 4 based Athena install media:
- ISO CD image.
- Update to image on IS&T PXE server
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- An update to the install script has been deployed. Additional ; additional issues have been identified and resolved.
- New RHEL 4 based Athena install media (release 6) has been released.
- Efforts are underway to have it installed on the PXE server.