IBM Open Client RHEL 6
Periodically I try the various internal distributions IBM provides for Linux, and each time in the past I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m better off sticking with the public distribution. Until now.
While there currently are distributions based on Ubuntu and Red Hat, at the moment the Red Hat distribution is more current, so I went with that.
While I have grown accustomed to installations taking literally minutes, this installation took hours. The installation did not need to be attended, so this was not a major issue, but it does mean that I won’t go wild with experimentation. I have no way of apportioning this time between Red Hat itself and IBM “value add”.
Once installed, all of the necessities "just worked": video, audio, WIFI, suspend/resume. I haven’t tried projecting yet.
Some things remain a bit different than Ubuntu. Yum vs apt-get. Some packages are named differently. mysql-client, mysql-server become mysql, mysql-server. Some things are configured differently /var/apache2/conf.d/* becomes /etc/httpd/conf.d/*.conf and /var/www becomes /var/www/html. And for reasons I haven’t investigated, I need to chkconfig mysqld on before starting mysqld for the first time — but only on Red Hat, not on Ubuntu
This time, however, the available packages are fairly up to date: e.g., Firefox 3.6.12, Ruby 1.8.7, Gem 1.3.7. Amusingly, Firefox was initially configured for a French / Belgium dictionary, but that was easily corrected by adding the English / United States dictionary.
Lotus Notes, Symphony, and Sametime all appear to be fully functional.
The biggest hiccup I had was on using a local printer. With Ubuntu all the printers in the house are found (the number varies from 2 to 4) and can be added by simply selecting the ones I want. With Red Hat, none were detected automatically. I could add my Samsung ML-1740 (connected via a parallel cable to my Ubuntu server, but adding my Brother HL-2170W (connected via WiFi) required me to install foomatic and hpijs. In both cases, I also had to make sure that the DNS names of the machines were in /etc/hosts so that I could continue to have access while I was connected via VPN and therefore using the IBM name servers.
Again, the printer issues could be an IBM configuration issue. I note that there are options for connecting to IBM facility printers, but as I work from home this is not relevant to me.