Seeing a Red Hat Beta so soon after the release of Red Hat Linux 7.3 is both surprising and exciting - I've used many flavors of Linux and always come back to Red Hat on the desktop. First off, the installation program is second only to Caldera's Lizard. Secondly, the GUI is usually responsive in most cases. Thirdly, the software is easy to find. Lastly, Red Hat seems to set the standard for Linux - until distributions are more compatible, I am content with Red Hat. Limbo is a major upgrade to Red Hat Linux from a user standpoint, so I'd like to discuss the pros and cons of this specific distribution as a comparison to other Red Hat distributions; this is not a "Why You Should Use Red Hat" article.
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looks tasty, maybe i'll try it out soon. it appears they are targetting the desktop market finally now, as promised. of course if they get another hiccup they may scorn the idea again.
rh7.0 was the first distro i tried... but it didn't hold with my hardware then.
(please do not become another mac thread, people keep going far OT here) 
but I've noticed quite a few screenshots on this site featuring the Nimbus sans font. I've been looking for that font and cannot find it anywhere... other than from a commercial site or in a suse rpm.
The font is present on all of my distros on this machine: Gentoo, Red Hat 7.2 and Mandrake Cooker. I think it just comes with X or something. It is a sans serif font, I think.
Like the look of Gnome 2. The RedHat install here doesn't look that far off from many of the developer screenshots I've seen. I'm tempted to "emerge" it on my Gentoo installation to see what it looks like.
Don't like Metacity very much, simply because I think it's a bit too lightweight for someone who has used Enlightenment or Sawfish (or KDM for that matter). I used Metacity for awhile on Debian and was thoroughly unimpressed. I'd imagine the reason RH is using it is because that's what Sun has said it's going to use for Solaris....trying to make things as transparant as possible for people comparing features.
Lastly, black text in a white term is annoying to me. Of course, I still use color xterm most of the time. Maybe I'm just partial to grey-on-white because that's what I've always used (DOS, Win, OS/2, etc.)
Regardless, I'll probably end up picking up a copy of Limbo. I'm sure I can find a place on a machine for it. :-)
BTW: gcc version?
ack... 5 CDs, what has what?
i need:
- development packages for compiling and headers.
- kde 3.0.2, not gnome
- the typical applications, not 15 different applications to do the same task.
bloat bloat bloat, 5 CDs will me take 4-5 hours.
Only the first 3 CDs are needed. The rest are SRPMs and source I think.
...but if you are looking for an excellent Unix-like experience, I would suggest buying a Mac. OSX is absolutely the best operating system I have ever seen.
I could go on and on about all the plusses (there are no minuses) except, I've never used it and don't know a thing about it. I'm just kidding Chad.
Meta-city rocks. It's lightweight (yes!) and it's fast.
Snide comments aside about redhat just following sun, meta-city is gnome2 compliant and uses GTK2 to render. Therefor, for accessibility purposes, it's the best windows manager.
You might not be interested in Accessibility, but for Redhat to sell to government on the desktop, they need it.
Also, Sun is making metacity multi-monitor capable, and this is something that would be very nice indeed.
Yes meta-city isn't so feature rich, but it's fast and it's gnome2 compliant, and that's what gnome2 needs.
...and IF you have a BOATLOAD of cash sitting about too...
btw, gentoo still rox. I've had a MUCH easier time configuring it *correctly*, something I never could quite get with Mandrake and Redhat.
The amongst biggest changes in Limbo were new gcc3.1, rpm4.1 and utf8 for me. It defaults to using utf8 everywhere, eg. perl -le 'print length("äö")' gives 4 instead of 2 now. Unfortunately some shells don't handle two byte characters quite well yet, but this is certainly the correct direction and things will be better when it truely works. Some packages (such as) perl have new (BETA/DEV/PRERELEASE) versions due to their enhanced utf8 support.
gcc3.1 doesn't compile pretty much of the software around currently - it is much stricter than gcc 2.9x and hasn't gone through extensive testing by huge number of users yet. gcc3.1 promises faster binaries and better C99 compatibility so in general I feel it would be good if people would migrate to it.
rpm4.1 isn't released yet, but rather a beta with some nice features. However, it breaks backwards compatibility with everything else that depends on rpm libraries. This might have been reason why article writer failed to compile rpm-apt. GnoRPM and such nice graphical tools are missing due to incompatability with new rpm.
All in all Limbo has many new packages with controversial features that make it really beta (compared with RH7.3beta skipjack what was actually around as usable as RH7.2 or RH7.3) and harder to work with. I'd say end users shouldn't touch this. However, developers really should take a peek and preferably check that their programs compile with this - and even better - make it possible to take advantage of utf8. If this is done, RH8.0 will be truely amazing and we will enjoy of Linux capable of operating with almost all languages with few rough edges.
Don't like Metacity very much, simply because I think it's a bit too lightweight for someone who has used Enlightenment or Sawfish (or KDM for that matter).
I didn't know KDM was a window manager. Since when did they started making a window manager and a login manager?
...but if you are looking for an excellent Unix-like experience, I would suggest buying a Mac. OSX is absolutely the best operating system I have ever seen.
Hmmm, if you want a Unix-like experience, you are better off staying away from OS X. It hides as much of Unix as possible. Sure, it has the Terminal.app, but Terminal.app is so bad in comparison with those found on Linux, I wonder who uses them anyway?
In the first screenshot the fonts look very nice indeed. However, in the second screenshot, the fonts in mozilla look dreadful.
The difficulty of utilizing the anti-aliasing abilities of Xfree86 4.2.0 is a big hit to Linux's future chances on the desktop. I've seen plenty of HOWTOs on the subject and I still have no idea how to get GTK 1.x apps antialiased. Gdkxft doesn't work, even though it seems like something that should be included in a major distro like Redhat or Mandrake with a configuration frontend.
What's the deal? I don't think I'm the only person who has a lot of trouble with this. It doesn't even seem like it would be difficult for the folks at one of these distro companies to accomplish.
Have a look here for Mozilla screenshots with an XFT patch that allows it to use AA.
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid...
Nice to see that they are serious about it. =) I guess they released the beta that early because they will need LOADS of testing to get this one stable. But then it will be really worth it (I will never use it though, unless RPM becomes something that doesn't suck).
As for Metacity (not Meta-city! It's spoken like Opacity, not like Meta City), the reason they use it could be that it is written by a Redhat developer. And because it rocks. Many people already want this to become the Gnome2 default and I'm sure this will happen as soon as it matures a little bit more. Atm it's still very incomplete but many people (count me in) already prefer it to everything else!
As for AA holding Linux back, I doubt that. Gtk1 is outdated and will slowly be replaced with Gtk2 apps and those handle AA just fine so soon it will be standard to have excellent font rendering. Mozilla is a huge beast but the Gtk2 port is close to be finished. Soon this will also be solved in Mozilla by default.
One step after another. 
Soon font rendering is another HUGE thing that can be removed from the "what we are lacking" list.
I used Red Hat 6.2 and I have heard that Mandrake is very user friendly so I upgraded to Mandrake 8.0. Mandrake was far worse than Red Hat. The configuration utilities looked very bad. They were created by people who don't know UI design. Half of the utilities didn't even work. Rpmdrake, fontdrake, netdrake. I was very disappointed. Compared to Red Hat, Mandrake is very unprofessional. I'm looking forward to replacing Mandrake with Red Hat 8.0. Gnome is the best desktop. Nothing beats Galeon, Pan, Sylpheed, licq, MC and IceWM.
still not bothered to fix the worst fucking problem; upgrading and installing. rpm sucks so bad, when will they either bite the bullet with it or embrace something like apt4rpm?
Damn, reading 'limbo' triggered me because I thought it was about the programming language limbo, used in Inferno OS...
oh well
totally offtopic:
btw, info about inferno: http://www.lucent.com/inferno
I'm dying to try this out, as with Valhalla, but the pain of setting it up for my USB Alcatel Speedtouch ADSL modem ensured I stuck with Mandrake, which required very little tweaking for that...
Long gone are my days with Slackware and Debian (yes I am a desktop user, server functionality is secondary as long as I've got OpenSSH).
Anyone knows if they've included some speedtouch packages in Limbo?
Since Red Hat Linux 7.2, you've been able to pass the option 'reiserfs' as a LILO boot parameter, and then ReiserFS shows up in the options for filesystems in Anaconda. I presume this still holds true in Limbo?
Red Hat seems to set the standard for Linux - until distributions are more compatible
I might've misunderstood this, but in the past, Red Hat has been the most incompatible distribution out there - read the archives of the LSB lists where they went through the locations and command-line options of the major command-line utilities, where Red Hat was typically the "odd man out". Last time I used a Red Hat based system (about 6 months ago), I found it still only gave little more than a passing nod to the FHS and LSB - something I find wholly unacceptable in a major distribution from which people set their standards. (How many vendors distribute packages ONLY for Red Hat, after all?)
The real problem has not been the lack of AA but the pathetic fonts included with a lot of distros. ie Redhat 7.3 (and I'll never forgive them for this) had the worst fonts possible. Using Mozilla was a nightmare. And the fix? All you had to do was reorder the font list in XF86Config. If that's how seriously they don't take their distribution, then I'll go elsewhere thanks.
I am not convinced 8 will be much better than 7.3. As I mentioned previously, installing programs will still be a bithc unless you use the Red Hat Network. (But not all of us have 1Mbit connections.)
I used Red Hat 6.2 and I have heard that Mandrake is very user friendly so I upgraded to Mandrake 8.0. Mandrake was far worse than Red Hat. The configuration utilities looked very bad. They were created by people who don't know UI design. Half of the utilities didn't even work. Rpmdrake, fontdrake, netdrake. I was very disappointed. Compared to Red Hat, Mandrake is very unprofessional. I'm looking forward to replacing Mandrake with Red Hat 8.0. Gnome is the best desktop. Nothing beats Galeon, Pan, Sylpheed, licq, MC and IceWM.
You took my thoughts out of my head. You couldn't be more right.
I spent a good two hours yesterday reading almost everything from the Developers list and seriously this OS once the kinks worked out is going to be the best all around thing we've seen from Linux.
Alot of work is being done with the fonts, for instance using MS fonts is as easy as dropping them in a directory.
pan 0.12 will be in the next release, it already works just a bug has to be worked out with Japanese language so everyone else can use if flawlessly.
There is also a "user kernel" built in which is like VM ware in the sence you can run a virtual system and its impossible to screw anything up, great for many of us.
here are some screen shots:
http://www.getlinuxonline.com/Downloads/limboscreens/
and here is the dev list archive, ALOT of interesting things to read:
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/limbo-list/2002-July/thread.htm...
Great job to the RedHat team!
i really do like Redhat's OS under the hood, and their rpm packageing system in a terminal, what i don't like about 7.3 is their latest build of KDE-3.xx... Redhat73 is getting sort of narrow on choices of available desktop environments AKA WindowManagers, so what i done is install 7.3 without Gnome and without KDE, then i take KDE-2.1.1 & qt from Redhat71 and install them which seems to be the last decently fast & stable release of KDE, i am willing to give Limbo a try when it is Officially released, and if i don't like the choices of desktops i will do the same with it as i did with 73 (just install a base system with X and grab 71's release if KDE-2.1.1 or something similar...
Those screenshots... Wow. That looks like what I've been hoping for from a Linux desktop. The fonts look great. Did I see an app that allows easy changes of screen resolution? I hope Mozilla finishes the GTK2 port soon. I have always hated the look of the font rendering in it.
What's the word on app integration? I know KDE has great drag and drop (comparatively). How well does it work in Gnome2?
Now, if they can just make it possible for the Linux-challenged (like me) to install apps and drivers without breaking everything, I'll be VERY happy. So far, my experiences with RPM have been mostly bad.
Not many people use it, because you don't need it on Mac OS X. Those that do use it, like it. It's not Bash, like on Linux, it tsch, which is standard on most BSDs.
Personally I use GLTerm, an OpenGL version of the Terminal. It's faster, it allows mouse controls and works great!
Other than the new font stuff - Xft2 is used throughout - one of the most notable enhancements is the setup and configuration tools.
Some more screenies here:
http://freespace.virgin.net/phil.mes/limbo-beta1/
I'm using it right now on two machines. A couple of key issues:
1. Anaconda bug causes loads of packages to fail to upgrade, if doing an upgrade.
2. A couple of annoying KDE bugs which made it to 3.0.2 release. Just got word that the panel "kicker" crashes
are fixed in latest CVS.
3. Printing is a disaster still. There are lpr, lprNG, CUPS, etc. CUPS is the wave of the future but it is very hard to get set up (only KDE interface seemed to work w/o a hitch.) I haven't been able to get CUPS to work over the network yet; so that's a huge annoyance.
4. Galeon crashed on me so much that I went back to using Opera, Netscape, Konqueror (in that order of preference.) IMHO, Opera is still the best, but Netscape is required for IE/Netscape only websites.
As concerns Gnome2, this is the first Gnome release that I can actually stomach using. The developers really cleaned things up and gave it more of a BeOS
feal (although it is still VERY far from a real BeOS
experience.)
Finally, the Firewire IEEE1394 drivers have been upgraded. Hotpluging works better. I've also got
TCP/IP over Firewire working, it is almost as fast
as full duplex 100BaseT. (Earlier kernels would
panic when two firewire PC's were interconnected.)
Finally, the system does seem more responsive due to
GCC 3.1 and 1000 Hz setting in kernel timer.
Things are definitely progressing, but I'm not going to
retire my BeOS box anytime soon.
I finished installing the Red hat now and the problems appers:
1 - My mouse is under /dev/ttyS0(COM1) and my modem is under /dev/ttyS3(COM4), ok, but the modem is always busy, say the message box that appears in connection.
2 - I can't change the grub and lilo configuration, because the changes not make effect.
If anyone know my problem, please help me...
(and sorry for my bad english...)
First, it's odd that the author claimed he always come back to Red Hat for desktop. Even RH CEO claimed Red Hat was/is for server. May be it's a personal taste . Anyhow, I have to admit Limbo looks very nice. I'm Gentoo/MD/Slackware user and for the first time starting to like what Red Hat shows in Limbo. The installation choices are broken down further so one could have more choices on what to install. There is even a Desktop settings configuration looks almost like the one in Redmond. Hope Billy Bob won't sue them anytime. It's a big improvement overall.
Thank you, Adam. You may not have given a full-blown review, but I'm glad to see that not everyone on OS News dismisses Gnome out of hand.
[QUOTE] Thank you, Adam. You may not have given a full-blown review, but I'm glad to see that not everyone on OS News dismisses Gnome out of hand.[/QUOTE]
Gnome is not a bad Desktop, it is KDE that won the battle of being #1 as a Linux desktop, i am sure Gnome will not go away and still be here for a long time and hopefully continue to make good progress, Gnome will most likely continue as another WM enviroment like WindowMaker or Enlightenment or Blackbox/Fluxbox, they are not #1 but still have a lot of users that dearly love em & use em everyday...
The apps!
Galeon
Gimp
XMMS
Evolution
Grip
gnome-toaster
I've had a hard time finding quality equivalents of these apps on the kde side. Can anyone give me equivelents for EVERY one of these for kde? I love the way kde looks and feels but I can't stand the way it looks and feels when I spend 90% of my time using these apps. IMO kde is a better desktop environment but gnome has better apps that look and feel consistent with it, so I choose gnome since productivity comes from using apps and not desktop environments.
[QUOTE]
The apps!
Galeon
Gimp
XMMS
Evolution
Grip
gnome-toaster
I've had a hard time finding quality equivalents of these apps on the kde side. Can anyone give me equivelents for EVERY one of kde? I love the way kde looks and feels but I can't stand the way it looks and feels when I spend 90% of my time using these apps. IMO kde is a better desktop environment but gnome has better apps that look and feel consistent with it, so I choose gnome since productivity comes from using apps and not desktop environments. [/QUOTE]
Amen, brother. However, GNOME 2.0 will close the gap between KDE usability and GNOME 2.0 usability. In fact, GNOME 2.0 will acquire a lead on KDE in terms of usability, and especially accessibility and don't forget the LGPL advantage of GNOME 2.0. It is more proprietary app-friendly. We'll see which desktop becomes more useful in the end. Personally, I'd rather see GNOME with the look-and-feel of Mac OS/X or BeOS than Windows XX any day. Sure, you can change the KDE look-n-feel but that's not the reason for which people use KDE, right? I always hear, people use KDE because it is more like Windows.
Why look for the kde alternatives? I use your listed applications in kde3 just fine. What are you crying about, I don't understand?
I think the point the poster was making is that he likes the apps to look integrated with the desktop. Of course you can use Gnome apps in KDE and vice versa but they look way out of place.
At any rate, my ideal scenario would be a 50/50 split between KDE/GNOME in terms of users. That way there's always the push to improve develop and extend.
Hey, how about the server part of it?
Kernel? Services? Libraries? etc?
[QUOTE] I think the point the poster was making is that he likes the apps to look integrated with the desktop. Of course you can use Gnome apps in KDE and vice versa but they look way out of place. [/QUOTE]
Exactly...To me, its distracting to have app 1 looking and feeling and in some cases behaving differently than app 2 and having them both different than app 3. I want a consistent desktop!
Someone should do a vote if people use more Gtk or Qt applications, I could imagine that this would come closer to a 50/50 situation.
I once did a vote in a forum weither people use Gtk or Qt and if they use it exclusive. The result was expected.
Many people liked Qt better, but almost everyone of those used Gtk apps, while most of the people who prefered Gtk, used it exclusively.
(It was like this: 3% Qt exclusive, 31% prefered Qt but used Gtk apps, 6% prefered Qt but used mostly Gtk apps(!), 22% Gtk exclusive, 9% prefered Gtk but used some Qt apps, 0% prefered Gtk but used mostly Qt apps and 28% liked both the same. This vote is old though (July 2001) and only 31 people participated =) So take it with a graint of salt)
I've found that Metacity meshes with GNOME2 far better than Sawfish does, primarily because it was designed to use GConf, and also has far fewer integration bugs than Sawfish. Red Hat was smart to make it the default. If the Red Hat guys are *really* smart, they'll adapt the third-party GUI Metacity-Setup and integrate it into their GNOME setup.
BTW, adding themes to it is actually pretty trivial, if you know how. All you have to do is unpack the theme tarballs in ~/.metacity/themes. Of course, that's not so easy a trick to figure out.
BTW, adding themes to it is actually pretty trivial, if you know how. All you have to do is unpack the theme tarballs in ~/.metacity/themes.
Ha! I tried this with about 5 themes, and never once did it work! I ended up getting ONE theme to apply, as seen in the screenshots, after entering a long an convoluted command line string I never would have arrived at if I didn't find it on the internet. Metacity theming doesn't even get to be called "beta" yet in my book - it simply doesn't exist!
Don't get me wrong, it might be a smart move by Red Hat, but it's early in the Limbo process and as of yet - it don't work.
Well, Metacity theming is not _that_ beta, as I could easily create my own theme and of course install it. =) It was my first theme ever so I was quite surprised how easy and straightforwarded it was. But I'm sure there still will be some changes breaking compatibility because atm it lacks some flexibility IMO. For example I don't think there is a way to create transparent window borders (like edges).
Gnome is not a bad Desktop, it is KDE that won the battle of being #1 as a Linux desktop, i am sure Gnome will not go away and still be here for a long time and hopefully continue to make good progress, Gnome will most likely continue as another WM enviroment like WindowMaker or Enlightenment or Blackbox/Fluxbox, they are not #1 but still have a lot of users that dearly love em & use em everyday...
What does KDE have going for it? A 75% installed base; but remember, it's installed on an operating system with less marketshare than the Mac. People using KDE are not afraid of change. It also uses C++; an advantage because it's object-oriented, but Objective C is a better language anyway. Gnome works with C, C++, ObjC, Python, and anything else; KDE is C++-only.
Then, what does Gnome have going for it? It has real UI insight; no feature-bloat like on Windows, just good clean design. It has GConf, one of the most revolutionary changes to Linux ever, which could theoretically become integrated into the kernel and finally eliminate the flat config file. It has GTK, a toolkit whose primary developers work for no company; if Trolltech stopped making non-embedded Qt tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised. It has a *huge* installed base of apps, whereas with KDE, if you're not in the distro you might as well not exist. Finally, it has corporate support (though it's not dependent on it): Mandrake and UnitedLinux are really the only two major distros that still support KDE as default (all others use Gnome or have no default), and even that could change.
In other words, it is KDE, not Gnome, that will become an afterthought. I wouldn't be surprised if Enlightenment had a bigger userbase three years in 2005 than KDE did!
Of course, what really needs to happen is for Fresco to mature. Once we finally have a stable high-level graphics environment (with network transparency no less), as opposed to the low-level nightmare that is X, all applications can be ported to that one environment. Imagine: you could use the Gnome panel, Konqueror browser, E17 file manager, all with one integrated toolkit, universal themes, and alpha transpa[î±ly everywhere! How wonderful that would be.
"all with one integrated toolkit"
Nothing but a pipedream.
There are two ways that this idea can work out:
1. Everyone uses the standard toolkit, and anything which can't be done with that toolkit just isn't done. This is the "prescriptive" model
Result: Apps are kludged to work around the toolkit and features which require special widgets just don't exist.
No mainstream OS has ever used the prescriptive model
2. Extensions to the toolkit are used to create new widgets
Result: Apps use custom widgets to solve problem. All major apps wind up depending on custom widgets, you have achieved little or nothing because your "integrated" toolkit isn't used except in introductory programming classes.
This happens in Mac OS, Windows, OS/2, and of course X
You see MS Word ? You see how it can do OLE, and MDI/SDI ? You know those are standard toolkit features, right ? MS Worddoesn't use the standard toolkit, it has its own private implementation of the same widgets. The private versions provide features needed for Word, but they work differently from all other versions. Few notice. No-one cares.
So I take it you dont want any decent apps (evolution,galeon etc) or config tools then
OOOOH - KDE trolls piss me off - have to say it
BTW, adding themes to it is actually pretty trivial, if you know how. All you have to do is unpack the theme tarballs in ~/.metacity/themes.
Ha! I tried this with about 5 themes, and never once did it work! I ended up getting ONE theme to apply, as seen in the screenshots, after entering a long an convoluted command line string I never would have arrived at if I didn't find it on the internet.
Adding themes and applying themes are two different things. Adding the theme is a matter of unpacking it in ~/.metacity/themes. Applying the added theme is a matter of making a call to GConf to tell it to have the theme applied, which can be done via that long ugly command line that you used, via the GConf editor (which looks a bit like Windows' RegEdit, or via a nice third-party app called Metacity-Setup.
It's Metacity's use of GConf that makes it such a good choice for GNOME.
I haven't try GNOME 2 by myself, but the screenshots are telling me, that GNOME 2 is a KILLER DESKTOP.
Greetings from Slovenia!
Nothing but a pipedream.
So are you saying that if GTK or Qt was integrated into X, it would automatically become unusable except in "introductory programming classes"? What if a toolkit as powerful as either GTK or Qt, and being as actively developed as both, was built into the graphics engine (a la Fresco)?
Extensions can quite certainly be made to the widget set. But those extensions will be made at a system level. They'll use standard themes, work like standard widgets, and be accessible to all applications. In other words, it's not a pipe dream.
