After a few short months since the release of Redhat 8.0, the boys in Raleigh are at it again. Redhat 8.0.92, codenamed "Phoebe", has been around for a couple of weeks. I have been using for about two days and figured it was time someone posted an initial reaction, so here goes.
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Well, not that it matters, cause I'm currently downloading phoebe...
All Eugenia reviews have screenshots......
Until RH include a simple font installer it will always take second place to SuSE. Not bashing RH, it is good but i prefer SuSE because of its included little programs like a font installer.
In RH im supposed to configure a folder and manually place the fonts inside it, but in SuSE a program which takes to clicks does it for me.
Is it right that i heard RH broke this font installer program in KDE?
to the author: just out of curiousity, are there still a lot of pro-MS computer science students, or are the pro-Linux students growing bit by bit? just wondering since i am the only pro-Linux person in my current employment of 12 people and i'm thinking if i made a mistake about the possible future of young people.
If you think hard enough I'm sure you can figure it out 
(think: money, business, rhn, support)
I wrote a review on 24th dezember 2002:
http://www.symlink.ch/article.pl?sid=02/12/24/1453259&mode=noco...
Unfortunately it's in german only but you can display the screenshots (links at the bottom) or use google to translate it:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fww...
The Submission form put a space in the google link. Here it is again, this time not parsed:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fww...]
Will there ever be a preview for comments?
Damn, the Submission form did it again... anyway, I think if you want to translate it, you know where and how 
>All Eugenia reviews have screenshots
I am the only one with the passwords in our 9 image mirrors and I am currently in France, so articles with pictures will have to wait until I get to US. I forgot to hand these passwords to David when I left for Europe. But anyway, this article didn:t come with shots. And to upload in 9 image mirrors is a bit of a pain actually, it takes quite some time...
After installing Red Hat 8.0.92 (and 8.0) I must say that the font quality is still pretty poor. On my LCD display the anti-aliased fonts look okay, but I prefer clean and crisp fonts. Turning off AA makes the fonts look really bad. There is no comparison to the font quality in Windows.
Also, the default install leaves all fonts at quite large sizes, which I don't understand. Red Hat wastes so much screen real estate. And when you adjust the font sizes you have to put up with crappy looking fonts.
I hope that one day fonts in Linux will improve. Even Red Hat's improvements are only a small step.
mdk have http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/urpmiweb.php and it suport dual monitor, and my ms intellimouse optical and ps/s compatible.
it was about time!
need... more .... RH 8 ... reviews.....
>Until RH include a simple font installer it will always >take second place to SuSE. Not bashing RH, it is good but >i prefer SuSE because of its included little programs like >a font installer.
>In RH im supposed to configure a folder and manually place >the fonts inside it, but in SuSE a program which takes to >clicks does it for me.
>Is it right that i heard RH broke this font installer >program in KDE?
Phoebe includes fontilus - dnd font install
Must we get a freaking new review EVERY time they update something??? Give them a chance to finish something before you sink your teeth into it. I dont see anyone reviewing OpenBeOS after every tiny kernel update.
>I dont see anyone reviewing OpenBeOS after every tiny kernel update.
There is a difference. The Red Hat betas boot and work at least at 95% of its final version, OpenBeOS doesn`t yet. Therefore, the Red Hat betas can get more people excited, rather than a kernel that doesn`t do much for the regular user yet. Its all simple maths... ;P
What happened to the Evolution fonts?
And the Mozilla non-gecko fonts still look woeful.
Hmm...
>What happened to the Evolution fonts?
Evolution's codebase still haven't switch to the new rendering and GTK+, it is really not great having 90% of the apps being in nice AA fonts and having a major app like the main email client not being the same as the rest of the system...
I believe that RH8.1 comes with fontillus. This is a drag and drop view for nautilus that allows you to install new fonts by simply dragging the font in and dropping that puppy. Very easy. Not so easy if you want to install fonts system-wide.
I installed the kdeadmin package even though I am Gnome user.
Why?
The KDE font installer is wonderful for installing a large group of say MS fonts or my company actually bought the Adobe font package. Great tool. Check it out. It is available for any linux distro that supports KDE.
heh.. I said it last time... I will say it again.. NTFS support shoudld be included.. Luckily the guys over at the NTFS project was nice enough to compile the kernel modules last time for 8.0.. RH quit being a D*** A**, there is a reason for needing the support..
Well, I got Phoebe up and running without issue. Id have to completely agree with the conclusions of this review. This looks like 8.0 with more polish. Its very unexciting, and theyve done nothing to address any of the 8.0 complaints. I, for one, am pretty disappointed thus far. I was hoping RH8.1 would stack up well against SuSE 8.1; but sadly, it still falls well short in my opinion.
A couple other notes: everyone needs to be prepared to spend more time on freshrpms.net than on the install, because, like 8.0, thats where youll have to get all the apps and utils we really want. No matter what I tried I couldnt get the nvidia drivers to work. Im sure this has everything to do with Phoebe using 4.3X11 and nothing to do with RH. The one stand out thing that I REALLY liked though was the fact that Phoebe's Mozilla was compiled with XFT support making it the most gorgeous web browser fonts Ive ever seen. Of course for those of us with the time and ability, its not that difficult to build Mozilla with xft support on any distro.
Has anyone had any luck installing 8.0 or phoebe in VMWare successfully?
I want to give it a go and have the isos, just dont want to go wasting time making room on my hard drive!
The reason your nVidia SRPMS didn't build was because of the incompatibility with the version of X (4.2.99) that comes with Pheobe.
Considering the nVidia team still build against XFree86_4.0 there is no surprise that the changes in architecture have broken the GLX portion of the nVidia driver set.
First off I would not recommend an upgrade from RH 8.0 as it killed my xfree86 to the point of unrecovery. But after a fresh install I got the system up and running.
Second off this is a beta RH and it shows. The package manager program is broke along with the GUI rpm install (I was able to use rpm at the cli) also some of the icons were missing and the theme manager was broken. To top that off X was pretty unstable. (They are using a beta version of Xfree86 2.4.3)
Third it does look good, if you can get past the icon and theme problem. They have a new very cool mouse (slightly translucent and hovering with a shadow backdrop) that stays the same throughout the OS even when you open Openoffice.org (you know what I'm talking about, when the mouse suddenly slants a little to much to the left, I hate that its ugly and usually very noticeable). They also have a cool translucent taskbar option for Gnome that is still just a little buggy (the icons kept disappearing from the taskbar) to top all the good is the fact that my ATI 8500 worked with 3d out the box. (although I would prefer using the official ATI drivers as opposed to using the DRI ones because they are much slower)
In the end I ended up putting 8.0 back on my machine because of the problems listed. What I ended up coming away with was a lot of excitement about RH on the desktop. With the new 8.1 they have improved CD burning file archiving along with some improvements for the fonts. I also like were the GUI is heading in fact I like were it is headed much more then I like the direction Microsoft is taking with Longhorn
It also quite easy to go to mozilla.org and download RH8 rpms with XFT support bypassing the compile process all together.
They work pretty well. Mozilla is just as slow as usual but I use Galeon 1.2.7 against the XFT Mozilla and that makes for a nice combo. I even put the galeon server in my startup programs in sessions. This makes startup very quick.
Im curious to see how those rpms work in other distros though. Im running SuSE 8.1....think Im gonna try em out.
Good ol' linux developers: rush making a new version that -must- break compatibility with the one released a yar ago, otherwise it'll be the end of the world.
I still can't believe they haven't added a Terminal shortcut icon to the start panel. What are they thinking, GUI users don't need CLI?
strange stuff... anyway, I don't like to hide
Anyone checked to see if setting menus_have_tearoff "true" in gconf enables this feature? (In 8.0 it worked for applications, but not the Gnome menu.)
I recognize there are pragmatic reasons for making the default desktop more MSW-like, but why drop a useful feature that imo helped make the Gnome 1.4 destop superior to the MSW desktop?
Tearoffable menus do not make a desktop superior (imho) and another fact is that these kind of menus are meant to be used with deep menu hiearchies (like the GIMP has).
About this RH 8.1 beta..
One thing I really dislike (just like some other people already mentioned) is that those fonts are really BIG.
It makes my res of 1024x768 look like 460x480 and that's definitely not the reason I bought this new monitor one year ago.
It shouldn't be that fuzzy either..
As I understand, Redhat suspect that they might one day have legal trouble if they support NTFS in their package. Same for mp3.
It looks like Redhat is very cautious about licencing issue, much more than other Linux ditributions. It is wise from a company that plan to be here in the long run.
If you really want NTFS support recompile the kernel. Recompiling the kernel isn't as difficult as it seems. However, Red Hat should support more file systems upon install other than ext2/3. They should also provide support for ReiserFS, etc. Automounting does exist in Red Hat 8.0 and if it doesn't you can set that up in the /etc/fstab file. Red Hat is a great distribution and probably is the distribution where the most linux software is available for.
I'm writing this now on 8.0.92. But I'm biased, I liked the whole 8.x series. It looks like RedHat will have KDE 3.1/3.2 and GNOME 2.2 in the final release of 8.1. I've found some bugs in GNOME, like the panel, and a few small quirks about the system, but overall it is very usable.
What I did like was how performance improved significantly, making a GNOME/KDE GUI very usable for most system and network operations. It worked fine with an Nvidia card, except I probably would have a problem with unaccelerated OpenGL onna Ti4200 if I played many games on this thing. But I can still boot into windows for that and I'm sure they'll have the problems worked out by the time it ships.
I installed it along side SuSE 8.1 on a dual processor box. SuSE has KDE 3.0 and GNOME 2.x, slightly dated software when compared with 8.0.92, and it shows. SuSE didn't come with any kind of server support in the personal edition, including NFS server, which I thought was a bit extreme. RedHat came with everything, including a Samba server I was able to make use of. Its funny SuSE wouldn't include this software with their $40 value package, while RedHat includes everything freely available with their free 5CD download. Needless to say I'm feeling slightly upset and like the SuSE 8.1 personal edition is way over priced. Its not worth the CD its burned on IMO. How could they take out NFS support? Its like RedHat taking out NTFS and mp3 support, but at least RedHat has a valid legal and financial reason.
>> Tearoffable menus do not make a desktop superior (imho)...
Nor did I write that, by themselves, they did.
>> ... and another fact is that these kind of menus are meant to be used with deep menu hiearchies (like the GIMP has).
No ... they're "meant" to be used if and however the individual user finds them useful.
Errrr. Why are you guys making NTFS support such a big deal. Heck, you don't even have to compile to kernel (for read-only NTFS support).
--> http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html
RPM patch. Install it... Barely any configuration needed. Works like a charm on 8.0, and probably will too on 8.1.
I normally just lurk but the nit picking was driving me nuts.
If you absolutely can't live without NTFS just add the support yourself. It's not very hard and I'm no guru.
The Term shortcut is a non-issue. If you need a shortcut on the Gnome bar put it there. It takes two seconds.
The lack of MP3 support can be fixed in two minutes.
Now the Nvidia problem, that HAS to be fixed! I need my Quake3 and my Unreal! :-)
Back to lurking...
Just for info - Nvidia support is much improved in XFree cvs (ALA 4.3)
Phoebe is a very different beast for me. It has issues with ps/2 keyboards when not using ps/2 mouse. It doesn't turn the computer off on shutdown. Until I upgraded the kernel it didn't do scsi-emulation right. I had royal issues with the installer and my ide controller and hard drives.
All that aside, RedHat 8.1 will be what RedHat 8.0 should have been. I see alot of promise in Phoebe, just as long as they fix all the serious bugs in it.
As for the nvidia drivers, they won't work. You can use the nv driver which is part of XFree86, but the binary only drivers aren't compatiable with XFree86 4.2.99. It will probably be weeks after 8.1 is released before Nvidia releases a version that works with 4.2.99/4.3.
It's a beta people, if you want the bugs fixed tell REDHAT about them. ;-)
I thought the review was very poorly done. Two days? You need to use an OS for atleast two WEEKS before writing a review. I guarantee you, in the next few days, the author of this article will be using his Redhat8.1 beta and suddenly say to himself, "gosh, I should have mentioned this in my review". It is absolutely pathetic that the only thing this review mentions is improved font support. Try spending a little more time with the articles and perhaps you will get something of better quality next time.
oh no! your binary nvidia drivers wont work....?!?! SHOCK HORROR!!!
You mean i will have to type "make install" instead of "rpm -ivh NVIDIAdrivers.rpm"
Heavens no! i would rather wait 4 weeks for someone else to type all that scary stuff for me
An srpm is no binary, it's source. (rpm is binary).
I also prefer rpm or srpm. I have had much problems afther mixing rpm/srpm with make.
(bat that was before I started to use gentoo)
Can somebody who has actual *experience* with Redhat let me know a little here... you see, I ran SuSE for a couple years, moved to slack for a year or so, and since may I've run gentoo. I like gentoo the most, though it is a pain in the ass sometimes.
What I'd like to know about redhat is:
Can I plug in my pcmcia card and have net services turn on automatically? Pull it out and have them stop gracefully? Does APM work right? I never got that working under slack -- and while it *used* to work in gentoo, about a week ago it died. Now I have to reboot the machine with the card inserted and start dhcpcd. I've tried fixing it, but no luck. And I've never had apm suspend work correctly.
What about plugging in a usb mouse when I'm home, and not using it when I take my laptop to the coffee shop. Right now I have to muck with XF86Config -- so it's not worth it.
Auto mounting/unmounting of removable media? I hear mandrake does this. Gentoo has DevFS (which rocks) and as such the kernel knows when I plug in a pendrive, or pull it out -- but I still can't get something nice and beos like wherein I just plug the device/zip disc/etc in & there it is, on my desktop.
Is it developer friendly from install? Documentation, man pages, etc? I use my box almost 100% for c/c++ development and the one time I tried redhat, 2 years ago, as far as I could tell the development environment was b0rked out of the box. Standard install too. I went back to SuSE after one evening trying to get my 100% standard GNU Automake style projects to build. Shameful. As far as I could tell, the configure scripts couldn't make sense of redhat's weird directory structures.
See here's the thing; Redhat looks great, and frankly, I like the idea of a system which just works and has friendly tools for system administration, hardware, etc etc. I prefer KDE but I don't mind Gnome. I'd be happy to run redhat's tweaked KDE and use the gnome based tools. I'm not a zealot; I'd rather run what works. And no, I don't consider Windows an option: because I like programming, and win32 is like having nails driven into your eyes.
I run gentoo but have been burned one time too many by etc-update ruining my init scripts and killing pcmcia (seems like this happens every few months). I know, it's my own fault -- but it shouldn't take a guru to keep a system running. I'd rather write code and let my system take care of itself. I will even... HAPPILY... pay for RHN to get up2date.
If anybody has any useful information for me on this, could you email me personally?
Thank you!
To all people complaining about bugs: please report bugs to redhat!!! Stop posting on this site. Report the bug!
Load this page and send bug reports or request for enhancement (http://bugzilla.redhat.com)
As an example do you want NTFS enabled by default?
then write a comment for bug #70571
(http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=70571)
Maybe if more people ask for NTFS then RedHat finally will enable it.
Thanks.
>Can somebody who has actual *experience* with Redhat let me know a little here... you see, I ran >SuSE for a couple years, moved to slack for a year or so, and since may I've run gentoo. I like ?
>gentoo the most, though it is a pain in the ass sometimes.
Sure, I've used RedHat since 1997, is that long enough? :-P haha
>What I'd like to know about redhat is:
>Can I plug in my pcmcia card and have net services turn on automatically? Pull it out and have
>them stop gracefully? Does APM work right? I never got that working under slack -- and while it
Yes, and yes. (There are some conditions where APM sets time wrong, that is usually caused by a timezone issue.)
>*used* to work in gentoo, about a week ago it died. Now I have to reboot the machine with the
>card inserted and start dhcpcd. I've tried fixing it, but no luck. And I've never had apm
>suspend work correctly.
YUCK! I have RedHat 8 on two laptops here at home, and both PCMCIA and APM are working fine.
>What about plugging in a usb mouse when I'm home, and not using it when I take my laptop to the
>coffee shop. Right now I have to muck with XF86Config -- so it's not worth it.
I have a USB Logitech MX500 on this notebook, and my wife has a PS/2 mouse on hers works great. I can show you how to use the alternate mouse tag but it will be a 5 step visit to XF86Config.
>Auto mounting/unmounting of removable media? I hear mandrake does this. Gentoo has DevFS (which
It does this out of the box I believe. I have it turned off on all but my server since this computer has no internal cdrom or floppy.
> rocks) and as such the kernel knows when I plug in a pendrive, or pull it out -- but I still >can't get something nice and beos like wherein I just plug the device/zip disc/etc in & there it >is, on my desktop.
If you put the device in fstab and use autofs it will appear on your desktop.
>Is it developer friendly from install? Documentation, man pages, etc? I use my box almost 100%
>for c/c++ development and the one time I tried redhat, 2 years ago, as far as I could tell the
>development environment was b0rked out of the box. Standard install too. I went back to SuSE
>after one evening trying to get my 100% standard GNU Automake style projects to build. Shameful.
>As far as I could tell, the configure scripts couldn't make sense of redhat's weird directory
>structures.
Yes, do a workstation install, not a personal desktop and you will be ok.
>See here's the thing; Redhat looks great, and frankly, I like the idea of a system which just
> works and has friendly tools for system administration, hardware, etc etc. I prefer KDE but I
>don't mind Gnome. I'd be happy to run redhat's tweaked KDE and use the gnome based tools. I'm
>not a zealot; I'd rather run what works. And no, I don't consider Windows an option: because I
>like programming, and win32 is like having nails driven into your eyes.
I was torn between KDE and GNOME until GNOME 2.0 with RedHat 8.0, I haven't touched KDE since. :-)
>I run gentoo but have been burned one time too many by etc-update ruining my init scripts and
>killing pcmcia (seems like this happens every few months). I know, it's my own fault -- but it
>shouldn't take a guru to keep a system running. I'd rather write code and let my system take
>care of itself. I will even... HAPPILY... pay for RHN to get up2date.
Sounds like you are in a very similar situation to what I went through when I used Gentoo, compile for a few weeks until you have a base system with all of the apps you need then you find out that you have to compile things daily until it works. :-( (Compile base, then KDE, then Mozilla, then GNOME, then OpenOffice on a P400, it will take 3 weeks just for those.)
>If anybody has any useful information for me on this, could you email me personally?
Hope this helps, I didn't see the personal email deal until I had already written the reply. Feel free to contact me offline.
>Thank you!
:-)
The RedHat KDE experience is something that an avid KDE user will not like.
It's like KDE on crutches for all I care. It ain't the KDE we all know and love. Delete the RedHat recreation and install the real deal!
There wasn't anything wrong with RedHat's KDE I did try it on my wife's computer before I switched her to GNOME. Maybe in your opinion it isn't as good as kde.org's version, that doesn't mean that it isn't. ;-)
KDE pre3.1 on RedHat 8.0.92 is not that bad. Its much faster than the KDE that came with 8.0 and it is rather easy to make a quick trip to kde.org or kde-look or kde-themes or whatever its called.org and grab the latest themes. The default isn't all that bad, but if you want to write up your dislike I'd love to hear some specific examples of exactly how KDE has not been compiled properly or is not fully functional. Sure the menus are a bit of a mess, but you have a built-in menu editor when you right-click on the KDE menu.
You can fix all those ugly RedHat icons with a quick change to some other icon set and maybe a minor update to the KDE menu button, maybe remove htmlview icon from your panel and copy the konqueror in its place, etc. Htmlview, btw, isn't that bad. Its just doesn't yet have a GUI to automate its configuration, which would actually make it really cool, if everything used it.
Its designed so you can access html documents from within a GUI or command line using the same command, htmlview.
I prefer the Aqua Fusion icons, with the Fish in the Sky theme and Bluecurve window borders. Run the transparent gkrellm, konqueror as my desktop and file manager, GNOME as the menubar at the top of the screen with a menu, task bar, pager and volume control and a KDE kicker as something like an OSX launch bar. I have no complaints and I've used RedHat, Debian, Slackware, SuSE, YellowDog, Mandrake, Demo, Gentoo, and Licoris. I've also used HPUX, AIX, IRIX, Solaris, BSD, BeOS, all MS products and a few other things. Like I said I have no complaints.
Some correction here http://www.mosfet.org/noredhat.html Mosfet explains why he thinks that RedHat's version of KDE is broken.
Mosfet, yeah he's someone you should listen to alright! (*HAHAHAHAHAHA*)
Come on, if you believe his drivel, I have a bridge to sell you *CHEAP*.
i used RedHat 8.0 some weeks ago, and nearly everything worked (even syncronizing my USB palm).
But it just felt slow - even although I didn't use Mozilla and OpenOffice.
But resizing windows, browsing through menus, etc.
Compared to Windows it just felt very slow.
Did you notice any (significant) differences in GUI speed between Gnome 2.0 in RH8.0 and Gnome 2.2 her in Phoebe?
@Aitvo
I have high respect of Mosfet. Regardless of what other people say about him I think he did quite good job on KDE and there is really no need to make stupid jokes about him. From what I heard he invented quite some stuff for KDE. And I think that his opinion is as good as yours, mine and anyone else.
I didn't notice a lot of performance improvements between GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, because I use KDE for file management. But I did notice a significant improvement in all around KDE performance. If you find nautilus too slow you might try swapping it out for KDE. If you have more than 128MB of RAM you can turn off nautilus by going to Edit->Preferences and on the desktop section you can tell it to stop managing your desktop, or in 8.0.92 you don't have to do anything, then just run startkde. KDE will start up and you can use it for file management while maintaining all your GNOME 2.x features. You should even be able to kill the kicker, the KDE panel, and just use konqueror in place of nautilus if you like.
I wasn't aware of RedHat's patches to the 8.x tree, but I am well aware of how they hacked up gcc, the kernel, X, etc. in previous builds. What I can't figure out is why, but I'm sure they have their reasons. 
Anyway, its all good, at least they're keeping up with releases. I'd definitely recommend any other distro that has GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1, like Dropline Slackware, but you'd have to install KDE from source. But RedHat does have decent industry support, for a linux distro.
Nice to see you Linux lovers are still having fun fiddling with fonts,compiling code,downloading new distros,stuffing around with configuration files.
Ill just sit here and happily use my install of Win2K which ive been using for 3 years without problems.
Nice fonts,decent apps that dont crash every 10 min,decent 3rd party hardware support-i think ill stick with win2k:)
I have a phrase for you (I got this 3 times this weekend.)
"Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks"
I'll spend 10 minutes installing fonts, using my 3rd party hardware, and not having to reboot for 85 days now while you spend two weeks reloading your computers because you didn't patch before you checked your email. LOL
You still have a point, MarkH. Win XP is fine once you use it for a week or two (shutting off its constant nagging).
Redhat may be complaining about licensing problems, but MOST USERS DON'T CARE!!! Why can't somebody understand this?
If licencing is a problem, I want Redhat to include a small extra installer, that would notify me of the legal problems, and ask me if I still wanted to continue, and then in one step, install mp3 (playing in XMMS and ripping in GRIP), flash, java for mozilla etc. etc.
I'm tired of only using Redhat (from a desktopian point of view) because of the fonts and the price. Otherwise, I would have been using Xandros a long time ago.
EOmy 0.02$
@c:
thanks for the comment, but I don't like KDE (mostly because of start up speed of applications. I don't want to wait 2 seconds for opening a screenshot program on a Athlon 1.33.)
And it's not about Nautilus since I like a dual pane file manager (http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/) which is REALLY fast.
BTW: Has anybody tried Gnome with (X)DirectFB? Does this speed up things like resizing windows? And is it difficult to install in RedHat?
I have no particular hatred for Microsoft the company.
I just do not like Windows and I like Unix. This is just me YMMV.
This is why things like Gnome's gconf-editor drives me nuts but at the same time I cannot live in a gui world without nautilus and my battery of nautilus scripts which gives me an easy way to use my catalog of shell scripts in an easy graphical manner.
If it works well in Windows I do not mind duplicating it in Linux (I like Gnumeric for example which is Excel-like but still feels very Gnomish). I like Fontillus which is a very mac'ish drap and drop font installer. Take the best of the interfaces and forget the prejudices.
Anway onto Redhat. I like Gnome. SuSE is really good for the KDE folks and all the yast2 modules are even builtin to the Control Center. But, for Gnome, the best distribution is Redhat. The desktop is tweaked around Gnome conventions. The configuration tools are gtk2/gnome based. The whole thing is just tooled around and about the Gnome desktop.
Not only that I like the user side system configuration tools. They are nice and work in a very straight-forward manner. There needs to be more of them especially the server side ones.
I like the package management tools but it needs to be tied into apt the way Mandrake is tied to urpmi. I like RH8 a lot but I understand its failings. Downloading the ltmodem and Nvidia or ATI binary drivers is a pain. Other update tools allow you to on the first update grab MS fonts, snag Nvidia drivers and stuff like that. RedHat should do this too. I understand this but the good part is I was prepared. I had the things I needed from apt and synaptic to plugins and MS fonts.
It took me from start of install to having my system installed just the way I wanted and updated a little less than two hours and this included installing my loki games and Castle Wolfenstein.
Once you are prepared and know what to do getting the box set up is not that bad but yes, still too much of a pain especially next to distros like SuSE and Mandrake that handle this stuff better.
Afterwards it feels very professional, the desktop is slick and there are little things like being able to easily set the time and date from the desktop without navigating an all-in-one big configuration center thing or install an rpm with a doubleclick or the Internet Configuration Wizard and neat tool. Lots of little things. The only appearance thing that drives me nuts is the fact there is no framebuffer image behind the boot messages like in SuSE.
I don't understand why everybody complain about the speed of Redhat 8.0. I installed it on two machines: Athlon XP2000 and Athlon 1.2, both in dual boot one with WinXP and one with Win2K. Both machines have 1Gig of ram. It is the FASTEST setups I ever had. I am always really impress by how responsive the redhat system look.
Granted I recompiled all X and gnome packages for Athlon (the default is i386 which is really low end, they should at least compile for i586). Now winXP or Win2K looks a bit slughish. Maybe having a lot of memory (file cache?) makes things a lot faster.
agreed!
i use xp, redhat, os 9 & X, and freebsd 4.7
redhat does not in any way shape or form seem slow to me.
when i allow my windows only friends on to one of my redhat systems....they have absolutely no problems.
a default install by a relative newbie could probably result in a different opinion.
my xp is very fast too btw...of course i have disabled about 30 plus services...and the gui looks just like NT 4.0 with slightly different icons(ALL eyecandy is disabled)... windows are not being displayed while dragged, no fading bullshit effects, no explorer trying to display all sorts of extraneous info.
come to think of it ...ALL MY MACHINES RUN FAST.
who would have thought...to all of you xp cheerleaders...IT'S THE USER STUPID!
Ok, here are my experiences as related to speed.
XP -- faster loading and low load (one or two apps) response and feel.
Linux -- slower loading, gnome/gtk2 apps feel very reponsive and feel was smooth, large C++ apps like Mozilla or OpenOffice feel slow under linux. Linux in general feels faster than even XP or 2000 under load (Lots of apps running and compiles going in background that sort of stuff).
OS X -- had a couple of hours of use on these. Slow feel but very smooth and app response is very dependant upon the app. Hard to peg it down. On one hand it feels slow, but on the other hand it also feels very smooth in the gui rendering. If that makes any sense. Also, some apps just feel quicker than others.
Just my experience.
@MaxAuthority: And it's not about Nautilus since I like a dual pane file manager ( http://www.obsession.se/gentoo ) which is REALLY fast.
Okay, if you say so. I'm running KDE 3.1 on GNOME 2.2 on RedHat 8.1 on an Athlon 1.0 Ghz system with 256MB of RAM, and KDE is honestly almost as responsive as windows 98. Maybe it's Phoebe, but something about this install is just nice. I even left magicdev running. (normally I delete the binary, can't stand any daemon without a man page) Anyway, using kuickshow images like this 1280x1024 screenshot.png load in about 1s. When I doubt-click on home konqueror loads in around 2s. I have scripts linked into it, in fact you can run anything that's in your path on any file in your system. And you can easily create and manage a set of file types. For example, I was able to add a separate ogm file type for Ogg Media from the ogg file type for Ogg Audio and have them automaticly play the content with the right applications, gmplayer and xmms in my case. In fact, it was so easy I have all my video file types linked to gmplayer or xmms depending on which one plays them the best. I think recently they all ended up getting mapped to gmplayer. My cheap Ghz Athlon is a A/V streamin machine. And extremely stable. For a beta. I really dig 8.1, been running it for a couple weeks now. KDE 3.1 also has integrated vnc for remote connectivity, yet another reason to run it. I highly recommend it, I promise you won't be missing out, if only for the extra minute of inital load time. After that everything runs fine.
[teknishn ]
" Of course for those of us with the time and ability, its not that difficult to build Mozilla with xft support on any distro."
Compiled it three times. Looked good though. 
[Anonymous (IP: ---.cg.shawcable.net)]
Mandrake Cooker the same. Building & Installing, Configuring actually was easy. Downhill from there.
[Kejar31]
Mandrake Cooker something similiar. Cursors a nicer one than the basic white pointer, and it has a shadow, as well as animation(Yah!).
[Rich]
"Tearoffable menus do not make a desktop superior (imho) and another fact is that these kind of menus are meant to be used with deep menu hiearchies (like the GIMP has)."
Worked fine for NextStep.
BTW Anyone running Mozilla. Is "cursor back" in comment boxes (like this one) leaving any "vertical lines"? Happens in Galeon too. (Un)highlighting the offending area, or hitting "enter" at the line end removes it. Been this way for several versions.
[I have a phrase for you (I got this 3 times this weekend.)
"Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks" ]
This sircam virus is not an issue even in M$ Outlook Express, just put OE into restricted zone - and that is the default with OE6, I think. There are dangers out there, but that is still better than not being able to use video cards as significant as nVidia.
The WinXP is slow with too many apps opened is just not true. While I type this post, I got 9 IE windows, 3 explorer file browsers, 4 notepads, one Outlook window, 2 Outlook Express windows, one M$ street and trips window, one Word 2002 window, one P2P client window and one DOS/Console window - 23 in total and it is as quick as it was when it just started on a Celeron 800 with 384 MB RAM and I still have 120 MB physical memory to spare.
@tty
Linux does nVidia. Even RH8.1 (a beta) does nVidia it just does not do them with the binary drivers, yet. It will soon, and I won't go to it till it does.
I did not say (if you were even referring to my post) that XP is slow with too many app open. I said that linux feels faster than XP with lots of apps open (as in terms of response and redraws and menu pulldown etc..etc..). BTW, I gave lots of points to XP for faster application load times. I have a Celeron 800 MHZ Inspiron laptop with 128MB of ram.
9 Galeon Windows, 3 Nautilus file browser windows, 4 Gedit windows, One Evolution window, Mr Project (Project Manager), Gftp, gaim, Abiword, Gnumeric, 3 Terminal Windows, xmms playing tunes
26 total and it sings.
BTW, opening up a bunch of app windows does not necessarily put a machine under load. The trick I would say is to do a lot of tasks at the same time. Compile programs while surfing and actively using two or three other apps cuting and pasting back and forth while running winamp with Outlook in the background checking mail of course along with some other things. That is what puts a desktop under load, not just opening window after window.
True - but how many of them are doing anything? I'm sure most are idle and simply taking up RAM. I'm able to run seti@home, listen to music, watch a divx movie and have my email client open in the background and doing periodical checks. Several apps, many actively doing *something.* To me the speed differences between Win XP/2K and Linux are increasingly subtle. On properly supported hardware both are quite fast.
Linux, to me, *is* faster but only in not-so-noticable ways. TCP/IP performance is always faster - I get lower pings and faster downloads on the very same hardware over my cable modem. Every time. Thnx to the new scheduler used in RH 8+ I can juggle an increasing number of apps without a performance penalty. Many apps also load faster in Linux, and yet the opposite is also true - many load slower. Integrated or C based apps are snappy - most of the native Gnome apps spring to life in a blink. Mozilla isn't all that bad, about the same loading time in both platforms. Open Office is a drag though - but once loaded it will re-launch fast enough. Games are a wash - Unreal Tournment loads just as fast on both, for instance.
Data integrity seems to be greated in Linux thnx to Ext3 vs NTFS. I've never lost data due to a hard crash on Linux, but I have on my Windows drives. It seems that when push comes to shove Linux can simply handle larger loads, though most end users don't ever really do this. Many are like tty why - they will have many applications open at once, but most are idle. It appears to be a Unix thing to me - FreeBSD on the same hardware is just a silky. I've run seti@home, compiled an app through the ports collection, listened to mp3s, and browsed the web all without hickup or latency. I have my doubts Win XP/2K could do the same.
The very fact that Windows server environments tend to include a large number of servers is telling. At my work we have nearly three dozen Win servers in my part of the base alone (I work at a military base as a contractor). None of them do any more then one task. We have a single DHCP server, a single DNS server, a dozen Exchange servers in a cluster (for reliability apparently, one always crashes at least every other week) and so on. Unix environments often can do more at once. At my last job we had a Linux box running on an aging Dell with a PII that was our internet gateway, firewall, dhcp, dns, web and email server. Mind you we had maybe two hundred employees compared to the ammount of people on base here. But still. It never crashed either. Ever.
Thats it for me - my extended rant on performance and platforms. :-) Got carried away, eh?
Next time you do a review please spend the time and do it right. It only takes a few minutes to switch over to KDE if you have it installed. It's not necessary to say "I don't know what KDE looks like, but I can image the fonts look good there as well." Come on.
Show some screenshots.
if redhat were to have windows/apps booted up during the boot process would it be upon the kernal programmers to implement this or can redhat do this on their own? windows taking seconds to launch is what makes most windows users think linux is slow.
With most of today's modern hardware, loading up apps are not a problem. Neither is bootup speed.
I mean, yeah, sure, you'll notice a difference from loading IE a millisecond faster than Konqueror. Yeah sure, like you care if it takes 10 seconds longer to boot into WindowsXP than it is into your Gentoo box.
The only thing of speed I think Linux, or most *nix apps for that matter, that is lacking vs. Windows, is the marketing money, and Games that only run in D3D.
Listen, linux has an issue with BAD_RELOC calls or something with c++ apps that make a real difference with large c++ apps like Mozilla or OpenOffice especially in launch times. It should not take 13 seconds to launch mozilla or 30 seconds to launch open office writer. That is just silly. Prelinking and preload tricks that can make this better. Redhat 8.0 came with the prelink package that makes the launch times better but still not good. The issues gcc c++ linking needs to be resolved and ignoring does no one especially a linux fan any good.
Also every distro should come with fully standard packages and ones fully optimized for the typical top tier processor type available on the x86 market. Sure, Athlon build rpms would be nice but it would be great to at least have the majority of apps optimized fully (they do some partial optimization or something) for i686. Otherwise the compile your own distros will always have a real speed advantage. I have compiled my own desktop before and it is really honestly faster than the generic rpms.
Yes, every distro needs to work on boot times. The hardware detection of every major distro works terribly slow. Other services on one distro act slow (font server on SuSE or xinetd on RH8) while on other distros they act fine. All services should be optimized for a quicker boot up.
There are five other issues I wish Redhat would take seriously.
1. More server configuration tools --
network shares tool that handles both samba and nfs
ldap - client/server
NIS - client/server
Mail configuration tool -- postfix/pop3
2. Better system administration tools --
Full Sysconfig editor
Package Management tied to apt-rpm so dependencies would be less of an issue.
Cron tool for users -- gnome-crontab is the one I use
All the above are just examples I am sure I can think of more.
3. Multimedia/plugins -- Like Eugenia said, they should pay for the mp3 license and just include it and a full suite of multi-media tools. Every other big distro includes common browser plugins and so should Redhat in a non-free section of the distro.
4. Downloads/drivers -- MS fonts downloads, binary driver downloads are a pain in the butt to configure and Redhat's update tool should be re-worked to pull down the latest ATI, Nvidia drivers and those MS fonts and install them on your box.
5. Boot messages splash screen -- SuSE and Mandrake I believe have a framed boot messages screen that gives a nice background to boot messages as they scroll by. I do not even care about the SuSE cute animation. I just hate the rest of the UI looking so slick but I have to stare at that ugly black screen until I get my login prompt. Yes, this is eye-candy but so is a graphical login.
These are just my suggestions.
Now many have mentioned that the fonts looks fuzzy. Reason, the fonts are out of the box made for cheap monitors. They look good on them. Go to System Preferences and pick Fonts and select another rendering type (like for example Sub-Pixel).
As for font size, I like it just the way they are, except the icon font size. Again, in the same place, you can easily change the font size.
Some correction here http://www.mosfet.org/nored hat.html Mosfet explains why he thinks that RedHat's version of KDE is broken.
Mosfet arguments is flawed and never provide any REAL proof. See my arguments against his/hers below:
The modifications to KDE and Qt create several bugs not in the offical version. It would of been worse if several KDE developers didn't rush to help them out.
True. There is however something called *bugzilla* which you *report* bugs, and Red Hat tries to *fix* it. Take for example the renaming of the .desktop files used for start-up. They only realize the bug a wee bit too late, yet so many have been bashing RH for it. I guess nobody (including me, sorry :-) bothered to tell RH about the bug?
People have reported many compile problems under RedHat and I've gotten mail from several who switched distributions because of it.
On Null, yes I got some problems here and there. But with the final version, I have yet to find one application I can't compile properly. Can you at least give some examples?
RedHat's desktop is based on unofficial, unreleased software including the X server. Several of the hacks they did to support unreleased software conflict with the actual solutions developed openly because RedHat made their hacks in secret without letting developers know about it.
So what you want them to do. Inform you whenever they write a new character in their source code? SuSE developed their modifications much more closed than Red Hat (they don't even have a beta), yet I don't see you having http://www.mosfet.org/nosuse.html?
Essentially what they did was use an unreleased beta X server and hacked a bunch of stuff like KDE to work with it without sharing or cooperating with the official projects.
As beta as it may be (IIRC, I always taught the final version of 8.0 came with XFree86 4.2.0), I never seen it crash, nor have I have not been able to compile applications depending on XFree86.
The issue is they also made several changes to the KDE libraries and programs, some of which cause breakage, incompatibilities, or reduce functionality.
There are some incompatibilities. But most of them are considered by Red Hat a bug. As for breakage, again Mosfet neglected to provide an example. Reduce functionality? In what way? So making fonts look better, making annoying stuff like single/double-click consistent accross desktops etc.?
The other problem is switching the default applications for things like the web browser and email client from their KDE implementations to Gnome apps while using the KDE desktop.
The only GNOME app that RH made default was Evolution, which itself iis for GNOME 1.x. Mozilla is not a GNOME app (never was), and the same with OpenOffice.org (albeit it was once part of GNOME Office, but it doesn't even use GTK+).
It will take longer to load the default web browser or email client in KDE than it would in Gnome
Actually it is the same in both enviroments for all apps made default. Evolution uses GTK+ 1 (GNOME uses GTK+2), Mozilla uses its XUL & XPCOM, OpenOffice.org uses god-knows-what.
and it will not provide a consistent look and feel with file dialogs, etc... all when KDE has it's own native equivalents.
Is Mozilla file dialogs consistent with GNOME 2.0? Is Evolutions'? Is OpenOffice.org's? So if GNOME users aren't making such a fuss, why must you?
Let's face it: Gnome people would have an absolute fit if some distribution replaced Mozilla and Evolution with Konqueror and KMail in their Gnome desktop
Well, I don't see any reason why GNOME fans would be angry if Konqueror and KMail were made default in GNOME for technical reasons. Mainly because Mozilla in the first place isn't a GNOME app. But if the distributor made that decission because of a reason other than it is a KDE app, then they wouldn't be mad.
Do you think GNOME users like Mozilla over Galeon? I doubt it. But RH still picked Mozilla. If RH would to pick Konqueror, you have to give a proper reason. Mozilla was picked because it support the web far more than Konqueror, and if Konqueror was to beat Mozilla at its game, I wouldn't be suprise if Konqueror be made default.
I emailed all this to Mosfet, but instead of rebutting my arguments, she/he called me a troll.
I have high respect of Mosfet. Regardless of what other people say about him I think he did quite good job on KDE and there is really no need to make stupid jokes about him. From what I heard he invented quite some stuff for KDE. And I think that his opinion is as good as yours, mine and anyone else.
He may be a good coder and maybe even a artist, but taht doesn't mean that you must follow everything he/she says. Mosfet is one very demanding and emotional person. He/she just wants things done his/her way.
Guess why he/she was kicked out of the KDE development team? His/her snobbishness and lack of respect for other developer. He/she may be reknown for writing many parts of KDE, but one thing he/she isn't - pragmatic. He/she is very biased in his/her opinions and that can be seen in her writings.
>> "Nice to see you Linux lovers are still having fun fiddling with fonts,compiling code,downloading new distros,stuffing around with configuration files.
Ill just sit here and happily use my install of Win2K which ive been using for 3 years without problems. "
That's funny.
I can crash (read: bsod) Windows XP in 2 seconds.
Linux won't crash when doing it the same way.
Now what OS is more crappy?
If you go look at the nVidia SRPMS you will see that it MOSTLY is binary. The little code to be compiled is some glue code between the kernel and the binary nvidia module.
Noone is stopping you to package binary things from a SRPMS, and it is often desired to do so for non open packages.
Great post, let me add this.
>RH is a "closed" open source company
>
Uhh, no they aren't. ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/8.0/en/os/i386/SRPMS
>One of the continuing themes here is that Red Hat does not cooperate with the free software projects from which they
>profit from. KDE is not the only example of this - people from GCC, Wine, and even their flagship Gnome desktop have
Sure they do, just look at any project out there. Hell THEY have more people on the GCC steering committe than any other company! LOL.
>complained about this. What Red Hat likes to do is make a lot of changes to applications internally without letting
Where, who's complained?
>the developers of the projects know what they intend to do, then suprise everyone when they release the betas of the
Waah.
>distributions. Developers are left saying, "Oh my God, what did they do to my software!". No one in KDE had any idea
Uhh yeah, it's not your software, it's EVERYONE's software deal with it.
>Red Hat made such invasive modifications to KDE until they released their betas! When they did find out what RedHat
WAAH! They modified it to suit them, just like Lycoris SUSE Mandrake Lindows.com and everyone else did.
>did there was a massive rush by the KDE developers to fix the most glaring flaws including services and font breakage,
Waah, they made the fonts in their OS usable. If you prefer shit fonts by all means use them.
>but of course they couldn't get them all. This is because Red Hat did most of their modifications in private and did not
>coordinate with KDE at all. The problem was compounded by the fact that they had no developers on staff with any KDE/Qt
Who said they had to? Did KDE approach RedHat and offer to help? Doubtful. RedHat did infact have a KDE developer on staff
that left prior to RedHat 8.0's release. This is an outright lie mosfet.
>development experience. Not all of what they did was bad but because they have no experience and developed their fork of
>KDE in private it created bugs and conflicts with offical software releases.
Oh well, take your gistapo software and go home then. Isn't the whole point behind OSS the ability to modify it?
Then quit your bitchin.
rajan r was talking about
> I emailed all this to Mosfet, but instead of rebutting my arguments, she/he called me a troll.
rajan, don't bother with Mosfet. Remember that once he left KDE (and Linux) because of one of his childish trollings.
It seems to me that OSNews needs a new editor...or are they just struggling for content? The recent Knoppix review, was probably the worst case I'd seen of this. It's plain to see that neither of these two reviewers have been in the real world where users complain about every little nit-pick.
Basically, this review told me that there is nothing new in Phoebe. Sure, RH updated libfreetype so antialiased fonts look great(er). My Gentoo box has had better (than RH) fonts for a month (my first reaction to these fonts was wow also). But non-AA fonts still stink.
For those of you who are getting disappointed in the youth...just choose wisely. These guys are not familiar with the concept of supporting users and computers as a means to do actual work (games are still the primary purpose of computers to them). I'm a 21-year-old CS student also. What's the difference? I have real-world experience. I'm not selling myself, I just want to stick up for crowd of educated youth.
What I have seen so far in the lists above Phoebe:
KDE seems faster. Good for KDE users.
Gnome 2.1 stuff basically what 2.2 will be.
This includes stuff like fontilus - drag-n-drop install of fonts, gnome icon themes, transparency in panel are back, nautilus based media views, startup notification for apps is back and cd burning from nautilus.
Newer version XFree86
XFT Mozilla
gstreamer
newer versions of lots of other apps.
I will go to it probably once it comes out in full release mode. I like my laptop so I am less prone to experiment than some of those out there.
BTW, I am not disappointed in the youth. I just wish sometimes some of the PFY knew their history when it comes to Unix and took the time to move slowly deliberately when it comes to system administration. It seems my latest batches of young administrators seem so ready to go they rarely think first but I am sure I was the same way back in the day. The last guy I am working with now is very calm, laid back and professional. So the youth has promise.
As near as I can tell the majority of the Computer Science students at my schools (Kansas State University) are completely into Microsoft products. Most have used linux, but by and large we learn and use Microsoft IDE's, language implementations, and operating systems. In fact, KSU recently received a donation of .NET licenses from Microsoft.
"There is no comparison to the font quality in Windows."
Well, this is really a matter of opinion. I am usually highly critical of fonts in linux. However, I really, really love the look of this implementation. Obviously you disagree, but I can't see what you wouldn't like about it.
I am sorry you don't like my nitpicking; however, the complaints I have were quite common. I have heard many others complain, and there are distros that do come with these. Yes, I can add mp3 support and I do it after install. Yes I can add NTFS support. Yes I can edit the fstab. I shouldn't have to. Other distros set this up by themselves. I give on the mp3 because that is a pure financial issue. But as for the rest, it should be taken care of. Redhat honestly wants to make inroads as a desktop OS, it needs to automount windows drives on install. It is as simple as that.
It is pointed out that I hadn't been using Phoebe for only two days before writing a review. I would like to point out that the review was titled "Initial Impressions of Redhat 8.0.92." I understand that I didn't cover every nook and cranny. I mainly wrote it for people who hadn't tried Phoebe to get an idea if they are interested in giving it a shot, not uncover all of its deep secrets.
"Now many have mentioned that the fonts looks fuzzy. Reason, the fonts are out of the box made for cheap monitors. They look good on them. Go to System Preferences and pick Fonts and select another rendering type (like for example Sub-Pixel).
As for font size, I like it just the way they are, except the icon font size. Again, in the same place, you can easily change the font size."
I was unaware of this. My monitor is about 8 years old though, so that explains why I thought they looked a lot better than some others felt about them.
"Basically, this review told me that there is nothing new in Phoebe. Sure, RH updated libfreetype so antialiased fonts look great(er). My Gentoo box has had better (than RH) fonts for a month (my first reaction to these fonts was wow also). But non-AA fonts still stink. "
It is true. There is very little different from Redhat 8.0 to 8.0.92. What else would you want me to say about it. Everything works the same more or less except prettier. I find your tone insulting t