Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 25th Oct 2002 08:37 UTC
A month ago we published the world's exclusive review of Red Hat 8.0, Download Edition. In the meatime Red Hat, Inc. sent us a box of their newest product, Red Hat Professional. While the OS is pretty much the same as in the download edition and we have already made an extensive article on it, a few additional goodies await the customer in the box and we review them.
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Just a note about Red Hat 8.0's usability. Sorry, but it got a little long. I had a lot to say about Red Hat!
Yesterday morning, instead of drudging through rush hour traffic(actually, in Atlanta, its more like rush morning traffic...), I decided that I would work from home. Now, since I installed Red Hat 8.0 a few weeks ago, I have been very, very impressed with it. But somehow I shot the pooch on installing and configuring Grub, as I can no longer boot into my Windows XP install (if anyone has any suggestions on fixing this, please email me!). So I decided this would be a good experiment in testing the usability of Red Hat.
As I said, I was working from home. Knowing how I liked to play with various software, I installed just about every Office/Productivity package that was available to me. What I needed to do was take a series of Excel spreadsheets that stored telephone terminal information, standardize the form, create a DB structure to eventually move the data into, and write a requirements document. Now I realize that all of these tasks really have nothing to do with Red Hat itself, but instead have everything to do with the applications that I chose to use. The point here is whether or not Red Hat provided a usable, productive environment for me to work in. So, I download the Excel documents from my file repository, and fired up GNumeric. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with GNumeric's conversion of my Excel documents (they have some strange formatting), so I tried KSpread. KSpread did not fair much better, if at all. Lastly, I tried OpenOffice.org, and found that it imported my Excel document to almost a perfect copy. Could not have been more impressed. And unlike previous versions of KDE and other distributions of Linux, when I copy and pasted from one application to another, it actually worked pasted what I copied. None of the applications that I used paused, hiccuped, or crashed.
When I had finished using OO.o to edit the spreadsheets, I decided to print them out (as they are little more than data input forms). Unlike Mandrake, Red Hat 8.0 did not automatically detect and install my printer, so I had to go in an configure it using the Printer utility under System Config. After a little frustration with choosing a driver for my HP 932c, I was successfully printing from OO.o. With my spreadsheets done, I fired up OO.o's Word Processor and wrote my 4 page requirements document. I do have to say that the neatest feature of OO.o is auto complete.
After my requirements doc, I put together the SQL statements using Kate, but that's not saying anything special.
So, using Red Hat 8.0, I was able to do everything that I needed to do for work, as well as listen to my MP3 collection while doing it. As it stands now, the only thing that I need to log into Windows for would be game play. Now, I'm not saying that RedHat is ready for the average user. Most users don't care about the minutia that I do. I've been playing with Linux for over a year now, and I feel that I'm quite adept at using it. What I do have to say, is that in my opinion, Red Hat 8.0 is the best Linux Distribution that I have ever used. Its clean, fast, stable, and well stocked with highly usable applications as long as you are willing to invest a little time to learn to do things a slightly different way.
Sorry for the long post.
Chris Shaffer
http://holycow.sytes.net