A quick run through the "start here icon" configuration will set you up with a look and feel to match your tastes, and get most of the general configuration out of the way. I must say it was a pretty smooth 25 minute run to setting up a great looking desktop. Only hurdles to jump were those "strange and mysterious Red Hat icons" that represent the same folder as the one they are in (yeah right - lets click on an icon so that we can go to the folder that we are already in!! - but for some reason I still click them??) It must not be an easy fix for Red Hat to remove these icons, because they have been sitting around giving error messages ever since the beta releases before Red Hat 8.
Gedit
Fired up gedit to write this review and it is very smart and snappy with some new icons as well. File history in the menu is a new and useful feature. I really like this practical little editor (*cough* syntax highlighting would be nice though *cough*).
XMMS
I went to www.xmms.org and downloaded the mp3 plugin for xmms, double-clicked the package icon in nautilus, typed root passwd, clicked ok and that was all it took to install. It works perfectly (but I should be using .ogg anyway).
Printer configuration
CUPS is the default print daemon now with Red Hat 9 and my printer installation couldn't have been easier. I turned my printer on, clicked the printer icon in the panel, clicked ok a couple of times and my Epson Stylus Color 740 was good to go. Gotta like that!
Open office writer
OpenOffice broke the longest start-up time world record by taking a good 45secs on its first load, but consequent start-up times in the same session were incredible, at less than 5 seconds!!! (15 seconds after a reboot). The menus font looks good (which is a big improvement) but my newly added truetype fonts haven't been detected - but I know there is a doc somewhere on the OO site that can help me out there.
Mozilla
Nothing to say here but mozilla is mozilla - beautiful font rendering, excellent page compatibility, rock solid stable, and it takes a rare day on a windows machine with IE now to actually remind me that the web is plagued with pop-up ads. Thank-you soo much mozilla crew for allowing us this freedom - and mozilla's tabbed browsing makes everyday a great day for cruising the net.
Miscellaneous discoveries/thoughts/tips
It is not a well advertised fact that installing truetype fonts is super easy nowadays with Red Hat. You just need to creat a .fonts folder in your home directory and plonk all of your fonts in there (or link to them).
Nautilus cd-burning is a neat add-in (limited in features) but it just does what it should do - burns files to a cd! K3b is by far the king of the cd-burning software in my books.
[DOH] Not really a Red Hat complaint - more of a Gnome one - I was disappointed to find that the Gnome file/save dialogs are still the old boring ones, which I find to be limited in features. But I hear the new ones could be coming in gnome 2.4 (don't quote me on that), so it just gives me something to look forward to.
Conclusion
Red Hat 9 racks up another winner with this release, and if things continue to go as smoothly as they have been, Red Hat is bound to remain my stable base distro that other distros may come and go by (at least until the next frenzied distro release period in six months). It is a delight and pleasure to be able to work and play in an attractive and super functional desktop environment. The fact that it is all linux and free software, and it works so well just makes me gooey with pride - proud for anyone who contributes to open-source projects around the globe.
About the author
I am an Aussie, living in Quebec, and I have been working in linux for about 6 months now full on, and for 6 months before that I was just been playing around with linux - with mandrake mostly (btw - gotta love their new galaxy theme). I have been a fan of Red Hat since 7.3 and it has been my stable distro ever since. Tried many others and liked them all, but for whatever reasons (mainly laziness) I seemed to always come back to my good old stable Red Hat install.
- "Red Hat Linux 9, Part I"
- "Red Hat Linux 9, Part II"
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