Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 8th Feb 2009 14:50 UTC, submitted by QPounder
What did the Linux world look like back in 2000? TuxRadar has republished a distribution round-up from Linux Format issue 1, May 2000. Many distributions such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations, but a few such as Corel and Definite have fallen by the wayside. Still, it does bring back some memories.
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RE[4]: Slackware 2 and RedHat 4.1...
by gilboa on Mon 9th Feb 2009 15:11
in reply to "RE[3]: Slackware 2 and RedHat 4.1..."
Member since:2005-07-06
Why are you using RedHat4.x as a basis whereas the article use Red Hat 6.1?
-I- (in my original post) was talking about the last 10 years.
As such, -I- was comparing the difference between RedHat 5.2 and Fedora 10, compared to to the difference between Windows 98 / Windows NT4 and Windows Vista.
The hardware support?
I said more drivers so I agree with you.
Yes, but you're missing the point, having drivers is not enough.
Linux has made huge steps in making hardware work out of the box. (E.g. Network Manager, Xorg-auto-config, udev, etc)
Configuration tools are more polished true but they're still opaque (don't tell you what they do), and have still some limitations in the 'lacking' parts of Linux (for examples when you want to reconfigure keyboard, it's still quite weird sometimes).
One can say the same about Windows.
E.g. Device Manager is nice and dandy, but if one of the devices on your machine is unknown, you're more-or-less screwed. (lcpi, especially once you update its database is far more informative)
As for the keyboard, what exactly doesn't work?
As for the GUIs, I'm not especially impressionned with modern GUIs, their best feature is that now the font display is better (even if there are still some ugly fonts from time to time).
A good example is BIDI support.
Back in older RedHat (<8/9), adding Hebrew support is a major pain in the back side.
Now I just select Hebrew in the language selection and presto - I have Hebrew support (both Fonts and RTL support) across the board - from text consoles to Firefox, KDE and GNOME.
Was-it still the case in 2000? My memory is a bit fuzzy but I thought that the packaging system was already working.
As far as I remember, Debian was the first one to introduce (an experimental) network transparent package manager - don't remember the exact date - but it should be around 2K.
It took RedHat ~3 more years to add yum support. (Fedora Core 1?)
Never the less, just compare the sheer size of the software library of, say, Fedora 10 and RedHat 6.x - let alone the tools that are used to install/remove/etc - again, the difference is nothing short of astonishing. (Again ,considering the difference in size between Fedora/Debian/etc and Microsoft).
- Gilboa
Edited 2009-02-09 15:13 UTC
RE[5]: Slackware 2 and RedHat 4.1...
by renox on Tue 10th Feb 2009 21:25
in reply to "RE[4]: Slackware 2 and RedHat 4.1..."
Member since:2005-07-06
As for the keyboard, what exactly doesn't work?
It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it poorly documented (and only in English) and too complex: I wanted to use the right 'Win' key as a compose key to make accents on a QWERTY keyboard on RHE3 and I wanted to do it only for my account, but I was never been able to build the corresponding Xmodmap, so I gave up (after two *days* of trying) and modified a settings in X conf which is an ugly solution as it's system wide change not user specific.
And then when I upgraded to RHE5 I found that my shortcuts 'leftWin + <another key>' didn't work anymore most certainly because for whatever reason both Win keys were treated as 'compose' key instead of only the right Win key. Defining the Left Win key as a different modifiers than the right Win key made it work again.
Again highly non intuitive and hard to debug (didn't took me so much time to solve though as after wasting so much time for the first issue I'm starting to understand how it works)..
Currently I have a focus issue, when I open kate from konsole and then close kate the konsole window becomes non-responsive until either I iconify it or either I right click in it (left click doesn't work).
No clue why (probably related to SCIM whatever that is) but annoying, currently I'm torn between not using anymore kate (nedit doesn't have this issue) and trying to use my google-fu to find the solution..
A good example is BIDI support.
Good example, that's indeed a big improvement.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Why are you using RedHat4.x as a basis whereas the article use Red Hat 6.1?
I said more drivers so I agree with you.
Configuration tools are more polished true but they're still opaque (don't tell you what they do), and have still some limitations in the 'lacking' parts of Linux (for examples when you want to reconfigure keyboard, it's still quite weird sometimes).
As for the GUIs, I'm not especially impressionned with modern GUIs, their best feature is that now the font display is better (even if there are still some ugly fonts from time to time).
Was-it still the case in 2000? My memory is a bit fuzzy but I thought that the packaging system was already working.