Gentoo, Lindows and Lycoris arguably were the big surprises of the year in the Linux land, but everyone is waiting the release of Red Hat 8.0 with, possibly, the biggest anticipation ever for a Linux distribution. Since Red Hat posted the Limbo and Null betas, fans of the most popular distribution on earth were making waves and even called this new version a Windows killer. Does this really hold up though? Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market? Read more to find out and view some of the high resolution screenshots we have for you! UPDATE: Red Hat 8 is out! ZDNews has an article about the new release of Red Hat 8.0.
![Some preferences with the unreleased BlueLightHouse theme]()
The installation of Red Hat 8 is similar to the previous versions. While Anaconda, the RH installer, was updated to support AA and GTK+ 2 resulting in a more spiffy look, little has been changed to the installer itself. One of the changes is that now you have to click “Advanced” to tell LILO or GRUB to only install themselves to the / partition and not on the MBR (I usually use the BeOS “bootman” bootloader), the option is not right up there as it used to be. Other than that, the installation went very smoothly; it only took less than 30 minutes with my 52-max CD-ROM I have here on this AthlonXP 1600+, 768 MB Ram (KM266 VIA Apollo PRO chipset, Asus GeForce2MX-400 AGP card and on board S3 SavagePRO, Yamaha YMF-754 and VIA VT8233 sound cards, RealTek 8139 onboard NIC). The OS rebooted and I loaded it into text mode, and from there I loaded X-Free.
As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven’t seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is “Sans”) are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920×1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. I think it should have been part of the font panel under preferences. Anyway, in no time I was up and running with Verdana as my main font on the Gnome2 desktop. I think Verdana and the rest of the web fonts I installed, render very nicely in this distribution (X Server included is 4.2.0)
The Gnome desktop included on RH8 looks sharp and clean. It has brand new icons, and only important plugins and launcher icons are included in the Gnome taskbar. For example, you will find a workspace switcher, Mozilla 1.0.1 (default browser), Evolution 1.0.8 (default email client) and the OpenOffice.org icons on the left side of the bar, while you will find the Red Hat Network Update Daemon (up2date) on the right, along the Time. On your desktop you will only find your Home icon, the “Start Here” preferences open in Nautilus and the trash, named “Wastebasket.”
Along with the brand new icons, you will find a new GTK+ theme, called BlueCurve, and a new window manager theme. I admit that it looks much better than many other themes from previous versions or from other distributions (the window manager is clean and up to the point – I like it), but there is still quite an lot of stuff to be improved in the UI itself. None of the suggestions we did here and here a month ago made it into this release. I hope the UI at Red Hat developers will consider some of the suggestions for the next version of Red Hat.
A nice surprise is OpenOffice.org’s looks in this desktop. Red Hat made some good work to make sure that OOo looks good, with full AA support on its menus, even when you try to type something on a document. Too bad that OOo does not recognize the TTF fonts I installed on my ~/.fonts dir, though. Other GTK+ application can’t see them either, eg. gedit, while other can (eg. Gnome2 Terminal). This is an incosintency issue and, in my opinion, it should be fixed.
![Mozilla, Evolution, Gimp, XMMS]()
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated “Start” Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don’t. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place? You have a “mouse” entry on your Preferences, and you got a “mouse” entry on your System Settings. Granted, the panels loading from each menu are doing different things, but it is just not clear enough just by looking at the menu items what is what and which one does what. You have to click both to see if it is the one you needed. A UI should be intuitive enough to clear up such misconceptions right away. Same goes for “Keyboard” and Networking panels. And if this is not enough, the Red Hat menu is cluttered with similar –at first glance– menus: “Preferences, Server Settings, System Settings, System Tools”. And if that is not enough, under the Extras menu, you will find submenus (with different apps in them) called… “Preferences, System Settings, System Tools.” Same goes for the Office, Games, Sound and Video. That “Extras” submenu is not needed. It duplicates things in a bad way, even if the apps offered there are different from their counterparts in the root Red Hat menu. The Extras should have been included in the master menus, and to avoid clutter, they should have been included under a submenu. For example, under Preferences, include a submenu called “More Preferences” and put there the not-so-needed prefs. Lycoris does it that way and it works well. The way it works now, after a while, you can’t remember under which “Preferences” menu you saw a specific item. Was it under the root’s Preferences menu, or under the Extras? Messy.
The Red Hat Network (up2date) is a pretty nice service and, via it, you are able to update your Red Hat installation automatically, via a GUI application. Only registered users are able to use the service. For the package management, Red Hat has created a nice to use “Package Management” application that will let you install/remove software from the RH8 CDs. I couldn’t find a way to actually make this manager to see other “sources”, for example rpmfind.net, but it is nice when you right-click on an RPM file it will load the “Install Package” application and take care of the installation. I installed a number of RPMs created for Null (there were no dependancy issues), so I don’t know how this installer behaves in the case there are dependancy issues. I downloaded an RPM (the “Downloader for X” application) created for RH 7.3, and it also installed and worked perfectly.
![System Settings]()
Red Hat still includes the Desktop Switcher application, so I momentarily switched to KDE 3.0.3. I think Red Hat has done a good job modifying a Qt theme to look similar to GTK+’s BlueCurve. Whoever said that Red Hat modified KDE to look like Gnome is wrong. The BlueCurve theme is not Gnome’s either. Red Hat wrote it pretty much from scratch. So, KDE applications now looks similar to Gnome’s, and Gnome’s applications are looking similar to KDE’s. This is a good thing. As you can see from the KDE screenshots the desktop now has an (almost) unified look (the buttons and some other details are not the same as in Gnome). If you do not count the plethora of GTK+ 1.x important and default applications (Evolution, GIMP, Balsa etc), XUL (Mozilla), God-knows-what-toolkit (OpenOffice.org), Java, some Python GUI apps I installed and some KDE 1.x and 2.x apps, well… the rest of the Red Hat 8 looks unified. Well, as you can see, not entirely. It is a step in the right direction, but until all these applications get ported to either Qt 3 or GTK+ 2 or create a BlueCurve theme for their toolkit and force AA to them, the desktop won’t feel entirely unified yet.
But as I said earlier, this is the most unified look and feel achieved today in the Linux world and it should be embraced by the community of users, instead of bitching at Red Hat for doing the Right Thing (TM) for their business. Yes, the “About KDE” is not there anymore, and very correctly it is not. I give props to Red Hat for taking this intrusive propaganda from the KDE Project to throw in this menu item on each and every Qt/KDE application. It is a completely reduntant, duplicated information for 99.9% of the users and it is there only to consume space. And yes, I am mostly a KDE user, but speaking as a UI designer (and not as a KDE user), RH did the right thing to remove that always-ever-present menu. The KDE About box should be included in a central place, somewhere else. Currently, you CAN view the About KDE box by clicking the KDE menu, then on the Panel menu, then on the Help menu and then you will find it there. It is a bit hidden I have to admit. But it is there, as you can see from the screenshots we feature here.
![Gnumeric, AbiWord, Quanta, ImageMagick, games...]()
Red Hat 8 comes with quite a number of applications, it even includes KOffice 1.2. Suspiciously and funny enough, when you install additional packages from the RH CDs via the Package Management application, all the GUI apps I installed were showing under the Extras menu, but KOffice was never joined the Gnome’s Extras menu as other KDE apps did after installation, while it does join KDE’s Extras submenu (which is identical to Gnome’s otherwise). Anyways, you can find a number of apps, FTP clients, KDevelop, Emacs, File-Roller, Gaim, Galeon, Gnumeric, lots of puzzle games, preferences for the http server, NFS, Services, hardware information, X11 resolution/monitor panel, Internet wizard with support for wireless, modems, nics, ADSL, ISDN etc. However, there are other things missing, equally important. I couldn’t find a samba configuration tool coming from Red Hat, no visual way to change your sound card from a list, and no visual way to change your monitor’s refresh rate or printers.
Also, there is no Java installed. No Macromedia Flash or Real Player either. And that brings me in the multimedia offerings of this distro. Or its lack there of. Red Hat 8 has to be the poorest multimedia-ready distro by default that I ever ran (except Gentoo of course, which comes with virtually nothing by default :). So, there are no movie players on Psyche (except the limited Kaboodle which is not even installed by default). None. No XINE, no VLC, no XMovie, no NoATun, no nothing. I don’t know what Red Hat means by saying that this is a “business desktop”, but I can tell you that when I used to work at Montal.com in UK, which is a business ISP and AIX/WinNT provider, the girls at the marketing and PR department needed the ability to play avi and qt or mpeg files daily. Our design company was sending us either Flash presentations, or real avi files to show us the progress for our marketing/advertising material they were creating for us. So, no matter how much I might bitch later in this article for not including 2D/3D drivers from nVidia, this is an even bigger oversight/issue. This is 2002, people, and modern offices and businesses need full multimedia capabilities by default on their desktop. And Red Hat fails to deliver these. Hurrah for Windows XP and MacOSX in this particular issue.
![OpenOffice.org]()
On a less important matter (possibly equally important for some IT engineers working at their dark room with RH8 trying to listen to their music – eg. my beloved husband) is the lack of mp3 capabilities. Because of the licensing issue of mp3 (which exists for YEARS for the SAME price, but for some reason people seem to think that this is a ‘new thing’), Red Hat decided to not include mp3 libraries on their OS. This is their liberty, but let’s be realistic here, most people use mp3s, no matter if both ogg vorbis and even wma are better technologies comparatively. Be paid that $50-60,000 USD needed to include mp3s on its BeOS back in year 2000, at a time that they were with one foot off the cliff, financially-speaking. And Red Hat, a much larger company, with more money and millions more users (Be never had more than 100,000 active users at the same time), decides to not license the technology. Well, maybe that was an ideologic decision rather than a business one, but the bottom line is most of their customers won’t be entirely satisfactied by this decision. No matter how you turn it, this is a limitation of the default system, as mp3 is a very standard audio format these days. And manually downloading and installing the already created mp3 RPMs for Psyche, it will only make you an outlaw and not the solver of the real, larger issue at hand here.
On another XMMS issue, it refuses to play online playlists, like my favorite one (works on Lycoris, doesn’t work either on Xandros).
There are good things in Psyche, don’t get me wrong. GCC 3.2 rocks; all the binaries are really fast, the system feels fast, and by modifying the services to load on boot, will make your booting even faster (dunno why Red Hat decided to load things like wireless and PCMCIA daemons on this PC though – I don’t have any such hardware). The default blue background image is pretty good too. WindowMaker, is the fastest between Gnome2 and KDE 3 and it works great too. The system is very stable too so far, except for the problems I describe later about the graphics driver. The filesystem used is ext3 while the kernel used is 2.4.18 (yes, it would have been nice to get some of 2.4.19’s goodies, but hey, Red Hat’s kernels are always kinda modified and patched with special patches for stability and they get a long time testing – which is a good thing).
On the downside of things, my mouse was not recognized to have a wheel mouse and after changing its type via the mouse system panel (one of the 2-3 mouse preference panels with the same name… see above to understand the sarcasm) to get it recognized as a wheel one, the mouse would jump like crazy on the screen, as if I had selected the wrong type (I didn’t). Killing the X server (couldn’t use the mouse or shortcut to logout – there is no shortcut) and reloading X, fixed the problem and I now have full wheel operations. I am not the only one with the problem. It seems that Red Hat does not enable wheel operations for all mice. Mandrake and Lycoris recognized the mouse with no problems though.
And talking about the X server… Hmm.. should I start about it, or not? I better do, it’s part of the whole experience at the end of the day.
![More system tools]()
So, here is the story: First of all, there was no resolution available to pick above 1600×1200. This baby, a high-end SGI Trinitron 24″ monitor, I got here can do up to 2048×1440, but I wanted to set it up for the much more “conservative” 1920×1200 at 90 Hz. The X preference panel does not let you pick VESA resolutions except the very standard ones, and to make things even worse, you can’t pick the refresh rate you want. I hand-edited the XF86Config file, I double checked the monitor’s sync info, and then added the 1920×1200 res to the confing file. Restarted X, and I was indeed at 1920×1200. But it wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz, even if both the monitor and this graphics card can do more than 90 Hz for that specific res! I tried everything, I created a modeline via XTiming, nothing! It wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz. I downloaded nVidia’s official drivers, and install them successfully (I had 3D and all now). I reloaded X, and again, even nVidia’s drivers X wouldn’t let the refresh to go up to 73 Hz. To make the long story short, I had to email Andy Ritger at nVidia and ask him to give me his opinion of what’s up here. Andy is an incredibly helpful engineer (thanks Andy!) and he sent me his GTF command line application that creates VESA modelines. Even by using this app’s modeline, X wouldn’t go above 73 Hz. By forcing the X server to go at 85 Hz, it would downgrade itself automatically at 1600×1200. By sending the XFree log to Andy, he figured out that for some (stupid most probably) reason, X thinks that when you are on 24bit, the pixel clock of the card can be only 300 Mhz, while it is 350. So, if I downgraded to 16bit color, I would get 90 Hz as requested. It took some more experiementation and my husband’s additional help to modify BY HAND the modeline that GTF created and be able to get to 1920x1200x24bit @ 90Hz. There is no possible way that even Joe Admin in a remote office in Alabama would have figured out how to fix that without asking directly XFree or nVidia employees. For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn’t cut it, and as a result, why RH8 doesn’t cut it when configuring high-end monitors or other not 100% standard resolutions. Especially when Red Hat hopes to get all these ex-SGI animators over to their platform after porting their custom multimedia applications. These are issues that XFree should fix, include the (proprierty) GTF mechanism (there is no other way) and update the modelines for more VESA resolutions for up to 2048×1536. This is 2002 we are living in, not 1995.
Red Hat comes with DRI 3D drivers for Voodoos, i810, Matrox, Radeon and SiS. There is no 3D support by default for nVidia cards though. I was a bit unhappy about this a few days ago, but now I am over it. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a business desktop and as such it does not really need 3D, right? Well, not exactly. Think the… poor ex-SGI animators trying to port and work with Blender and other GL-enabled animation packages on a PC with Red Hat, or game developers. Developers are employees too and this a business desktop, right?
![Red Hat Network, System Monitor, File-Roller, Gconf, Grip etc]()
I downloaded and installed successfully the nVidia 2D and 3D drivers. OpenGL works fine in 3D game, except that the GL screensavers have a problem to start in accelerated mode (yes, the memoryLimit is set to 0). After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate I wanted, X would crash. SSH’ing in the machine and either stopping, or huping or killing X (which would now consume 99% cpu), it would completely kill Red Hat 8 (sign that the kernel was crashing because of the nVidia driver) and I would need to reset the machine. Andy told me to set the AGP settings to 0, and I did so. In the beginning, it was looking more stable, but after a while it would still crash in the exact same way. So, I just reverted back to the generic 2D “nv” driver that comes with XFree. The problem is that this nv driver could not drive my monitor at 90Hz. I could see the windows’ edges to render as zig-zag, which is a sign that something is getting overclocked (while the gfx card _can_ do it with other OSes or drivers). So, here I am back on 73 Hz, writing this. I can tell you, I am not happy about the nVidia and nv drivers situation. The nVidia driver, which I compiled from the .tar.gz packages are NOT stable under Red Hat 8 on my machine even if when I disabled AGP support. I wish that Red Hat, who are now a big respected company (I wrote recently about their dominance in this year’s LinuxWorld expo), could partner with nVidia to include these 2D/3D _better_than_nv nVidia drivers by default, but most-most importantly to have these drivers fully tested and ready for download for the time when their OS is about to come out. As for the standard XFree “nv” nVidia driver is so basic and untested on high resolutions that if it was something real that I could touch, I would have already thrown it in the river, which runs outside my house. And please don’t tell me to dive in to the code and fix it, I am not a device driver programmer, neither I want to be one. I am a user when it comes to Linux and I expect things to work as nicely as they do on Windows XP and MacOSX (I do some C/C++ development only for OSX and BeOS these days).
There are three last points I would like to discuss in this review, because these are indeed real issues in the last 5 days that I am using Psyche.
First, the focus of windows does not always work and this is either a window manager or a toolkit issue. For example, I have Nautilus, gedit and the preferences/mouse panel open and I click between them (in the application body, not in the window manager) and while the clicked app gets the focus, it does not come into the front (I am using the default “click to focus” btw). Half of the time it would work and the clicked apps would come to the front, while the other 50% of the time1 it wouldn’t do it. This might be a toolkit bug, because if I click inside a tab view area, the window will always come on focus, while if I click outside of this specific area, but still inside its window, it wouldn’t. Weird.
Most important bug in my opinion is the GTK+ 2 combo box bug. Example: I get to the System Settings/Display panel and I open the graphics card panel which has a combo/drop down box on its right side, with the name of the driver loaded. About 60-70% of the time I hit the little arrow to open the combo box’s menu, the combo box would get a different value, EVEN if I did not click to any value! In my case, it selects automatically the “mga” option! This is a toolkit bug, and while it does not happen all the time, it happens MOST of the time and if a user won’t be very careful of what got selected without his consent, he/she would end up with a non working X server until he/she gets to hand-edit back the XF86Config file. Messy.
![KDE, KOffice, Konqueror, KontrolCenter, Gaim]()
The last gripe I have is the shortcut and navigability this distro does not have. For example, as I described above, by selecting the correct mouse driver for my mouse to give it the wheel ability, until I restart X, the mouse would move like crazy and I was not be able to click anything. I had to ALT+CNTRL+BACKSPACE my X Server (which was something that was not nessesary, X was fine), because none of the Windows Keys worked. By just clicking the windows key and the context menu key on my keyboard, nothing would happen, no menu would open. Yeah, yeah, I know. These are keys that the evil empire introduced. But they are freaking useful for God’s sake. USE them! They are here, present on each modern keyboard! And what about the complete lack of navigation via other keyboard shortcuts? How do I logout via a shortcut, or even better how do I open a Red Hat menu (in order to navigate through it and do stuff or log out) via a shortcut or via the Windows key? The Gnome Help didn’t help at all on this issue!
Conclusion
So, there are two questions remain:
How well this distribution would do as a business desktop? Let me answer this like this:
Psyche is better than most of its Linux competitors, but still way behind in both the desktop experience and feature-set from both WindowsXP and MacOSX.
How well this would serve as a server OS?
I am sure it would be good server OS. It is stable and fast. Some GUI utils are missing for configuring more servers, but for the admin who does not need GUI tools, Red Hat 8 would be better and faster than ever.
But as a (business or not) desktop, I am sorry, but I am still skeptical about it. It isn’t ready yet, it has a number of rough edges, and I really do not understand where the whole fuss was about the last two months about Red Hat 8 being a Windows killer on the desktop. It isn’t one. Not yet anyway.
Installation: 8/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 7.5/10
Features: 8/10
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.9 / 10
Thanks to Ed Boyce for going through the pain of proof reading this article.
Eugenia,
Thank you for all of your hard work & contribution to the PC community (especially having to slave over the SGI widescreen).
I am trying (again) to switch from Winxx to linux (be it RH8 or MD9). However, I understand that it takes Samba to access my files on Win? And you say it is missing in RH8? I will be looking forward to your review of MD9.
Already, I’ve been hacked twice in trying out MD9…Zone Alarm Pro has kept me free from intrusion under Winxx for the last couple of years.
Here is the short list of what it will take to convert Winxx users like me.
1. Trouble-free install and access to all of the goodies.
ex. I find no way to set or insure that the video refresh is 75Mhz.
2. My new 40x12x48 Sony CDRW is not recognized anywhere and I could not make a backup of a critical D/L.
3. You were right; the KDE/Gnome UI is cluttered with redundancies (at least in MD9).
4. KDE seemed very slow (and I have very fast hardware, so it is not H/W related).
5. Look at the “How To”. It is very disorganized.
What do “grep”, “cron”, “gawk”, “rmmod” and the like mean (I just picked them out of a hat;-)?
6. There is nothing difficult about “sys”, “fdisk”, “format”, “echo”, “ld” & “dir”. How can similar commands become familiar in Linux?
This could be a very long post and I do not wish to say anything negative about the Linux community. I wish there was an easier way to become familiar with Linux as I have been around since PC-DOS 1.0
Linux is harder than Spanish…at least Spanish has a great deal of familiar sounds and words. What the hell is awk, Seagullese?
This is not a rant but despair at being both trapped by M$and overwhelmed by Linux.
On the one hand you have the high price in terms of Micro$oft.
On the other hand the high investment in terms of Linux learning-curve time.
What to do?
Font support and the Xserver are the two main issues that i dont see being resolved. The more you point this out to people, especially linux enthusiasts, the more people call you a whiner. But, seriously speaking, as long as the UI doesnt improve and the clutter, duplication and organisation of commands and configuration files remains, Linux will only be a bored sysadmin’s past time. “Users” want usability, not the knowledge of what features the current kernel supports.
I need fonts for gods sake. and I need the stupid Xserver to open up and tell me that I paid money for my Athlon. Why wont these guys just get it at all?
🙂
–quoted by Aodhagan–
[i]If you don’t like that, run Windows, MacOS, or another BSD based system, but Linux is not for you. Linux was not created to provide you with software, make your life easy, allow you to be productive, or to save money. It was created as a collaborative community of developers scratching their own itches. If by happenstance your itch hasn’t been scratched yet, consider scratching it yourself, or go buy a product that does. That’s not old-school. That’s how it is. Linux is a system for developers and sys-admins, all the end users out there should just be thankful that such an rich system is even available for them to use barrring any non-compatible expectations.<i/>
–/quoted by Aodhagan–
Perhaps, you have missed the whole points? Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat and other desktop distros’ (not Gentoo, Debian, Slackware and etc) main goal is to make Linux easier for the people. Also, their most main goal is to get the desktop to be easier for the users. WITHOUT have to poke kernel, source codes and etc, which that’s why they created GUI of YaST, RedHat’s update/installtion and etc.
Eugenia is right, they still aren’t even ready and not easy to use as Windows/MacOS/BeOS, yet. NEVER tell people if they don’t like Linux, then use something else. Because, Mandrake, SuSE and others still haven’t meet the goal, yet.
Knownsense: Font support and the Xserver are the two main issues that i dont see being resolved.
Have you bothered to read Eugenia’s article (or install 8.0 yourself) before posting this troll? As Eugenia mentioned, and I can verify for myself, simply creating a “.fonts” directory in your home folder, then dumping all the True Type fonts you want in there, works great. You don’t even have to restart X. I guess that’s not easy enough for you, eh? Well, if you’d like to send me a check, I’ll be happy to code a gui for you.
Now, as far as your X complaints, would you care to elaborate, or shall we just assume that was part of your troll as well?
-fp
I am for getting some civility going again here. I was very impressed over in the thread about OSNew’s bandwidth needs by people’s willingness to be of help. That is what we need here in these discussions.
If you come here all the time, you know how Eugenia does her reviews. And there is no reason for these blow ups to result from them. When she reviews something, she will go into detail about its shortcomings – that is natural because it is always the problem areas that get talked about because it’s usually something that needs to be fixed.
She writes strong reviews with strong opinions. She wants people to respond to that – she wouldn’t write a review or article in the first place if she didn’t want that. Yet, there are a group of people who look at her strong statements as being attacks against their favorite OS or favorite version of Linux, etc. And then it ends up that people start posting against Eugenia herself instead of her comments. And then the trash talk starts about her English, etc. It is sad to see this. Some of the people who come here accuse her of everything – she has been accused of favoring every OS over others, which is, of course, impossible. The Mac people think she favors Windows, the Windows people think she favors Linux, Linux people of different stripes think she favors one distro over others – it’s ridiculous.
When Eugenia or anyone writes a review or article, there is no need to then do a review of the review. Just take it as a starting point for discussion. That’s the real purpose, in the end. Also, people are afraid to admit they don’t understand something because they will be called morons or idiots. How is that helpful to this forum? So many want to come off as Mr. Big and Mr. Know-It-All rather than ask questions and admit they don’t know everything. I have said this before, but those of you who do this – you don’t understand, you undermine your own knowledge and skill by the way you conduct yourselves. You come off as being narrow-minded and rigid when you could be really contributing to discussion. You are too intelligent to be acting this way. I’m sure you don’t act this way in your person-to-person dealings in 3D life each day – why do it here?
it’s quite sad to read all the give and take regarding Red Hat’s latest offering… most of the tech pundits reviewing Linux products really don’t understand (and this points to the problem of the IS/IT industry’s inability to grasp the mechanics of open source) that while Red Hat has an obligation as a commercial entity to produce a palatable product for its markets (which is not the Windows user or naive computer consumer), many Linux users really don’t care one whit about whether Mandrake is better than Red Hat, or that SuSE is better than Mandrake, and so on… many Linux users choose to use Linux because they realize what a wonderful, empowering gift it is: an operating system that works well, uses GNU software, supports the X Window System, and is well supported (to the extent that hardware manufacturers choose to open up specs)… this new Red Hat release is designed to form a base structure for Red Hat’s more advanced offerings… the real customer is the SOHO, small business, corporate, enterprise and Fortune 500 entity…
the somewhat acrimonious debate over GNOME, KDE, Red Hat’s supposed ‘treatment’ of KDE is wasted bandwidth, IMHO, as many Red Hat installs aren’t for the desktop (indeed, installing X and any related software on a production server could be considered an ill-advised security risk, and even the default XFree86 X startup included with ANY current major distro allows UDP packets unless specifically told not to)…
that said, if you’re contemplating using Red Hat Linux:
– don’t buy equipment from manufacturers that don’t support open specs…
– don’t want to use GNOME? use switchdesk or [shudder], edit your .xinitrc
– don’t like the default menus? edit them
– don’t like Red Hat’s KDE? rpm -e the packages, then download and build KDE from source
– looking for multimedia clients? download and install them..
– don’t blame Red Hat for not being held hostage to patent lawyers – use Ogg, which is free and offers better performance anyway – and if you’re playing DVDs using Linux, you’re breaking the law (at least in the U.S.), but this isn’t Red Hat’s problem – it’s yours: write your governmental representative and vote!
– expecting Red Hat to be responsible for XFree86 and its performance with any of the myriad combinations of monitors and graphics cards shows ignorance of the mechanics of open source – Red Hat (and SuSE) has supported development of many graphics drivers for X, but The XFree86 Project, Inc. has overall responsibility for free X – try xig.com’s version of X if you want 3D performance…
– considering my previous rants above – if you’re contemplating using Red Hat Linux:
– do expect to save loads of money if you’re a consumer, SOHO, business, academic or other user
– don’t expect hand-holding
– do be pleasantly surprised by how well everything works
– do be pleasantly surprised when you find out that you don’t have to spend money on support, bug fixes or security updates
– don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – you’re getting Red Hat Linux for free – if you want a nice box and printed manuals, go ahead and support Red Hat…
Exactly! Thank you Jay!
Euginia, I think, has either been misled or has totally missed the point. Redhat is not windows. Nor is it Mac OS. It is Redhat and should be evaluated as such. Every major Linux distro is far more feature-rich than either one of the two “main-stream” OS’s she has mentioned in the conclusion of her article, taking Windows as an example, the last release I loaded did not include Flash or Realplayer, they had to be downloaded, just as I had to do for RH 8. Further, I am wondering where this magical windows release is that includes an Office suite, a development environment, a photo editing suite, a C/C++ compiler and stability. Having worked with windows from 3.1 to 2000, I never came across this version. I did, however see the price tags on MS office, Visual Studio and Photo Shop. If we are going to compare the features of OS’s, then lets be not be bias.
If you are finding the menus too cluttered or confusing, perhaps you loaded too many programs…but I guess you have us on that point, because loading too many programs is never a problem under windows, is it? Of course there is nothing but a raw, $200+ OS to load, but that is not the point.
Drivers, I am not going to rage about MS’s business practices of the past, but I will point out that device drivers come from the hardware Manufacturers not from any OS Manufacturer, and getting current drivers is a problem with the Linux platform, however having upgraded or downgraded many MS-based systems I have spent my share of time downloading this driver and that driver, so I fail to see where the differences are.
The facts as I see them are as such, dollar for dollar, any linux distro is a far greater value that either of the OS’s mentioned in your article, Windows cannot match Linux when it comes to stability, scope of use (try setting up a server with the same disk you loaded on a notebook/workstation in the MS world) or system scalability, Just as Mac OS cannot touch Linux on hardware support.
Red Hat 8.0 is a wonderful product, with it’s ease of install, multiple uses, and speed, I feel it far surpasses any offering from MS or Apple, and I am sure you will get the drivers to run your display the way you want it after a week or two, just as you would if this was a new MS release, remember the driver seach when win 2k was released? Red Hat 8.0, in my particular case recognized all my hardware, from the external CD-RWs to the Digital Camera with no additional driver loads, which is yet another exapmle of the surperiority of this product, can you connect a burner without an additional disk under MS? No. Can you connect a Digital Camera without an additional disk? No. Did Red Hat 8.0 give you a workable display out of the box? Yes. Did Red Hat 8.0 overwhelm you with programs? Yes, but again I fail to see where that falls into a negative catagory.
Perhaps I am missing the point, but with the ease of install and feature-richness of Red Hat 8.0, I beleive it is now MS who has to catch-up to keep the desktop.
euginia: Here is a work around for Athlon + Nvidia woes just in case someone else hasn’t posted it.
you need to pass this line to the kernal at startup (I think you will need to configure your boot loader to do this)
the line is
mem=nopentium
This reportedly makes the system a lot more stable at the cost of performance of some applications.
I am heartened to hear that some kind of fix is in 2.4.19…
Anyway here is the best description of the problem I have found to date.
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20020123-amd-news.html
Hey,
Can they make it so that commonly compressed file formats (.ZIP, .GZ, .TAR, etc.) open up by default in a GUI decompression utility (take yer pick)? Seems like a basic concept to me.
It just seems silly that this isn’t done by default in most distros. If I wanted to use cmd line for everything, I’d boot in text mode!
On my install of Debian, I installed KDE via apt-get and it came with Archiver, which does just that.
Eugenia:
How does RH8 compare with SuSE 8.1 or United Linux Beta 1.
and with mandrake 9, how about coparing the 4 of them. I found your comments really helpfull.
Wow…… 211 comments just on one article? Well, I think no one could refused it if i said this is one of the most interesting article around the net, and also this site is well IMHO, is one of the most active site. :> Lots of different opinions actually is good, look what we get in Linux here…. We got so many choice of distributions, we got the freedom to choose it, we got the freedom to modify it. :> And better of all it is free… What else could be better?? :>
does anyone find the screenshost familiar? Dont they kinda look like QNX Photon?
>How does RH8 compare with SuSE 8.1 or United Linux Beta 1 and with mandrake 9
I just instralled SuSE 8.1 today. Await a review soon. I haven’t received the Mandrake CDs yet. I won’t be reviewing UnitedLinux, first because it is a purely server OS, and second, it is based on SuSE anyway.
>this is one of the most interesting article around the net,
thanks.
>Dont they kinda look like QNX Photon?
Not really.
hell even xp and x(10) are bundled with simple video editing programs.
Mandrake used to come with Broadcast2000 hopefully version 9 will have Cinellera. (:
I really want to download red-hat but I cannot find a link anywhere 🙁
Does anyone know.
I have see a link on distrowatch.com but there is ALLWAYS to many user connected ;-(
Hope someone can help!
Thanks!
http://freshrpms.net/mirrors/psyche.html
Most of them are swamped though.
Thanks for your replay, Ott
I’ve always been partial to the RH distro. I’m unfortunately still running WindowsXP, spent too much on software to give it up entirely, but I’m still looking for the reason to erase XP on two of three computers. Of course, I have Linux (RH 7.2, RH7.3 and MDK 8.0) on the three running boxes in my home.
From your intuitive and seemingly unbiased article, it looks like I’ll put off buying RH8.x until it’s more fully evolved. Luckily, as quickly as Linux is evolving, I truly believe they will surpass MS soon in userability and advent technology. I really wished I could get better involved in the Open Source world, but my code-writing is still in its infancy.
Along the lines of video drivers, does anyone know what I can use or where I can go for ATI’s Radeon 9700 PRO? How long does it generally take for the open source world to develop drivers for a new card?
Matthew Gardiner has stated in this forum: “I would go so far so say that there should be a license so that only those who have a bloody clue can use a computer.” Well, this sound very dictatorial and autocratic. Shame on him! He should make company to people like Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic or other crappy dictator. This kind of thought is the root of evils like the one the world experienced coming from the nazis. It sounds like excluding a mass of people and confine then in a concentration camp just because they are not as “bright” as him… he should think over, simply because the world deserves to be a better place to live.
I upgraded from Red Hat 7.3 to 8.0 at work yesterday, and overall I like it.
I prefer the default KDE theme to Bluecurve, and it turned out to be easy to change in the KDE Control Centre.
My fonts first looked ugly, but it turned out that I just had to enable anti-aliasing (this was disabled by default in previous versions of KDE and therefore also in my existing KDE configuration).
I prefer KDE and like Konqueror, and what annoys me is that Red Hat seems to have problems making Konqueror DISPLAY the last three letters of the Danish alphabet correcly. This was also the case in Red Hat 7.3 and at least one earlier version of Red Hat. I hoped that Red Hat 8.0 would solve this problem, but it has just gotten worse. Have a look at http://www.berlingske.dk with Konqueror to see the problem.
Berlingske.dk is a Danish newspaper site – arbitrarily chosen here. You will probably not understand the Danish text unless you are Scandinavian, but you will probably see the problem anyway: The Danish letters æ (looks like an a and an e glued together), ø (an o with a forward slash through it) and å (an a with a ring over it) are displayed as boxes – as are full stops, apostrophes and the like at the Web page you are reading right now.
Note that I wrote “DISPLAY … correctly” above. I am perfectly well able to type Danish characters into form fields at Danish web sites and get them submitted correctly to the web server, although they are also displayed wrongly in the form fields.
The problem with displaying Danish characters persists even if I rename my $HOME/.kde directory to something else and let the new KDE generate a new, fresh configuration.
FreeBSD 4.6.2 ships with binaries for KDE 3.0.0 – the same KDE version as Red Hat 7.3 ships with. The FreeBSD KDE 3.0.0 displays the Danish characters correctly.
So it seems to me that Red Hat has some work to do here.
Although I like Red Hat 8.0 overall, this is the kind of problem which annoys me enough to make me consider using another distribution – especially because 8.0 is the third version of Red Hat I have experienced this problem with.
Open the file ‘/etc/sysconfig/i18n’. If you find ‘xx_XX.utf8’ there, you may try and replace ‘utf8’ with ‘iso8859-1’. That did the trick for me.
I tried Red Hat 8 and I was happy about one thing it was the first time I ever got any of the Red Hat releases to install so that was a nice first time for me. Even though Mandrake always works. I did like the fonts in the Red Hat 8. They were nice and clear very easy to read. A first time for any Linux distro I have tried so far. As per the apps speeds for loading and running everything did seem a bit slower then on Mandrake or Debian. One annoying bug I noted on Red Hat 8 was that sometimes the commands would work and sometimes they wouldnt. As well there was some bug in Kmail that when you would reply to a message it would not quote the previous text no matter what I tried. I think they hit the nail on the head with the name. ( Psyche ) sorta like someone saying hehehe made you look. I happily switched back to Mandrake 9. Cant beat a good thing
I have been a Redhat user since version 5.1, slowly over the course of time I have come to learn a lot about how to work with Linux, but certainly not nearly enough. It has, until recently been the easiest to install and provided excellent support for the desktop. Up until RH 7.2 Gnome 1.x and KDE up to 2.x were updated as soon as the updates were made available. Then Gnome 2 and KDE 3 rolled off the shelf and it would seem that real desktop support has ceased. Maybe the effort to streamline the desktop in version 8 was meant to save their developers work, but it has definetly turned me off. The problems with KDE (my favorite Xwindows manager) in 7.3 have not been fixed in 8.
Installation went off like a dream as usual with Redhat. All my hardware was detected fine. Afterward the recompilation of my Nvidia Drivers went off without a hitch. Got my connection up and running to the internet without having to change everything. But after checking if sendmail would send my mail it didn’t. Good thing I backed up my etc directory. Copied over the old configuration restarted sendmail and it worked, along with IMAP, fetchmail and DNS.
Rebooted to init 5 and up came GDM even though the desktop file in /etc/syconfig says my Desktop should be KDE. Not such a terrible thing. But then when I went to KDE I was horrified to see that a whole lot of stuff was missing. Kpackage, ark, etc. Tried to compile kdeadmin from the tarball, but the current Redhat RPM packages seem to be incompatible with kpackage 3.0.3. Netscape plugins still don’t work. Filemanger – superuser mode does not work. On the Gnome side, no gnorpm and their are probably a host of other apps not their as well. The package manager that they provide doesn’t give any information about the contents of a package at all.
And the KDE apps that I already compiled with 7.3 failed to work, even though according to KDE the libraries for KDE 3.0.x are supposed to be binary compatible. Why didn’t they work, because Redhat compiled the libraries so that they would include the version of the compiler that they were compiled with. Just like they did with 7.3 So of course, the previously compiled apps could not locate the libraries that they were previously compiled with.
KDE and Gnome are not the same XWindows manager. And no one should try to make them the same. While they tried to make the desktop fit everybody, they have broken both.
I will be trying other distributions again. And if there things do not work with them … well. People this does not bode well for Linux at all. United Linux will only provide sources for download. The other distros are off doing their own things. Distro manufacturers and Xwindows managers can’t seem to get past their own adgendas. Linux as a real working environment seems to fragmenting little by little. And I’m sure that the only people that will be laughing are the people at MS.
I made a fresh install of RedHat 8.0 and here’s what i found:
My setup here is a Matrox G400 32Mb dualhead, with two 21″ monitors. Furthermore to get the +xinerama option running i installed the beta driver mgadrivers-2.0.tgz from matrox.com on top of XFree86 4.2.0.
I created 2 users , stock (running KDE) and foobar (running GNOME). I attached two desktop shots from both freshly initialized desktops. As you can see with the KDE desktop the icon subtitles are shifted to the screen on the right.With the GNOME desktop nothing is wrong.
The screenshots are here :
http://crashrecovery.org/xinerama-kde-rh80.jpg
http://crashrecovery.org/xinerama-gnome-rh80.jpg
Now i really would like to run RedHat 8.0, but if my xinerama test fails at home, how am i possibly going to buy the new Redhat 8.0 box?
Any clues as how KDE fails and GNOME succesfully runs +xinerama?
Robert
So far with Mandrake 9.0 I have flash 5 working, I can rip music files to wave than turn them into mp3’s, but I perfer .ogg which is easy out of the box. I can go on gnutella and download anything. I can convert my .png’s to .jpg’s. I can burn iso images with cdrecord. Oh and I can watch &&& DVD movies. I love Gnome 2.0, and it is better on Mandrake. The theme is way different.
I can do more on this PC than any Microsoft OS and it’s also more fun. I used to have Win2k but I had to erase it. I’m never going back to Microsoft.
Visit some Linux based message boards if you want to find out how to set up your system. Some of the stuff doesn’t come out of the box and it has to do with evil Monopolies. I’m glad that I get to be a hero in life. This gives me purpose. Thanks Microsoft.
The first step to gain the corporate desktop (laptop that would be) would be found in supporting the vast quantity of Dell Inspiron and Latitude Laptops that use these closed source chips…
..until then, we’ll need to revert back to 7.3?
“my mom (or my boss) could never figure this out”
seattle, washington.
October 4, 2002
I think there is a huge point wrong in RedHat 8.0 I didn’t saw commented:
When you upgrade your system it warns you there are packets installed that aren’t RedHat’s and can make the installation unstable. But it doesn’t present you a list of them. It would be nice to have a list of them and a possibility to uninstall them during installation:
I have the GTK+ and Ximian Evolution and after installation I cannot enter into the gnome look&feel. I’ll have to remove the previous packets and install it over again, but if installation would identify and tell me what packet’s were suspicious, it would have been much more strait forward.
On the other side I see you blame RedHat for not including MP3 and NVIDIA support. People that invented MP3 made enough money for their invent (if that was it) to continue charging for something they don’t improve anymore. I think it is very Linux-coherent that RedHat don’t pay for it anymore. Blame MP3 owners, not RedHat.
Same with NVidia. The problem with NVidia is that this people wanna play the game with different rules from the others. They wanna be on the Open Source bussiness without releasing their code. It’s normal and correct RedHat don’t include their drivers. It is Nvidia’s fault, not RedHat’s. Don’t blame RedHat for being coherent.
I’ve read the review and tried out the 8.0. I see big improvements to the installation, menus and overall usability. RH 7-7.3 could’ve been this good but whatever… I continue to enjoy using the OS. Despite people wanting the OS to be more mainstream, just look back to 6.X and tell me the OS has not improved…
My function keys on an HP Omnibook 4500 work correctly!
That drove me nuts in Windows 2K and RH 7.3 that whenever I tried to use them they would stick and make the mouse and other keys go nuts.
RH 8.0 worth it just because so many little things work out of the box, no questions asked.
Only caveat is that sndconfig WAS NOT INCLUDED by default. Made configurig my NeoMagic 256 sound card (which it is, but the driver doesn’t work) a pain in the rear, because their sound tool doesn’t give you the choice to select an alternate driver.
For those of you trying to get em to work, use the SB16 driver.
I first started using Linux with Redh Hat 5.2, (I think, it was a while ago).
And I’ve been impressed with each new release of Red Hat. Each new version feels snappier to use, looks better, easier to use, and so and so.
Red Hat 8.0 has some really nice features, and I see where they’re going with it. But at the some time, I’m having more troubles with it, than any other version.
(Maybe I’m not looking hard enough), when I installed VMware workstation 3.1 on Red Hat 8.0, from RPNs, the Package manager doesn’t seem to have picked up on this, and all I see is the standard RPMs that were installed at installtion time. (I’ve installed a few other things to, but I can’t see them in the Package manager.
I’ve been using Star Office since 5.1, and now when I install it, it isn’t added to the menu systems, whether it be gnome or KDE. I had to add them in manully.
And this buisness with not playing MP3z is annoying.
At first I thought something was wrong with the system, but about 5 minutes I sussed out what the problem was.
And all my MPG/MPEG files will not play either.
I’m finding this release quite frustrating, and I’ve used more time and effort setting it up how I want it, than any other previous version of Red Hat.
Though, saying that, the best part about it is the anti aliasing. I can finally see fonts clearly on while running at 1600 x 1200.
For that reason alone I’m going to stick with it, but if quality of what on my screen was the same as 7.3, I’d have no hesitation, and wipe this pain in the A off my PC and put 7.3 back on.
Wow!
There is some very interesting software packaged for Redhat 8.0 here:
http://neomundi.com.br/usuarios/mab/redhat8.html
Nice find Marcos! Thanks for sharing…
Great job Redhat team I use your linux for the day to day work and play. I specially love the new interface and ease of use. I think we have a gem here that I think will easily topple windows. I had no issues with Nvidia drivers. I use Redhat 7.3 at home to play warcraftIII and wow what a difference the 8.0 looks. Keep on the good work !!!!
>>- don’t like the default menus? edit them
You can’t edit them (at least for Gnome). There is no menu editor in RH8. Anyone else notice that?
Until someone comes up with an operating system their mother can install without any help, any hope of significant inroads into the Windows market is love’s labor lost. Why developers are so beligerently stupid about ease of use issues is beyond me.
Thanks for such a great article! I have been searching for a review for the two new linux versions. Actually, I had my credit card out in front of me and going to Redhat.com to purchase 8.0 I am new to linux and am now not convinced to purchase the program yet. I was starting to get hyped about the “windows killer”. I want to try linux but do not want all these little headaches. I will definately purchase a version when one gets a good, honest review as an OS for the general public. I am looking forward to your Mandrake 9.0 review; please email to me when you write it.
Thanks!
I liked this review as it shows the view of the user rather than the tech noob.
If you want to look for a nice distribution for desktop rahter look for PEANUT 9.3R2. It comes with mplayer,xmms,mp3,ogg,etc ,KDE3,enlightenment.,Koffice, netscape, GAIM etc etc
And the iso is only 220MB, not 3 CDs.Also VERY good support for RPMS and a nice help forum that actually answers fast for problems.
The only bad thing I found was that you still have to make your partitions at the beginning of the install, but I don’t see why one should always have to get so many CDs to have a nice desktop.
Eugenia: all the pain you had with the X issue = nVidia = crap. those things happen when you have crap instead of quality hardware ie: ATI,3Dfx,etc
—
Crap can work, given anough thrust pigs will fly, but it’s not necessary a good idea.
Alexander Biro on Linux-kernel