When you first heard about Linux, it was probably Red Hat Linux, and for good reason. Red Hat entered the market in 1994 and has become the largest and most recognized company dedicated to open source software. Red Hat now has more than 500 employees and 15 locations worldwide, with headquarters in Durham, North Carolina. The review is at ExtremeTech.
I think Red Hat 8.0 is probably the best Linux distribution released yet. Last week end I installed it on my grand mothers computer, and it works great, except for the modem. IT has one of those disgusting winmodems, and I can’t get the Cnexant drivers to work.
i don’t understand why the non-redhat-linux-users dump on the company. it’s a linux success story and they are commited to competing with winblowz. maybe linux users enjoy the underdog status a little to much
Wow finally someone who thinks like me.
I hate.. yes that is a storng word but i really do hate it when people consider Red Hat the next Microsoft. That comparison is about as stupid as comparing American culture to the Arab culture. Red Hat has done nothing but try to improve the name of Linux and offer a rock solid distribution while keeping that Linux leading edge. But since they have the majority in Linux distributions some how they have to be evil, even though they’ve been competing on A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD ALL A LONG!!!
Explain that too me.
at least they’re free. how can anyone compare a maker of free software i’ll never know….
i like red hat 8. i like Lycoris better, but that’s becasue of familiarity. gnome 2 is kinda nice, although i still prefer kde.
i wouldn’t go as far as calling it the “best” distro, with no other qualifiers though. the lack of FULL multimedia support out of the box hinders it IMNSHO. (although it is easy enough to fix…but maybe not for a newbie)
You don’t like to hear people dump on redhat, but you yourself made fun of their competition ‘winblowz’. Everyone has an opinion- maybe not as contridictive as your post- but maybe you should wait for a post that has an anti-redhat stance before pushing that ill-fated “Submit comment” button?
Hey stupid, did I ever mention anything about Microsoft being big and bad and evil.. well that’s easy no. Obviously you didn’t read my response before you stupidly responded. People consider Red Hat to be as big and bad as they consider Microsoft to be. I don’t understand why they do.
Never really stated my opinion on Microsoft, start something somewhere else.
>> i really do hate it when people consider Red
>> Hat the next Microsoft. That comparison is
>> about as stupid as comparing American culture
>> to the Arab culture.
Naah … I would say both cultures have more in common: Both are immensely pompous, both bother on the fanatic, and and both tend to swing to extememes.
Was slackware, and with it I did learn a lot. With slackware you have to do all by yourself, no package manager so you *have* to learn.
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
but that does make sense does it not?
Because there are linux zealots and windows zealots, they both think they know what’s best and they are constantly at conflict with their beliefs.
Well I would love to try RH 8.0. I have the discs, I started to install it but it failed to probe my monitor and the screen went blank in the middle of the install. Even after I eneterd the monitor specs manually in the text install mode it still would not work. Until they figure out how to make sure that things like a generic 15 in monitor can be recognized I’ll just have to pass.
I’ve been a fan of RedHat since I first got my hands on a copy of 6.1. I’ve tried various other distros – Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Corel – but I always come back to RedHat. I just feel that it strikes a nice balance between ease of use and power. Release 8 is excellent, in my opinion. It went on to my PC easily. I didn’t bother choosing the packages I wanted; I just selected Personal Desktop and found that the default packages were sensible and that I wasn’t inundated with a ton of applications that I may never use, if I ever even realise they exist. Even the installation process struck a nice balance between power and ease of use.
That’s not to say there aren’t things that couldn’t do with being looked at by RedHat. For example, I installed from FTP, rather than CD. Yet, when I go to the ‘Packages’ app and try to install a new package, I’m asked to insert a CD! There are plenty of other things, most of which have been touched on in other places, including this site.
I’m clueless as to how the Extremetech Linux Distro ‘reviews’ qualify as anything other than a drawn-out description of the various installation front-ends. A three paragraph postscript at the end of the each ‘review’ points out, ‘well, once installed, it looks much prettier than the last version’.
This still seems quite common among many of the more mainstream tech media, and seems to be indicative of most of those reviewers don’t actually do anything besides install Linux, and pass a few judgements on the latest desktop environment’s appearance, before reformatting to move on to the next review.
“Hey stupid, did I ever mention anything about Microsoft being big and bad and evil.. well that’s easy no. Never really stated my opinion on Microsoft, start something somewhere else.”
No, but you did take the time to let us know what you thought of ‘winblowz.’ And even though you didn’t come right out and say it, if I would have said ‘Lin-sucks’, that says quite enough by itself.
And for the love of God, I wish people would lay off the ‘M$’ shit .. it really gets old. Even if I was hardcore anti-MS, I’d still get tired of seeing it.
“Hey stupid, did I ever mention anything about Microsoft being big and bad and evil.. well that’s easy no. Never really stated my opinion on Microsoft, start something somewhere else.”
No, but you did take the time to let us know what you thought of ‘winblowz.’ And even though you didn’t come right out and say it, if I would have said ‘Lin-sucks’, that says quite enough by itself.
And for the love of God, I wish people would lay off the ‘M$’ shit .. it really gets old. Even if I was hardcore anti-MS, I’d still get tired of seeing it. It’s just like the whole ‘George Dublya thing’ … it was cute for about an hour, but enough is enough.
Sorry for the duplicate posts I don’t know what is up with this site .. sometimes posts show up immediately, and sometimes it takes 5 minutes or more.
it had the best installer I had seen (less and easy IS more)
it has the best looking widgets in the bluecurve theme around,
BUT
there is no menu editor for Gnome or KDE and from what I read it is becasue the Redhat is trying to make both DEs be exactly the same and since the Gnome Menu editor is not done due to a new more standard system of organization, Redhat basicly excludes KDE from being editable.
also….
I know this is just a driver problem, but the VT86xxx_audio driver that my VIA sound chip uses will not play sound properly, it just loops a tone when ever an event calls a sound file to play and the loop does not end.
then…..
I have no Idea why this happened, but out of the blue, Gnome and KDE freeze up the mouse action..it starts with the gnome/K pannel, then it moves to the desktop and forces a hard boot as it stops accepting Keyboard and Mouse comands.
Redhat has made tons of improvements, however, this is an x.0 and it is still very apparent.
This “reviewer” need to do some fact-checking before publishing something. Red Hat’s HQ is no longer in Durham. It’s in Raleigh (where I live). They moved about a year ago.
Hmm, VIA boards, *shudder* *shudder*, they are shocking, under any platform. If I was you, grab a board with a N-Force or SIS shipset. You shouldn’t experiece any more problems.
VIA unfortunately has a bad reputation for producing buggy/crappy chipsets. The only reason why they are bought is because the “cheaper is better” croud would sooner pay $2 for a board and have crappy stability than splash out and get a good quality one.
on the ‘winblowz’ and ‘M$’ thingie. It really gets old (and not to mention, childish) after a while … wish we could put a stop to that.
Sorry man, but Slackware has an excellent package manager called pkgtool.
On a constructive and related note, Red Hat 8 is a wonderful, fast, stable, and easy desktop operating system to install, use, and configure. The only problem with it might be if you don’t like have a crippled KDE (Or so I hear, I’ve never gotten the guts to install KDE to see if it’s true). Oh well.
Hmm, VIA boards, *shudder* *shudder*, they are shocking, under any platform. If I was you, grab a board with a N-Force or SIS shipset. You shouldn’t experiece any more problems.
Funny, I heard more problems (especially with Linux) on nForce than any VIA chipset. Both my desktops, one PIII and the other a Duron, uses a VIA chipset. Sure, one blew up in a thunder storm (what chipset doesn’t allow a mobo to blow up?), it has been rock solid for years. Not a crash in its name.
Just…. stay away from MSI.
I thought that they had disk druid? or fdisk
every time that I’ve gone through red hat install there has been some type of partitioning segment.
I think what they mean is there is no graphical tool in the install for resizing existing FAT partitions (there’s one in Mandrake right? i wouldn’t knw being a RH user Obviously they don’t like the usability of fips in the dosutils directory on the CD, awh i remember my 1st Linux install was fun
“The only problem with it might be if you don’t like have a crippled KDE”
Please stop spreading the lies that have been told by a few worthless people in the KDE community. RedHat’s KDE is not crippled.
Oh jesus christ! not another Redhat 8 review!
Give it a rest guys!
…except one annoying bug, the renaming of *.desktop files used for the startup. I remember reading it on mailing lists at kde.org dating back to Null’s release. I wonder why nobody thought of a bug report….
I don’t know what’s so bad about “M$”. I would agree about Winblows, etc, that looks kinda cheap and childish, but M$ seems to fit quite nicely. $ is basically just an “S” and considering that MS is probably the richest company in the world (well, not “probably”) and from the US, using the dollar sign seems to quite appropriate too. And it’s not offending in any way. Though personally I still prefer to write “MS”.
Please don’t assume everyone reading OSNews is a neophyte. I learned about Linux from Matt Walsh via USENET. The kernel was <0.8. Slackware and Yggdrasil were barely started. We configured XFree modelines BY HAND.
“…except one annoying bug, the renaming of *.desktop files used for the startup. I remember reading it on mailing lists at kde.org dating back to Null’s release. I wonder why nobody thought of a bug report….”
Which is exactly that, a bug that RedHat said will be fixed. 😉
Notice that RH also doesnt give you any way to play an mpeg out of the box either, (not just mp3s)
Huh? It’s an option on the CD, go to package management and select a video player.
Yeah, yeah, I know. The problem is that with everybody (okay, almost everybody) mentioning this at kde’s various mailing lists – not one soul even thought of filling a bug report?
Ok checked out packages, NO video player listed to install, Noatun fails to do a damn thing. This aint good. No xanim, aKtion etc etc…..sad.