“Reviewers like to evaulate Linux distros for the mythical Uncle Ralph and Aunt Faye, the prototypical clueless technophobes. Can Aunty and Uncle, who still rub sticks together to make fire, install and run Linux? Let’s get real. Computers are complex machines for performing complex tasks. There is always a learning curve. No one sits down to any PC–not Mac, not Windows, none of them–starting from zero knowledge, and is instantly productive.” The review is at LinuxPlanet. Another one at InfoWorld.
Red Hat 8.0: Past the Hype and Under the Hood
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
get PHP and MySQL and apache to work with Redhat 8.0.
I get a ‘connection failure’ on accessing the MySQL database!!!
I have created the user and password and database, what am I doing wrong. I can’t even connect to the database using root and root password
Fix that RedHat – or maybe one of you know how
Although very short, I found the review at infoWorld to be very accurate, at least to my own experience. Namely, that, with Red Hat 8, there is no longer any “almost” there. The Linux corporate desktop is here – now.
The LinuxPlanet review – it says, like all Linuxes, (RH 8) is “light years” ahead of Windows and Mac OS as far as features and stability are concerned. I thought the term “light years” was a little over the top 🙂
I didn’t have any problems with PHP or MySQL out of the box. There were some new defaults that Apache has set that I had to change but other than that it just worked fine.
Maybe you didn’t set up your db database record properly?
are obviously not a measure for time but distance – when will people grasp this..?!
Well It should have dawned on you that the obvious meaning is Redhat is lightyears ahead of the other as in distance, nothing can touch it, there all light years behind it. He wasn’t speaking about time:) Think beofre you comment:p
Will
reread your comment, i’d have to say i stuck my foot in it, but what exactly is your point anyway, it was a vaild use of the term.
Will
If you can add users then the MySQL database is working (though maybe not running when you use it via PHP). If you get a connection failure error message then PHP is working. So, it’s likely you’ve got a problem in your connection that isn’t the fault of either software. Try phpbuilder.com’s forums, this seems a tad off topic.
The “unicode problems” appear to be a word-wrap in AbiWord. Unless AbiWord is insane, how could word-wrapping be a unicode issue?
“light years” ahead of Windows and Mac OS as far as features and stability are concerned.”
Eh, that is too much of a blanket statement to be true all of the time. I built a Win2k box for a friend of mine over a year ago and it’s still running without a hitch. Why? Because I know how to set up Windows properly
On the other hand, someone could set up a Linux box to run even longer than that, but I can’t set one up for shit. Soon after setting up a modern distro, I can crash it in a matter of minutes. It’s all in the execution.
As far as features go, Linux is great at some things, terrible at others. Windows is the same way
“The last pieces needed to complete the picture are more full-featured, quality productivity apps. I have a long wish list: accounting, desktop publishing, inventory, games, home and garden design, legal, video editing, family tree, sales and contact management… That’s what is going to get Linux onto desktops, not pretty colors. And that perennial favorite, more and better hardware drivers. I do wish manufacturers were not so timid about entering the Linux market.”
Well, he/she is on the right track with this .. you’re also going to need to make sure that if it works in Windows, it better work in Linux, and I’m talking about mostly hardware here. None of this recompiling the kernel or compiling a driver from source crap either .. if it doesn’t work out of the box, it’s worthless. And as for software, if it doesn’t work in Linux, there better be an alternative, and a good one too.
Good review
I have found RH8 to be very good. They finally seem to have got the fonts readable. I dont know how many hours ive spent stuffing around in Linux trying to get decent fonts.
Mozilla is a great browser and im glad to see Netscape removed from the distro.
I agree with the comment about third party drivers. This is THE major issue for Linux on the desktop. It needs broad third party support for hardware drivers. It also needs a standard,easy way to install those drivers. The average user and even the system admins shouldnt be expected to compile kernels or kernel modules when they want to install a new device. It MUST be as easy as in Windows (yes there are sometimes problems installing hardware with Windows but generally it just works).
For a supposedly modular kernel theres still a lot of kernel compiling going on when installing hardware.
Anyway i think RedHat should keep up the good work. You cant please everyone of course but with RedHat 8 they have brought Linux many steps foreward in my opinion
you guys actually make honest reviews.
These people are biased, all tehy do is praise instead of raising the real issues. For example easy netowrking with sambe like in Xandros and something like InstallShield for Linux.
“Like all Linuxes, it is light-years ahead of Windows and Mac in features and stability.”
Yeah right! I run Linux and I lvoe it, but it is nowhere near light-years ahead of OS X Jaguar or XP Pro, I’ve tried and in fact it’s quite the oppposite. I still preffer Linux, but a normal desktop user still likes ahving all of their hardware and peripherals liek cameras recognized on the spot and both of these platforms have more mature software. XP is also now jsut as stable as Linux.
Well stability is dependant on a lot of things. If you setup your desktop manager incorrectly it’s going to crash a lot. One of the biggest things that cause KDE to crash is themes that are broken. (Atleast in my experience) but the major reason that Linux is more stable than windows is because it handles memory better and it crashes gracefully. I had a computer that was constantly giving me trouble, then I installed Linux along side of Windows and I had no problems in Linux but was having problems in windows still. Well I found out that my CD-Rom was broken and so when ever I typed in google.com in IE in windows it would just hang for a long time, because in Windows if you don’t specify www or http before your .com it searches your hardware first for some reason. Also if I opened up my “My Computer” area it would hang.. this was due to it trying to read my CD Rom but not being able to so it would just sit there and keep trying and it would wait and cause my computer to hang. It’s things like that that linux excels in. Linux doens’t give a damn about my Cd rom drive till I put something in it. And ust a note, i’m using Linux as a blanket term even though i’m really talking about the kernel the desktop environments and the WMs.
🙂
Just a few concerns regarding the parts about Apache in the review; I don’t understand the gripe about the startup scripts. Surely it would be a lot stranger if they did not include them for Apache, since every other service has them? Consistency == Good. Apachectl is of course also available.
Also, the packages are named httpd-* because the Apache groups wants it to be called that. If you download Apache 2 in a tarball from apache.org it’s called httpd-*.tar.gz, 1.3 is apache-*.tar.gz. As a nice bonus, the renaming means it’s trivial to run Apache 1.3 and 2.0 on the same machine.
I contacted the author hours ago about that. She said she’d try to get it updated, but I haven’t seen any changes yet.
-fp
The LinuxPlanet review is the best I have read so far – skipping the installation and actually looking at what the OS is like. Far better than Carla’s previous review, which was posted here a few weeks ago (in which she did concentrate on the installation, and badly IMHO)
1) fix your typing. Even me, on a -40 day can type better
2) There already is a Install Sheild Equivilant that was designed by Loki and used by Codeweavers. RPM/pkg is more likely used as it is more consistant ensuring that files are tracked and managed properly, unlike MS where you can have 100 different versions of the same file littered throughout your harddrive.
How many people will review Red Hat 8.0? It seems like everyone and their dog is reviewing it these days. Haven’t there been enough people that everyone has read a review of it somewhere?
I guess its much better than being ignored, but do any of them after the first 5 bring anything new to the table? Have they found other things missing? bad? or very good?
Maybe someone should keep score? They could write any original, insightful comments in a compilation?
coming in fast and furious of late. While I’m jealous that my darling distro (Debian) isn’t getting nearly as much media attention, it’s definitely good to see that a distro that the averge Joe equates with Linux is getting what seems to be almost uniformly positive reviews.
While I personally find the distro to be too hand-holding in certain instances, (edit dhclient.conf — get my changes overwritten. Rinse, repeat…), the graphical niceities are not merely window-dressing: they make the system far more usable overall. I’m a Blackbox/Debian addict, but I actually spent a few days booted into RedHat and was fairly happy — the only thing that caused me to leave was the instability of the nVidia kernel/GLX stuff. (Not that XFree86’s stock nv driver is so great, but hey — lesser of two evils.)
I did not find this article informative at all.
Matthew Gardiner:
1) fix your typing. Even me, on a -40 day can type better
2) There already is a Install Sheild Equivilant
Tee f’n hee!
I’m a pedantic Star Bard, however I don’t promote posts correcting people’s spelling now-a-days.
Why? Because people that complain about somebody’s errors always make one in their complaint!
(I don’t gamble (even if it is Melbourne Cup day!), but who wants to bet that I’m made a spelling error in this message? I’m sure that I’ll notice it as soon as I hit “Submyt”)
how to get Konsole view UTF-8 on the right way? if we need to change any enviroment variable then what it is? and change to what?
Feh! Honest, maybe, but OSNews is hardly unbiased. There’s a lot of Xandros and Lycoris and Lindows and the Debian Desktop project. Lots and lots of “Uncle Ralph and Aunt Faye”-type articles here, but hardly anything about how about a review of RedHat 8.0 as a desktop for hardcore geeks? Or Linux as a — crazy as it sounds — *server*? Furthermore, a common theme in the reviews featured here is how Linux-as-desktop will play to Windows users, taking knowledge of Windows and all its bizarre idiosynchrasies as a given and faulting Linux for its differences.
Thus, it’s good to see a review that evaluates RedHat 8.0 on its own merits. It seems to me an honest review with a different bias.
Yeah, watch the cup today. Ahh, its all good, I was going to put a few bob on Media Puzzle, then I chickened out 🙁
Anyway, I think it is about time people realised that computers are complex devices and whether you like it or not, you have to learn how to use one to utilise it efficiently.
Eugenia Loli-Queru, you can swing off the rafters all night about usability, however, a moron will be the same moron, even if you had a big friggin neon sign above the monitor and a 200000watt speaker that yells out what to do.
As for documentation with OSS projects. The number of reviews I read complaining that the documentation is too complex. Here is a hint sunshine (reviewers of OSS projects), the average moron doesn’t read. They are the same idiot who pick up a desk kit set, get home, bitch and moan when it doesn’t work, then finally realise that they have an instruction book, and low and behold, it is there to be read!
What i did was go from dk_DA-UTf8 (denmark, danish) to standard dk_DA by setting the LANG env variable, and then setting the LC_CTYPE to iso-8859-15 (iso-8859-1, but with euro support.)
I don’t know how you actually get UTF8 to work correctly everywhere. I had heaps of trouble with it, which is why i got rid of it. (fonts looking strange in terminals, man pages showing lots of strange symbols, and having troubles compiling things (i think the real problem was automake doing strange things)
Well, have you ever heared that something is years behind/ahead something else? – Yes, you did. Have you ever heared that something is ahead a mile? Or a kilometer..? No, you didn’t. Because some people simply don’t make up there minds upon looking for how to express some sort of “mega”-advantage which is always given in time, they mistakenly go for the light years You think about it, not for a couple meters or feet, but maybe for a couple of minutes and you’ll see the point.. 😉
[email protected] wrote:
Well, have you ever heared that something is years behind/ahead something else? – Yes, you did. Have you ever heared that something is ahead a mile? Or a kilometer..? No, you didn’t.
Bzzzzt! Wrong! Thanks for playing!
Things are often referred to as being “miles ahead.” And not just in Oz, either!
Context varies, however it is ultimately:
“XXX is miles ahead of ZZZZ”
And, just for us XXXX-ers, “It’s better by a country mile…”
Matthew Gardiner:
Yeah, watch the cup today. Ahh, its all good, I was going to put a few bob on Media Puzzle, then I chickened out 🙁
For the last 5 years I’ve put money in sweepstakes at the places I’ve worked. Begrudgingly, I might add; I don’t gamble.
Strewth! I don’t drink and I’m vegetarian too. Ah well, there goes the Aussie stereotype!
If I were to back a horse, I would have been obliged to chuck a few quid on “Freemason.” Of course, I didn’t even realise the bloody cup was on today, so I have no idea what other nags were running!
Who won, anyway?
I can’t beleive how people find those AA beautiful. I can’t work on such a display for more than an hour, it just sucks. Disable AA from the fonts prefs in KDE, and all my fonts look horrible (not to mention that it doesnt “see” any of the fonts listed in XF86Config). AA in a terminal window? No, I dont think so… 7.3 for me, thanks.
When I ran Linux for the 1st time, I was instantly productive, and my name is Ralph too! I produced at least 100 glitches and generated 45 system errors in botched tweaking attempts. Now THAT’S productive!
Best review I have read with that little words.
Maybe I should try to install RH8 on my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 5000e) and then add to the crowd by writing a review based on that experience 🙂
… the background is that so far all the free Unixes I tried were somewhat iffy to install on this machine: XFree out of the box doesn’t know how to handle the big LCD, FreeBSD has special demands regarding the root partition, Debian doesn’t seem to handle the sound hardware, and SuSe first threatened to delete everything on the system and then rendered the machine inoperable altogether (luckily I could revive it).
“The “unicode problems” appear to be a word-wrap in AbiWord. Unless AbiWord is insane, how could
word-wrapping be a unicode issue?”
If the algorithm for calculating line lengths expects each character
to be an 8-bit byte, it could get thrown by 16 or 32 bit characters.
Especially by a mixture of 8 and 16 bit characters, which I think you
will see in UTF-8.
“Miles ahead” is a common expression. Think of a race, where at the
finishing line one runner would be several yards/metres ahead of
another.
(There is also a good CD called “Miles Ahead”). 😉
Sounds like me.
I’m a vegetarian, don’t drink, smoke, gamble or take drugs. I know, most people will ask, “what did you do in your teenage years”, well, alot of piano practice and programming 😉
Now you blew it; I almost thought that I’d found my twin!
(I played classical guitar, not piano. Oh, and instead of programming, I setup and ran a BBS during the golden age of Fidonet (as well as being a hub and bossnode of 4 other Fido-style “amateur networks.”)
You’re lucky. They say that critters like me can easily fall in love with their reflection otherwise!
😛