Software vendor Red Hat will align its workstation and server OSes to encourage the development of more applications. Another article, says that immediately after its release and apart from the usual rough edges of every .0 version, Red Hat 8.0 generated a lot of heat. Much of it came from the Bluecurve desktop and from the changes RH made to standard KDE.
Red Hat Readies Linux for Workstations
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Its about time a *nix company pushed in to the desktop…
I deffinatly agree with the author of the second artical on the subject of migration from windows. I think he is dead on. The key is not to make everything look and work like windows, its being able to do “push-button” perfect conversion from those proprietary file formats. Its all about the data, the work that they have already completed. If they have to go back and do it again, or even just modify/edit it after conversion, they’ll just stick with windows, even if linux is otherwise identical.
I have to say, I haven’t really understand where all the controversy came from? I haven’t used Redhat since 7.1, but it seems that Redhat has always tried to be a distro for the masses. As such, they have to have defaults based on a user friendly environment.
I understand people having preferences. I care about what is installed on my computer. I want to specify everything that goes in there. But because of this, I use a source-based customizable distro.
And if you have to use redhat [read @work], then can’t you overide this stuff? Anybody use 8.0 and want to weigh in on this?
I downloaded and installed RH-8 just to see what all the fuss was about, all in all I was not impressed, Dont get me wrong, I use *nix for just about everything but gaming. RH8 had problems detecting my Geforce 4, and various other system stuff. I would say key to taking the desktop, would be easy intergration of *new hardware. I use Gentoo as of now so I really dont have a problem.
I use RH8 @home on one of my machines. I use a custom tweaked slackware at work for servers all day. I’ve used BeOS, OS X, Mandrake, OS/2 & Windows in the past on home machines also. I personally like RH8, think they did an awesome job of tidying the interface up a bit. Great fonts & nice intergation of UI. Nothing that cannot be done on any other distro, but it’s nice to have it done out of box. That’s part of offering polish of a commercial distro I suppose. Saves me time & I know if I had to install across a few hundred workstations, that extra bit of end-user shine would be mucho appreciated
I think overall desktop linux & corporate end user linux is not quite there yet, but integration like this is where it needs to go.
I’ve been using RH8 for about a month and a half now, and I have to say, IMHO, it is the best linux distro I’ve ever used. It is really the first distro that I’ve been able to operate completley in (ie not having to switch back to windows to do this or that). My hardware was detected without problems (although, most of it is about 1 1/2 years old). By adding apt-get from freshrpms.net, I have had little to no problems getting the software I wanted.
One day last month, I worked from home, and I was able to use RH8 and OO.o to edit some Excel spreadsheets and Word Documents that I created at work, using MS Office, and when I got the back to the office the next day, they opened fine in MS Office. Its stable, rock solid, and highly usable.
To be honest, I think most of the people that don’t like RH8 are fringe distro users (or true linux gurus) who like obsurity, editing config files by hand, and doing everything possible without a GUI. There are somethings that are better suited for the command line, but text editing is not one of them! I’ve been using linux for almost two years now, and I’ve come to this realization: It dosen’t matter what distro you use, as long as you use Linux.
Vito wrote:
“I would say key to taking the desktop, would be easy intergration of *new hardware.”
I know you were probably not compairing Linux to Windows, but I’m weak, and could not resist saying this: You’ve never had Windows NOT have a driver for something! What, did you have trouble finding this:
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_1.0-2880
“RH8 had problems detecting my Geforce 4”
The GF4 was released later then XFree 4.2.0 so that’s a bit logical that your GF4 isn’t supported don’t you think?
(at least, it isn’t in the open source nv driver, it will be in Januari)
“Its about time a *nix company pushed in to the desktop…”
Red Hat is hardly the first Linux vendor to try pushing into the desktop. Caldera tried this a couple of years ago. So did TurboLinux. Corel also tried it, and of course, Lindows is geared at the desktop. None of these efforts have proven very successful. Neither effort at getting Linux on the desktop succeeded very well. I don’t think Red Hat will either. After all, Red Hat has already made statements to the effect of Linux on the desktop being a lost cause. So has Rasterman. Better to focus on the server where Linux has potential then a market where it really has very little.
RH8 is a definitive very good idea, not a good system. Of course you will answer me that RH could hardly do better with a system based on Linux, which itself is nothing more than a poor copy of the oldest and worst system on this planet : Unix. Sad, but that’s life ;-)))
Unstable, UI is too hard to customize, if feasible, and to finish : java strictly do not run on it ( gcc 3.x is faulty, not RH ).
No doubt that the 9.x will began to be good, and maybe, why not dreaming ? usable
Java runs fine on RH8
-G
Ditto, I have had no problems with Java & RH8. What are you trying to run?
I must agree with you, gmlongo, java doesn’t suffer only a tiny bug on 8.
For sure, and the best reason is that the sdk is strictly UNinstable. Hard to program, but on the other hand it’s a very good solution to avoid any problem with the binary…
Regarding this way, we can proudly announce : it’s rock !
Red Hat 8 raised the bar for the large Linux distros – nothing can touch it right now.
Neither effort at getting Linux on the desktop succeeded very well. I don’t think Red Hat will either. After all, Red Hat has already made statements to the effect of Linux on the desktop being a lost cause.
I’m seeing the exact opposite happening in my workplace. We are saving a bundle by using Redhat workstations in our engineering departement, not to mention the savings (in time = money) by not having *any* OS related downtimes for over
3 weeks now, that was when we switched, after a trial run of a month. Things just work. I actually have time now to implement the long overdue LDAP switch 🙂
So has Rasterman.
Yeah, I’m sure many IT heads base their decision making on opinions from the Rasterman! *g*
-fooks
Red Hat 8 is not a home distro outta the box…definitely not enough multimedia support without installing additional software.
With that said, Red Hat 8 is the first linux distribution that I would readily deploy in a corporate environment in a near default configuration. OpenOffice is excellent, I would upgrade the Mozilla to 1.2…but that’s easy enough to do…and Blue Curve really looks great. Very very professional.
Red Hat 8 is really pretty solid for a .0 release, although I do have a few issues with it (could be caused by the CVS copy of XFree86 I’m running to properly support my card) but all in all it hasn’t crashed on me while in the middle of actual work.
All in all a very excellent, very solid release by RedHat that I would honestly recommend to anyone wanting to dive into Linux
-bytes256
“so has rasterman”?
sorry but what he said is this, linux is doomed in its current form for the desktop, ive discussed it with him on several occasions.
people like to whine, you and i, everyone.
are we doing anything about it , I am are you?
what is most likely to happen is a unification of standards , we already have a project that I hope will get some more space, opendesktop.
and still people complain, kde this gnome that, beos here windows there.
lets use the os:es where they make sense, and have a purpose to fill be it a school with budget cuts or a multinational corporation looking to spare a few.
they will use what makes sense for them and _their_ goals.
and id love to see more OPEN standards in use.
in that sense OSBOS , linux-distros, unice variants and other open platforms bring some light in the darkness dont you agree?
now stop complaining and start werkin…
“We are saving a bundle by using Redhat workstations in our engineering departement…”
Engineering is a traditional UNIX stronghold though, as is science. I don’t expect to see Red Hat make much progress in most other areas though. For example, I don’t think you are going to see it on executive desktops or laptops anytime soon.
“are we doing anything about it , I am are you?”
No. Because personally, I don’t care. If software works I use it. If I have to pay for it and it is worth the price, I buy it. If I can’t afford it, I find something else. Time is money, and the time I save in buying commercial software often outweighs the money I would save if I tried to work with some open source hack. (Sure there is some quality open source software out there. But a lot of it is semi-functional hacks.)
“now stop complaining and start werkin…”
Once again, I don’t care. There are some people who see an open source world as a goal worth spending a bunch of time on. I don’t. I have other goals I would rather spend my time on. Software is a tool to me. And like any other tool, if it is a good tool and gets the job done efficiently, I am willing to pay for it.
and hence you disregarded what I wrote about using the tools where they make sense, if the tool costing money makes more sense for what you are doing, by al means use it , if there is a free one use that..
nice attitude by the way…
“nice attitude by the way…”
What’s wrong with it? I’m just being honest. Different people consider different things to be important or unimportant. To me, open source software is not something I care about. It’s not important to me. (And I would say the vast majority of people feel the same way. They really don’t care whether their software is open source or not.) If it’s important to you, then by all means, advocate it. Donate money to FSF, write open source software. It’s just not important to me. There are other causes, which I consider more important, which I would rather donate my time and money to.
I’ve always found Linux to be a pain, so I decided to check out RH8.0 and see whether its improved (or not). I installed it from FTP last week, and during the first hour found the following gripes:
-mp3 codec not installed by default – downloaded latest XMMS RPM, used RedHat Package Manager to remove old XMMS, and Package Manager crashed. Restarting PM, it comes upto the section where it checks headers, where it never exits from. Reboot, try again. No go. I’ve managed to destroy Package Manager during the first run, simply by removing an existing package. This is crazy.
-Gnome / X11 is dog slow. It seems slower now than my previous attemp with RH7.3 and Suse 7.1.
– Screensavers are broken.
– After all these years, NTFS is still not compiled into the default Redhat kernel. I cannot be bothered recomiling the kernel.
– As always, it takes over 2 minutes to boot.
-Typing sudo and a command doesn’t accept my root password.
-from the default Gnome menu, I’ve already found 4 programs which do not work at all.
-no HWOpenGL drivers for my nVidia GeForce 3.
Why do I even bother. Linux has always been a joke as far as the end user desktop experience is concerned. BeOS R5 from almost 3 years ago is a better user experience. OBOS can take it easy since it isn’t threatened by Linux on the desktop any time in the next 2-3 years.
I have previously had problems with FTP installs. It seems that any transmission errors don’t get corrected. I also had errors installing RH from homemade CDs – didn’t bother to do the disk check at first install, when I did I had to burn all three CDs again (at lower speed) after which everything ran perfectly. There is absolutely no need to remove XMMS. Just get xmms-mp3, and you’re ready to go (or get xmms-mad) – check out Freshrpms. And while you’re at it, get apt4rpm (and Synaptic)! As for the other problems some might be install-related. Red Hat doesn’t seem to bother so much about windows maybe that’s why NTFS support isn’t there (and I’m not sure the code is regarded as stable or safe either). You won’t see any windows partitions in your fstab either, unlike Mandrake.
Zenja wrote:
no HWOpenGL drivers for my nVidia GeForce 3.
And, what. You’ve never had Windows not have a driver for your video card? You’ve never had to go out and get a driver for a printer, digital camera, sound card, or <insert device here>? I don’t understand why people bitch about not have every driver in the world in the default linux distibution. This seems like a something that should be second nature to most Windows users. Go find that dang driver!
Now, about your other point on BeOS. I half agree with you. Out of the box, BeOS provided the best operating system experenece on the x86 platform. By just judgeing the operating system, its one of the all timers. BUT YOU COULDN’T DO ANYTHING!. Small selection of software, no drivers for Linksys NICs (except maybe some guys unstable hack…), and, best of all, no more updates to the core product since Be went under and Palm bought the intellectual property. BeOS would be a nice OS for a media box, though.
With Linux, you have to take some time to set things up. Configure this, add that driver, remove this, download that. RH8, though, out of the box is highly usable. RedHat had some very legitimate licencing concerns for not including MP3 support with RH8. And, as Niklas already pointed out, you can add MP3 support to your current XMMS install, if you’d bother to read anything.
How quickly we all forget how much of a learning curve we had with computers to begin with.