Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn’t always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world’s first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots. Update: Added one more screenshot.
The installation process hasn’t changed much, it is pretty much the same, but fortunately this time, Anaconda (the Red Hat installation routine), was able to correctly probe my 19″ Envision monitor and obtain the modelines, without me needing to input them manually. In the past, this didn’t work with my monitors, so everytime I was installing Linux, I had to dig up the monitor manuals and type the numbers manually. Thankfully, this is no more (gtf is a Good Thing (TM)). At the end, my installation of the beta was not as lucky, as GRUB didn’t want to install on /dev/hda2, but later, after booting with the floppy, I managed to install LILO manually, so it’s all good now, up and running.
The UI hasn’t change much since Red Hat 8.0, but Gnome 2.2 is included and things are a bit more refined and polished. Positive surprise would be the launch feedback you get when you load something from the Gnome Panel. Nautilus feels faster, the Red Hat menu is a bit more organized (no “Extras” anymore!), the BlueCurve theme is as sharp and clean as ever and it has seen a clean-up/update in its looks.
New mouse cursors are also there, as Phoebe comes with a beta of the XFree 4.3, which has quite a number of new features (including the ability to change real resolutions (non virtual) on the fly). For a beta, XFree86 seemed very stable to me with the “nv” 2D driver.
KDE 3.1 is also there, included, but it is not as refined as Gnome 2.2. Red Hat has put quite some weight on taking care of Gnome as this is their main environment, but KDE users should be satisfied as well, as KDE is present and works as expected, in my experience with the system.
Red Hat Phoebe 3 comes with a number of development packages, KOffice 1.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.2, Mr Project 0.8, FileRoller while some RPMs created for RH 8.0 that I tried, worked on 8.1beta just fine.
Overall speed is good, but both QT and GTK+ apps should do better when resizing and improve launching times (could someone please explain to me why even the smallest Gnome/GTK+ app takes longer to launch than the much bigger Blender?).
A pretty large number of preference and system tools is coming with the system, making it easier for people to configure their system (however, having 76 setting panels under Preferences, System Tools and System Settings, is really not all that great to be honest).
This is a beta release, so it doesn’t come without bugs. I encountered about 7-8 bugs so far (odd behaviors and/or app crashings), plus some UI bugs (however, I was told that the source tree is in freeze regarding UI bugs). Also, I was not able to hook into my shared Windows XP directory via Samba, not sure why not, yet. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out for the final release.
Overall, even by being a beta, I feel that the Red Hat 8.x series are the strongest releases today in the Linux world and Red Hat, Inc. the leading Linux power which brings Linux one step beyond to the corporate desktop and the server space. It is the most consistent, polished Linux desktop available, it has major support by developers and companies who partner with Red Hat, Inc. and its server side is also strong compared to other Linux solutions today.
Having said all that, there is always room for improvement. The desktop could be much better and media formats could be licensed to fill the multimedia gap (currently a thorn for my needs) in order to better compete with OSes beyond the Linux scope, like WindowsXP and Mac OS X. But the important thing is that Red Hat is on the right track and they race against the big OS players, having already outpace their Linux-oriented competitors. Red Hat is definately the next big, continuously rising, OS company to watch in the future.
Nice mini-review.
I also like RedHat now, there still some stuff that needs to be done…
-i686 ISOs
-NTFS support (even if not loaded by default)
-MP3 support, Thomsons multimedia has made clear that MP3 may be included in free software for free.
About the GTK stuff, I really not an expert so I could totally be wrong, but maybe GTK just has lots of initialization to do…
>-i686 ISOs
>-NTFS support (even if not loaded by default)
>-MP3 support, Thomsons multimedia has made clear that MP3 may be included in free software for free.
I agree. Especially for the i686 optimization, as Red Hat recommends 300-400 Mhz anyway (and a K6 at 300 Mhz is nowhere as fast as a PII at 300, so there is not much point supporting the i586 cpus)
This looks pretty cool to me! especially new xfree with rendr extension! And I agree with you pascal … For me it’s no problem to enable mp3 but for starters it’s hard. And about NTFS support I think it’s a bad idea. NTFS module is far from working oke (writing could be even distroy NTFS), and I understand RH doesn’t want to run risc people are fucking up and blame redhat …
Now there is a menu that is way better. KDE 3.1’s menu is just fugly and poorly organized. For example, it isn’t clear at all what the difference between “System” and “Settings” are.
That so many apps in the menu’s are listed like: Kblah (What it actually is) is indicative of the poor naming scheme IMO. For example:
Noatrun (Multimedia Player)
Who would ever guess that Noatrun is Multimedia Player? That should be entirely hidden from the user. Just call it Media Player, or something, darnit.
The only one there I don’t like is “Accessories.” I don’t think that makes much sense.
It would be super-cool if some standard could arise out of this kind of user-presentation stuff, to such a point where as far as a newbie was concerned, KDE and GNOME were merely different things “under the hood.”
The name is Notatun, not Notatrun.
As for the menu organization on Red Hat 8.1 I already talked about it here:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2611
I know that KDE uses QT for the graphical API, so what does Gnome use?
Is it GTK?
Just wondering, because I want to encapsulate the API gnome uses for Eiffel.
Yes, it is GTK+
You cant just call Noatun a “Multimedia Player” because there are other, even better ones out there. However, if they want to make it the default one, why not call it “Redhat Media Player”? Would be following the naming scheme of “Windows Media Player” and it would not confuse people, should they come across another media player for Linux.
If you are scared that there are potential customers using decade old processors, have two versions – i386 and i686 :-). There is always a time to let go, and move on. I believe that time is now.
Personally, I like the direction they are taking. They are clearly targeted for the *corporate* desktop, unlike many others that either
a) say they are for the corporate desktop yet either have home user features (Lindows) or have nothing the corporate enviroment wants (Mandrake)
b) go for the home user market (Lycoris)
Not to say they are bad, but frankly, the corporate desktop is one of the only desktop market interested with Linux. Home users generally couldn’t care less what OS they are using. (hehe, I remember asking my aunt what version of Windows she was using… she couldn’t answer off hand :-).
Super-cheap desktops are also not the way to go. One thing is that though matter how good that $200 PC is, people would think it is too cheap considering that its closest Windows competitor for a known company is around $400.
For that cheap, you may as well buy a bunch of thin clients and a server..
I know that the NTFS module is still in experimental mode. But they could compiled it in as a module, which would not get loaded by default, (even if the system has NTFS partitions). If i’m not mistaken many distributions simply have NTFS support on read-only, which takes care of the data-loss issue.
Mostly read-only is enough, this way I can still play music which is located on my NTFS drive.
Yey, no Extras anymore. They should fire the guy who invented that menu…
Eugenia, it’s actually called Noatun not Notatun and definetly not Notatrun
For the final review? Red Hat 8.1 includes NTPL threads implementation and I’m curious if there is any detectable speedup in threaded apps like Evolution. I highly doubt something as mundane as Evolution will be drasticly sped up by it, but what about Apache 2.0 or other such apps? I’m quite curious. About the i686 issue, I’ve noticed that once I registered my installations of Red Hat and update the system I’m offered the opportunity to install Athlon optimized versions of the kernel (and maybe glibc, not sure). There are also i686 versions availible from Red Hat if you wish to spare the compile. While this won’t help the other apps, this may add a perk up. I myself never noticed much difference, but I don’t know of any other mainstream distro that offers platform optimizations for their kernels. Anyone care to comment?
>I believe that time is now.
I believe so too, but it won’t be happening for the Final version of 8.1. When you optimize the compilation with different flags, it creates different code. And different code, means different bugs than the ones already reported to their bugzilla. So for 8.1, this is a no-go, it is already too late for it. But I hope it will be standard for 8.2.
Elver… notice too that Internet Explorer isn’t trademarked? Red Hat can rename Mozilla to that too. In addition to that, Nautilus to RedHat Explorer…. 🙂 The power of Microsoft picking a trademarked term and arguing it is generic while bankrupting the prosecutor…
> Eugenia, it’s actually called Noatun not Notatun and definetly not Notatrun
Two people did a mistake writting it in a matter of minutes, and I had the name of the app already written in front of me on another browser window. Possibly a proof that the name is not that good, or easy to pronounce.
Err, well it’s Noatun. But I’m sure you get the point.
I didn’t see the earlier menu story. Surely you don’t expect everyone to read every story.
Of course not, I just pointed to it, so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.
> Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader [..] Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity [..] Red Hat, Inc. the leading Linux power
Sure that you didn’t copy some parts/terms from the RedHat marketing pages?
Nope. Numbers and reality speak for themselves.
What I really miss is ntfs, auto mount win partitions or an option to turn it on, also there should be some kind of network wizard, maybe there is? Other than that I find Red hat the best distro around, you have full fledged office suit with even MrProject included. Very nice. Only thing I can’t understand is why having preferences, System settings, and system tools in the main menu? Maybe they should put them in accesories or at least System settings, and system tools.
Thank you RedHat and thank you Eugenia, it’s allways nice to read your stuff
For applications that are able to be substitutes like web browsers or media players, this could merely be some kind of preference setting. I would imagine the same could go for lots of other stuff.
—
Eugenia: Ok. I looked at the mockup. Like most of the suggestions. One thing I do like though is the bigger fonts, but its small potatoes.
One question that just occured to me about applicatoins like a PDF viewer or a Media player, is if they are actually often started standalone by themselves? Personally I never do that, and I rely on just opening a file and having the associated app launch to do something automagically. For that kind of ‘passive’ stuff, it seems to me you could just remove them from the menu’s altogether.
> Also, I was not able to hook into my shared Windows XP
> directory via Samba, not sure why not, yet.
I inserted my computer name and lan name at installation. And I have no trouble accessing other computers using nautilus “smb://pcname”. Is there another way to access shares on other comuter under gnome?
The broken parts are the theme installer. Crashes every time. French-Canadian keyboard support is broken too. Also can’t seem find the redhat network utility(I could not input my email addy in the installation.)
Now if I could find a good tutorial on installing 3d enabled nvidia drivers(without jeopardizing my installation this time) and an how-to install MP3 support on XMMS AND ntfs support.
What I would like to see is Redhat, Mainsoft and a number of commercial software companies like Macromedia, Adobe and Corel team up and port their applications natively to Linux.
Mainsoft which produces product to ease porting from Windows to UNIX could be used.
At the end of the day, one can have the greatest desktop on the planet, however, if there is no commercial applications, one is not going to move
Awesome work by RH since 8.0, just in the UI and fonts dept. (or whatever). Now THAT is my main reason to use RH. No matter the ‘Bad’ press given by Linux zealots (so what else is new?), RH have the best UI to look at with integration on any linux desktop.
Have the fixed that crappy package manager to allow me to install other apps than “Redhat-Certified” ones?
Eugenia, would it be possible for you to post some screenshots where an app window is focused? AFAICT, all of your examples show unfocused windows, so it’s hard to distinguish any Bluecurve UI changes.
Thanks,
-fp
I’m not sure many of you understand how RedHat does its packaging. With GCC, one can do full optimization for a processor – by using processor-specific instructions and optimal instruction ordering. RedHat does the latter only. That is, the order of the instructions are optimized for i686 though it only uses i386 instructions. This way, any i386 processor can run the distribution, though anything lower than a Pentium Pro would do so sub-optimally. The difference between the two is minimal for most apps – and where there is a big difference (i.e. kernel, glibc, etc.) RedHat provides i686 packages.
Is it just me, or did they improve the fonts? Judging by the screenshots, they have. To me, the ones in 8.0 are too fuzzy or blurry. These don’t seem to suffer the same fate.
I do like that they are including KDE 3.1.
I hope that will release the isos for i686, I think the i386 isos is not fit for my computer. and another problem use the new kernel that support NPTL can’t use the nvidia driver, hope this can be solved in the final release of 8.1.
I think 8.1 will be a great release of Linux Desktop.
RedHat 8.x is really good. I think their default kernel is the best. I was recently very impressed when it recognised my maxtor usb HD, hotpluggable and everything.
What I really cant understand is why they use GNOME2+GNOME1.4+moz+OOo+others, it is lightyears behind a KDE only desktop (works today) or a GNOME2 only desktop (wich sadly dont exist yet).
nautilus, evolution, mozilla, openoffice all use their own gui toolkit (or toolkit version)! On a modern desktop every app has to use the same gui toolkit, no way it can compete with proprietary offerings otherwise. I dont care if openoffice is the best free software office solution today, there is no future in the one toolkit per app desktop. If all apps used GNOME2 then it would atleast suck consistently (more or less).
NTFS is not in Redhat due to possible patent concerns I believe.
I’m not sure why MP3 support still isn’t in there, if Thompson have made it clear free decoders are allowed, but they are very careful with legal things. Anyway, it’s trivial to add.
Evolution is not really multithreaded afaik, it runs 2 processes that communicate via CORBA in the new gnome2 version anyway.
There will be other nice features too, like the gnome sound recorder can convert between various formats (once you have the right gst plugins installed), little things like that.
I seem to recall seeing bluecurve toolbar icons a while ago, they must have dropped them for this beta.
QNX moving in this Desktop/Corporate direction instead of only focusing on an embedded plattform. Meanwhile what I’d like to see happening to the RedHat Desk is a completely polished ReHMudi release instead of this (not the one available for download right now).
I didn’t see the second screenshot for some reason. So the bluecurve icons are there. Personally I prefer the default gnome toolbar icons, but hey, they look ok too. A bit blurry for my tastes.
Moho vs gnome app launch time is probably due to linker relocations, prelink will hopefully address some of these issues.
> Thomsons multimedia has made clear that MP3 may be included in free software for free.
Ah. You see, a naive person might take that to mean that Red Hat can include MP3 players with no fear of trouble.
But the reality is very different. Without a license (an email saying “Yes, it is OK to make free MP3 programs” is not a license) Red Hat has to consider that Thompson may decide one day that it would like royalties after all. They will argue that they meant free SOFTWARE, not FREE software, or that only no-cost downloads were included, or that in any case Red Hat don’t have a license… at best it will cause a lot of negative press and lost revenue.
Unisys played this game for years with GIF, offering “special exceptions” and then changing the terms and conditions as it suited them. RSA did the same thing with crypto libraries. Red Hat want no part in it if they can help it.
Quick comments…….
I have been using the XFT Mozilla from Phoebe 2 for a while. It is the best looking browser and font rendering yet. It looks like they finally finished Bluecurve.
I still ran into the infamous RPM crash…
Nautilus is much better at parsing large directories…
I love the new Theme Panel. (I use GNOME 2)
Crossover Office 1.31 did not work…
I could not use the 1.0-4191 nvidia driver… I know it is a binary and Nvidia will need to supply it. I will also have to wait till VIA releases its Rhyne drive for my onboard NIC card.
I have started recommending Redhat to my newbie friends instead of Mandrake because of Bluecurve. (no flames please..)
Can’t wait for the final release. I will be in line to pay for it.
I think from 8.x on wards, RH done a good job. I think what it has to do is
1) i686/586 compiled binaries
2) Networking support irrespective of the environment
3) Multimedia support
4) A very good office ( although openoffice is good, but its still below the mark. For eg., Apples recent presentation program, still beta, is far above the powerpoint in presentation)
5) stability and performance improvements for gnome
6) as they are planning, support for only one wm and rest optional
Thanks Eugenia! I’m glad to see they’re working on the menus. It still sounds like they have those various system prefs and that stuff in those various menus. I wish they would fix that. LOL, it bugs me – to have come up with something as cool as BlueCurve and to have that kind of menu confusion 🙂
I disagree with a distro being i686 only, maybe i586, but I have a Pentium233, and it is quite capable of running recent distros. I have FreeBSD 4.7 and SuSE 8.1 installed on it and the both run pretty fast. Even running KDE it isnt that bad.
So either stay at i386, make two different versions(this wouldnt be the easiest), or make it i586. AFAIK Anything less than a pentium would be really slow.
1) On my 700mhz laptop RH is a little poky. That makes me a little sad. Click on “New Message” in Evolution can be a 2-3 second wait, every single time. Is this par for everyone else’s course? What’s worse is, XP feels much snappier on the same hardware. Not that I want to go back to MS.
2) RHN used to give one complementary machine to every account. I recently logged into mine and now it says I’m in demo mode. Can anyone else confirm that there’s no free lunch anymore with RHN?
Thanks.
This is mostly subjective, you say KDE is lightyears in front, I say Gnome/GTK+ is way better and more powerful. Also if one wants to build a desktop aiming to become a big player in the world, you do not want to force 3. party developers to pay license fees to a small company in Norway, which is the case with KDE. Not everyone can do GPL apps.
erm, but there is a gpl version of Qt, and its whats used for KDE…
Yes, they have made big changes in their support, etc. I don’t think they’ve had that one extra machine for quite some time. It seems like you would have received an email from them about the changes though.
erm, but there is a gpl version of Qt, and its whats used for KDE…
I beleive that the GPL version is *only* available for Linux. The GTK libraries are LGPL, which is why many GTK apps (GAIM, GIMP, etc.) have been easily ported to the Win32 platform, and also why Sun is using Gnome for Solaris. I haven’t seen any non-commercial QT apps for non-Linux platforms because of the royalty issue.
This is mostly subjective, you say KDE is lightyears in front, I say Gnome/GTK+ is way better and more powerful
I’d hate to see this thread deteriorate into any flamefest about why RedHat backs Gnome over KDE. If you like KDE, you can still like RedHat too, I assure you. The FUD about it being crippled is ludicrous. If you like Gnome (which I really do), then you’ll like how RedHat has made Gnome look and feel so sharp for 8.1. It’s really impressive.
I have a ti4200 card and I can’t get it to work under any linux except Suse 8.1, but I have other issues with Suse (like the fact that I can’t use 4.0.x rpms, and anything I try to install that isn’t on their site runs into dependency hell – and it doesn’t come with apt, etc).
RH8 is nice. They’re working toward a user friendly OS.
1) WRT menu organization, careful definition of terms and use will require many meetings to properly organize and name them.
I hope they succeed, but it will require a lot of input and discussion from “troops in the field”. These issues must be taken to management, made important and discussed often.
2) Which kernel is included?
3) Do they include alsa sound system?
4) Have they added a script to /etc/init/d to turn
oss sound on/off?
5) The menu’s in my gnome ( 8.0 installed on top of 7.3 installed on top of 7.2 …) have no properties in the R-click. I want to add or delete menus. Is that possible?
My gnome only includes “add to panel”.
6) Does gnome include a utility to add/delete kde apps
from the gnome menu, and vice versa.
7) Does gnome or kde provide detailed instructions on how to directly edit the desktop/panel/menu configuration text files, and describe inter-operation?
thx……………….
Firstly, $2000 isn’t all that much for many companies making software. If you are making internal software (mostly for corporates, IMHO what most software are written for), you don’t really have to pay a thing (GPL is fine if your distribution base is limited).
In addition to that, Qt allows you to target 3 platforms at the same time. If source compatibility doesn’t make your day, using Qt would still mean easier porting from platform to platform. This is essential for now as Linux is still a very small market (more smaller if you count only people that actually want to pay for software).
Besides, since we are talking about Red Hat, personally I think Red Hat would have gone further if it had gone the KDE way. They decided to support GNOME at the time when KDE was until QPL. Instead they should have invested in Harmony (from the looks of then, there weren’t in a hurry to load a desktop). Harmony would also mean that there would be a dominant toolkit on Linux that is actually made for Linux, and not for cross platform usage.
For most companies BTW, $2000 for propreitary software is a small sum. Unless they are planning to make a small tiny weeny profit or have a very small tiny weeny budget. And to add on, while this may seem very objective, Qt would also mean faster time to market (Wine would mean even more faster time to market). Many Win32 developers (well, all the developers I know personally are Win32 ones 🙂 said they prefer Qt or GTK+ mainly because Qt means faster development (the rest never tried them both :-).
With that said, I think it is stupid to say now that we should go for one toolkit. Many software is already written in that toolkit. What should be done is to change the look of each toolkit to be consistent. And for each app to follow a single HIG (KDE’s seems far better to me… but copying the old Macintosh Human Interface Guide (not Aqua) would be better :-).
1. Would anyone who knows NPTL and gcc 3.2 comment on GStreamer support for it? I understand GStreamer is a heavilly threaded subsystem (a Good Thing(TM) IMHO), but has some issues with certain compilers and/or thread libraries.
2. Would some kind soul create a source-based RedHat 8.1 distro which uses the RH8.1 SRPMS? I would like to compile-install RedHat 8.1 on my Athlon and i686 systems. This would be a god-send.
3. I think the 3D-accelerated NVidia drivers don’t work because XFree86 4.3 uses a different DRI version. Hopefully, NVidia is working on a driver for XF86 4.3. (Need a betatester, NVidia?
)
4. Is the mozilla suite released with RH8.1 compiled with gcc 3.2? It’s just that I’ve compiled mozilla-1.3b with gcc-3.2 (with gtk2 and xft support) and it works flawlessly with Crossover plugins 1.2 and the gcc-3.2 compiled Blackdown 1.4.1_01 JVM. I even compiled galeon-1.3.2 against that mozilla and it works great (am using it right now). I was just hoping that RedHat did it saving me from having to recompile.
Great mini-review, Eugenia! How about a screenshot with your LighthouseBlue theme? 😀
Eugenia,
You may have answered this in one of your past articles or post.
Are you at liberty to say what Linux distro you use as a main desktop? I realize you test different one’s and just post the reviews, I test a lot of them to. I was just wondering if you had ONE that you stick with on a main p.c.?
Thanks for the article. Have you ever done in article on SuSE 8.1 or Gentoo?
How much do they pay you to make such biased reviews ????
I wouldn’t presume to say whether RedHat was right or wrong in choosing the Gnome2 platform nor Gnome2 to standardize on Gtk2, but I personally like those choices.
Eugenia has stated that she dislikes the Gtk2 programming paradigm and as a programmer, I happen to agree with her. But from reading what the Gnome2 designers & developers have been writing, it is obvious that they’ve standardized on their “Object-Oriented extender version of C” because C is 1) supported on most platform, 2) is the natural way to extend or create wrappers for most programming libraries (Java JNI, perl modules, Ruby, Python, Mono), and 3) presents the least chances of binary incompatibilities with various versions of the GCC compiler.
I would love to see 3 things: a stable C API (which we now have), language bindings for the languages I like, and support for these extensions in RAD IDE tools (think MS Visual C++ 6.0 with support for gnomemm libs).
I happen to like the Gnome2 framework. This includes ORBit2, GConf2, bonobo and the gnome2 widget set (haven’t played with the printing libraries much). As this isn’t a forum on toolkit virtues, I won’t elaborate. Suffice it to say, RedHat 8.1, for me, is going the right way.
“Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity.”.
Sure. Maybe in the States.
Justin – Although she owns a Mac and runs something like 8 other OS’s regularly, it’s no secret that Eugenia, like many vocal Linuxists, uses XP as her main desktop.
I LOVE Red Hat’s Linux distro. Second to none on the Linux front, if you ask me. But XP stil has that je ne sais quoi…
With each release, the gap narrows though. So here’s hoping…
Check out my os rant page for a kewl screenshot of this release. hehe
http://www.darkambient.org/operatingsystem.html
i dont think that it will be much longer till red hat decides to
charge per computer for their distro. wouldnt that be wonderful ?
they could make a lot more profit that way.
patrick_darcy, Do you have any specific information about Red Hat planning to charge per computer for their distro or are you just talking out of your ass ?
>Eugenia, would it be possible for you to post some screenshots where an app window is focused?
http://www.eugenia.co.uk/images/notatun2.png
>Is it just me, or did they improve the fonts? Judging by the screenshots, they have.
In the screenshots you don’t see the fonts that Red Hat comes with. I manually downloaded and installed the Vera fonts which are currently in Beta by Bitstream.
2) Which kernel is included?
2.4.20 I think, checked it out last night, can’t remember now. 😮
3) Do they include alsa sound system?
No idea, does it matter? As long as it works…
>4) Have they added a script to /etc/init/d to turn oss sound on/off?
That would be the last thing I would check and mess around. Loading different sound systems, I find this to be the responsibility of any modern OS..
>5) The menu’s in my gnome have no properties in the R-click. I want to add or delete menus. Is that possible?
Not that easily unfortunately, and trying it via Nautilus didn’t work for me.
6) Does gnome include a utility to add/delete kde apps from the gnome menu, and vice versa.
Not that I saw…
>Are you at liberty to say what Linux distro you use as a main desktop?
WindowsXP and then MacOSX and then BeOS.
From the Linux distros, I prefer Red Hat.
>Thanks for the article. Have you ever done in article on SuSE 8.1 or Gentoo?
Yes, check out our archives.
About samba, I just did smb://10.0.0.10 (that’s my XP machine) and it didn’t work from either konqueror or nautilus. I mean, it sees my “sharedir” but then it doesn’t show any files in it and it tries to read that dir forever. It works from my other SuSE partition… 😮
I understand that it’s not a big issue to add mp3 support to redhat 8. And if you only use xmms it’s not a real big deal for this new beta as well. I wonder though, if any of you have tried some more advanced audio features and had similar experiences.
See, one of the big things that I’ve been looking forward to from the gnome2.2 based distro’s is the nautilus-media bit. That really nice audio list view and player that’s embedded into nautilus. If someone has an easy way to add mp3 support to it in phoebe…do tell…please. The problem is that it’s no longer about just xmms. Alot of features of redhats multimedia are now going to be intertwined and built off of gstreamer. And believe me, even with apt gstreamer can be a real pain to get installed(even under 8.0). So last night I started to go about installing mp3 support under phoebe. First I got the xmms plugin working…no big deal. Then I realized that nautilus would not even show id3 info for my mp3’s let alone play them. It just sits there and says “no info yet”. So I first I had to compile mad, lame, id3lib, mpg123, and a few other mp3 apps and libs just for good measure. Then I grabed the gstreamer and gstreamer-plugins source from the gstreamer site and compiled those(The redhat gstreamer plugin package does not have the mad plugin). And that’s where I’m at so far. Gstreamer now plays mp3’s without a problem. Unfortunately, Nautilus displays the same behaviour as it did before. No love for the mp3’s. My guess is that I should probably recompile Nautilus but I’m a little scared of that. The latest Nautilus under Gentoo was great but no matter what I tried it would not access my windows shares through smb://blah . (and yes I did have my smb client software installed properly. Doing a smbclient -L blah showed my domain just fine). Redhat’s version however, does fine with it. So I may be in for a big trade off.
Anyway, my point is this…
Redhats decision to leave out mp3 support is just going to get harder and harder to deal with as our desktops evolve. The media subsystems are getting more and more pervasive with embedded players and adding mp3 support to it may not be trivial anymore. I’m sure a good apt archive could take care of some of these issues but I wouldn’t ever count on it being as easy as it was with 8.0 again.
I would really appreciate anyone elses experiences with this and alternative ways that you went about it.
Linux is improving constantly. But it will be always behind Windows, until some respected and powerful applications are ported to Linux. The reason is that the operating system is really irrelevant if people lack their applications of daily use like Photoshop (Please don’t come saying about GIMP, 1.2 is *NOT* professional and 1.4.x is not even ready: Just look at the .jpg saved images with GIMP, look at the blurred corners and other defects before bashing Photoshop), Illustrator, Macromedia tools like Dreamweaver and Flash and many other! A lot of “free” open source applications cannot substitute the level of professionalism one of these commercial can provide.
So it’s no use for me having Linux if I just have a eye candy desktop to browse the web, write a mail, play solitaire or make a spreadsheet.
“(Please don’t come saying about GIMP, 1.2 is *NOT* professional and 1.4.x is not even ready: Just look at the .jpg saved images with GIMP, look at the blurred corners and other defects before bashing Photoshop)”
Djeizon Barros: What are you talking about? I didn’t know that Gimp were unprof… Tell me more! Why did the team behind Shrek, Lord of the Ring and Monster Inc use Gimp (actually FilmGimp) on the desktops for retouch? Is the Hollywood guys smoking pot?
2) Which kernel is included?
2.4.20
3) Do they include alsa sound system?
No, alsa is standard in the 2.5.X system and will show up later.
>4) Have they added a script to /etc/init/d to turn oss sound on/off?
You don’t turn it off SS and Alsa are kernel level interfaces. The sound servers, (KDE,esound) can use both.
xmms then goes through the sound server
Also a little comment for people saying redhat is evil.
found this while working on the rawhide release. This is
the master configuration file for X windows, individual
customizations:
#if LinuxDistribution == LinuxRedHat
#define FSUseSyslog YES
#endif
evil hunh?? no look at this….
# ifdef DebianMaintainer
# ifndef XFree86CustomVersion
# define XFree86CustomVersion “Debian”
# endif
# ifndef BuilderEMailAddr
# define BuilderEMailAddr “[email protected]”
# endif
# define XFree86Devel YES
# define BuildAllSpecsDocs YES
# define InstallXinitConfig YES
# define InstallXdmConfig YES
# define InstallFSConfig YES
# define DebuggableLibraries YES
# define ForceNormalLib YES
# define BuildSpecsDocs YES
# define SpecsDocDirs CTEXT GL ICCCM X11 Xext Xv i18n xterm
# define BuildRman NO
# define BuildHtmlManPages NO
/* we build-depend on libfreetype6-dev (FreeType 2.x) */
# define BuildFreetype2Library NO
# define HasFreetype2 YES
/* m68k has no 2.4 kernel yet */
# ifndef Mc68020Architecture
# define HasLinuxInput YES
# endif
# define HasXdmAuth YES
# define HasLatex YES
/* at present, glide2 only works on i386 */
# ifdef i386Architecture
# define HasGlide2 YES
# define Glide2IncDir /usr/include/glide
# endif /* i386Architecture */
/* at present, glide3 only works on alpha and i386 */
# if defined(i386Architecture) || defined(AlphaArchitecture)
# define HasGlide3 YES
# define Glide3IncDir /usr/include/glide3
# endif /* i386Architecture || AlphaArchitecture */
/* extended instruction set support */
# ifdef i386Architecture
# define HasX86Support YES
# define HasMMXSupport YES
# define Has3DNowSupport YES
/* 2.4 is not yet the official (or predominant) kernel in unstable */
# define HasSSESupport NO
# endif /* i386Architecture */
# endif /* DebianMaintainer */
#endif /* LinuxDebian */
just my 2-cents work.
What I need is a distro which:
1. Is easy to install.
2. Has support for a year old video card (ti4200)
3. Allows me to use apt-get or a reasonable facsimile
What I’ve tried so far:
1. Red Hat 8.0 – easy to install, easy to install software – never could get the nvidia drivers working.
2. Lindows 3.0 – easy to install, easy to install software – can use nvidia but not at greater than 1024×768
3. Suse 8.1 – not a bad install, nvidia card works great.
updates from Suse site are OK (but a little long). Other updates run into dependency hell (I mean, to search 10 different websites to get the libraries to use apt is a little ridiculous, and it never worked)
4. Gentoo – not an easy install
5. Debian – not an easy install
6. Yoper – easy install, but no adsl
7. Windows XP – easy install, nvidia works great, easy update, but it talks to Bill Gates behind my back (or am I being paranoid?)
Is there anything that meets my specs?
Yes, it is called MacOSX.
However, in this case, you wouldn’t need to just switch OSes, but also hardware.
It costs 3 times the equivalent P4 system.
Well, you asked for a system that does all that, and it isn’t Microsoft-based, and I replied. There is a price for what you get.
Am I asking for too much?
Of course not. But if you are not happy with WinXP, the rest x86 OS platforms haven’t caught up yet to fullfill all the three points you raised, at least not without shortcomings or other problems, unfortunately.
computers are no fun anymore 8(
Eugenia, and OSNews,
I’m a relatively new reader of OSNews (6 or 7 months). I find the articles informative and somewhat entertaining at times. . . except. . .
when Eugenia fails to cover KDE in distros. Instead of any sort of object discussion of facts there is just gross bias and vague dismissive commentary. Like this non-review:
“KDE 3.1 is also there, included, but it is not as refined as Gnome 2.2. Red Hat has put quite some weight on taking care of Gnome as this is their main environment, but KDE users should be satisfied as well, as KDE is present and works as expected, in my experience with the system. ”
Interestingly enough KDE3.1 is one of the biggest leaps forward that KDE has ever taken in my experience. Some negative and many positive things have happened in this relase. . . things worth discussing . . discussion that both windowing systems could benefit from. Red hat butchered KDE in the last release (it’s objectively true, there are things that worked in Mandrake that simply don’t in Redhat because they decided to make KDE and gnome look alike without regard to the functionality– ie. things got crashier for the sake of cosmetics). Even THAT would have been a good discussion — the power of the distros over the developers. . .clashing visions.
Instead, what do we get? Dismissive invective from Eugenia, that NO ONE can learn anything from. You may be doing this for free Eugenia. . . and you are certainly welcome to do what ever you want. But be careful that you don’t chase some of your audience away who want to learn something. Igniting flamewars over biased writing is a sure way to ruin the community that you’ve worked hard to build. It may be less than fun for you when the community is self-wittled down, because the atmosphere became less objective.
Sweetheart, the article is a mini-report, NOT a review per se. I was not much more detailed on Gnome either, was I?
>Dismissive invective from Eugenia
I have absolutely no idea what this means in english.
>Red hat butchered KDE in the last release […] Even THAT would have been a good discussion
No, it would not. We have ALREADY discussed about this very subject a _zillion_ times in the past, please check our archives. And in fact, if I had a Linux company, I would do the exact same thing Red Hat did with KDE and Gnome, trying to unify the two DEs. It only makes sense for the business and your desktop users who seek consistency.
Again, this was a preview/report article on Phoebe3, NOT a full review. My reviews are between 3 and 4 pages, this one was less than a page long. Stay tuned for April.
KDE is not a really important part of RH, if she wants to write about all of the cool things RH is doing with GNOME then don’t bitch! There have been plenty of reviews of other distros where they say ” Oh yes, GNOME is included but it sucks… back to KDE!” OSnews is fair, stop whining.
Nautilus does have a lot of extensions, but it uses GTK. The version in RH 8.0.94 beta 3 is indeed gnome2 package using current version of GTK. Evolution uses GTK with extensions as needed, but it is GTK. Evolution is currently in beta for using a current GTK (instead of the ones used in old versions of gnome.
I believe, or heard at one time, that Mozilla is going GTK on Unix systems, I could be wrong. On the ones above, you are definitely telling falsehoods, Rull. Go check.
Thank you Eugenia for the job you do…
I have never had an issue with Redhat Regular Releases and Nvidia Drivers… Just the new Phoebe beta.
If the rpms from NVIDIA do not work and you can’t get the src.rpms to recompile.
maybe this will help….
get the source to match your kernel and install it
my example will use the latest kernel for RH8.0
rpm -Uvh kernel-source-2.4.18-24.8.0.i386.rpm
now as root
cd /usr/src
ln -s linux-2.4.18-24.8.0/ linux
get the latest tar balls from Nvidia
and unpack them
tar -zxvf NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4191.tar.gz
tar -zxvf NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191.tar.gz
cd NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191
If you need to turn on any advanced features edit the os-registry.c file
now type this and enter:
make install SYSINCLUDE=/usr/src/linux/include
cd..
cd NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4191
make install
edit the /etc/X11/XFConfig-4 file with vi
vi /etc/X11/XFConfig-4
comment out the DRI lines with a # and change the driver to nvidia
ie::::example
Section “Module”
Load “dbe”
Load “extmod”
Load “fbdevhw”
# Load “dri”
Load “glx”
Load “record”
Load “freetype”
Load “type1”
******
Section “Device”
# no known options
Identifier “NVIDIA GeForce 4 ti4200”
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “NVIDIA GeForce 4 ti4200”
BoardName “NVIDIA GeForce 4 ti4200”
Option “NvAgp” “1”
#BusID
*************
#Section “DRI”
# Mode 0666
#EndSection
>Dismissive invective from Eugenia
I have absolutely no idea what this means in english.
Nore do I, and I live here.
Didn’t know they has Road Runner in England.
I didn’t know what invective meant either. But all it takes is a quick trip to dictionary.com and you have expanded your vocabulary. Whats more is the word seems a very accurate description for the idea he was communicating.
From dictionary.com
1. Denunciatory or abusive language; vituperation.
2. Denunciatory or abusive expression or discourse
Lets not limit ourselves to the lowest common denominator in language.
About the new threads:
GStreamer was fubared by the i686 glibc in redhat 8.0, and in response the opt scheduler was developed which doesn’t use threads. Threading has gone through a major change in the 8.1 glibc and kernel, which has unfortunately borked Wine unless you use a workaround.
In general hopefully threading will not be a huge problem with GStreamer in redhat 8.1
>>Dismissive invective from Eugenia
> I have absolutely no idea what this means in english.
Dismissive: To dismiss
Invective: Abusive language
While I often disagree with you Eugenia, this just simply is not true. This guy is trolling.
I’m a Linux user from way back, as I’m sure many others that visit this site are. I’ve used SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, and Yellow Dog as well as Red Hat. The latest version of Red Hat I used was 7.3. I did notice after the release of RH 8 and Mandrake 9 that 7.3, although still very functional for me as a desktop OS (running Gnome 1.x), was getting long in the tooth.
My choices boiled down to two distros: Mandrake 9.0 and Red Hat 8. I heard much about the new BlueCurve theme, but I also wanted something that supported the latest and greatest stable software. After comparing the two from reviews I had read, I chose to go with Mandrake…and I was happy.
However, when I tried to install the RPM of the latest version of Mozilla that worked with Red Hat 8, I was a bit disappointed. After searching through newsgroups for why this would not work (considering both RH 8 and Mandrake 9 seemed basically on par with one another), I found out that RH’s version of the GCC compiler was different from what Mandrake (and apparently many other distros) had installed. I then started to see articles about how RH 8 used internally-hacked versions of beta software to get everything to work. Then I heard about the incident with KDE.
I’m sure many of you have seen or heard about Mosfet’s reason for not supporting Red Hat. Personally, I don’t blame him, or many of the other developers for KDE.
Now, I may have preference towards Gnome, but I have used KDE and I think it’s a great desktop environment. I also believe that the open source community is a community that always works together for the common good of computing. And I do believe that companies using/creating open source software should adhere to this.
From what I’ve seen on the Internet, Red Hat failed to do this with 8.0 and I will no longer be using the distro. I’m hoping 8.1 will change this trend. If they do not want to work openly with KDE developers, then shey should not even bother to include KDE instead of hacking it the way they did, no matter how unified it makes the two environments. That job is up to the GNOME and KDE teams to work on. Red Hat’s actions on this subject negatively affect the comradary, cooperation, and TRUST in the open source community. Nobody wants another Microsoft, let alone a company that uses Microsoft tactics with developers.
ogg!
Almost all original material contributed by OSnews writers is under the heading “reviews.” Reviews are, by definition, subjective.
You can plead KDE’s case, or anyone else’s case, on a news site, but not on a site where the reviewer is communicating personal preference.
We aren’t policiticians nor a network supporting a political candidate. We aren’t subject to “equal time” laws. KDE gets PLENTY of discsussion on OSNews.com. If this particular issues burns you, you should address your problem with Red Hat, or possibly the KDE team directly.
puppet, if you’ve been coming here for 6-7 months, it is off to me that you would pick, of all things, this quicki-review (and it was termed as such) to accuse Eugenia of “dismissive invective”. Of all things, it was not a review of KDE 3.1. Over the course of time, Eugenia has been accused of being either biased towards or biased against every OS imaginable. So, it is humorous but tiring to see this sort of thing again and again.
Claudio, I respect your opinion – it is very well put. I too think KDE 3.1 is a major advance. However, I have to be honest, I like what Red Hat did with BlueCurve. It is, I think, in fact, the answer to the ongoing Gnome/KDE business. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it is *the* answer, to the exclusion of others, but it is a step in the right direction. As far as Linux is concerened. I use Red Hat 8 and Lycoris. Both, in their own ways, provide a consistent interface. I, like many people, are tired of these battle and have come to long for cohesion and itegration in Linux.
Eugenia, did you set up your smbpasswd file for the new Redhat box? It sounds like you may not have permissions set properly for your Redhat box or the account name it’s using.
did they fix the bug that would not allow you to redefine your security settings throught the GUI IPTable app. It RH 8.0 – it simply doesn’t work … is it fix in 8.1?
I just finished dowloading the beta and installing it.
(on a p4, ti4200 graphics with geforce 4 generic drivers)
Wow, it looks good. I always liked the look of gnome more than KDE. The fonts in Mozilla look good too.
But I did notice that in the second part of the install ( after rebooting) and in the login, the text was all differnt colours, but while running the text is all black, and it looks good too.
It installed much better than beta2.
Thank you for listening to my little rant. . .
I trust that with your “longer reviews” you will pay some objective attention to KDE 3.1, since it is a signinificant step in KDE history (a step forward, or backward, it is up to your review to decide). Just please view it from a non-RH point of view in case they decide to butcher it again. Maybe try Mandrake 9.1 (VERY impressive so far. . . especially for a company that should be on the ropes)
As far as “trolling” is concerned. I’m interested in neither pro-KDE nor pro-gnome advocation — I just hope that osnews stays objective (and thorough) about both.
As far as my comment about “dismissive invective goes”, a few of Webster’s definitions go as follows:
dismissive: tending to dismiss or reject
invective: Characterized by invection; critical; denunciatory; satirical; abusive; railing.
I mean no disrespect. . . hats off to Eugenia for giving us a place to debate. Let’s keep the debate objective, thoughtful. . . and humming.
I’m still a big fan. . . (your quick response showed me that you care a LOT about the formus at osnews + calling me “sweatheart” gets you milage too, Eugenia – some things never change)
Do what they have to to get somewhere and some /linux/ redistributers such as redhat suse and lindows try to do something for the desktop users albeit aiming at the lowest common denominators doing so.
I’d love to see /linux/ desktops in wide use but all this kde vs. gnome bitching and DE vs. “my 31337 windowmanager” has got to stop.
Take Eugenia, she brings a valuable asset for these companies and to us “would be developers” as she has a specific proffession called “usability engineer” meaning, she knows generally what she does.
I don’t know for the other editors of this board but when it come’s to her words about ui design I tend to listen and evolve her ideas.
so Let us not reiterate this de vs. wm sheit.
let’s discuss how to get somewhere instead.
Even though Thompson has said that they won’t charge free mp3 players for using mp3 decoding, the GPL requires that anything with a GPL must not have software patents associated with it. (I’m not a GPL fanatic but this *is* what the license contains.) Because of that xmms, which is GPL’d, has a license problem if it has an mp3 plugin.
Phoebe can’t use the nvidia binaries, becasue the kernel is compiled with one version of gcc and X windows is compiled with another version of gcc. This is what causes the compile errors when one tries to compile the nvidia binaries(-“compiling” “binaries”-actually only a few header files get compiled because the actual driver code is closed-source and is not actually compiled when one uses the SRPMS or tar.gz version of the nvidia drivers…X windows 4.2.99.4 (pre-final release 4.3) itself has no problems whatsoever with the nvidia drivers-I am using this now on gentoo. I downloaded the original phoebe (8.0.92) some two months ago and liked it aside from NO NTFS support- which is stupid(only need read-only support) and the nvidia driver problem.
I will never understand the deal with gcc versions and redhat- is their code so unstable that they can only get things to compile using specific versions of gcc, and different versions of gcc for different apps ? this is ridiculous- every app on the system from top to bottom should be compiled with the same version of gcc and glibc….This is a kludge job which introduces artificial incompatibilities which are not neessary. Why should I have a) either recompile the kernel with the same gcc version with which X windows was compiled or b) recompile X windows with the same gcc version with which the kernel was compiled – just so I can use nvidia’s BINARY drivers ? When a distribution uses such a screwed up combination of various gcc versions and glibc versions this makes compiling new software for the target system quite invovled and difficult- as in the case of trying to replace the working gstreamer system in Phoebe with one that supports mp3’s via compilation. Similiar to add xft/freetype2 support to SuSE 8.1- good luck…….
I liked Phoebe so much that if it were not for these issues I would love to use it as the OS for my girlfriends computer- as it stands I am custom rolling my own install using gentoo – so that I can boot her machine from CD and install pre-compiled optimized binaries for her system without having to do a complete compile on her system -she will be using X windows 4.2.99.4 + GNOME2.2 + various KDE apps like K3b and kportage (which I may just statically build) + Phoenix .50 w/GTK2/Freetype + Evolution-1.3(GTK2) + Gimp -1.3.11 (GTK2) + Open Office 1.0.2 + GAIM-CVS(GTK2) and lots of multimedia stuff(Mplayer(GTK2)/mplayerpug-in/totem/xine) and TuxRacer….all apps except for a couple fo really good KDE 3.1 apps will be GTK2/freetype based……
Which is why MP3 support for xmms comes in the form of a plugin- as longs a mp3 decoding software is not hardcoded into the GPL program itself that GPL program *can* use a mp3 plugin which is distinct from the program. Redhat probably should avoid shipping distros with pre-compiled mad/lame/ffmeg/libdvdnav/libdvdcss libraries.
But they could ship the source and setup scripts enabling the user upon first run to compile these libraries themeselves-and then after this decsion has been(user either wants to or not) compile the multimedia apps which can use these libraries (xmms/gstreamer/mplayer/xine)- ie. user installs Phoebe, after reboot system comes up and user is confronted with a dialogue- “would you like to enable additional media support for your multimedia applications (yes/no) please review additional licenscing information)” and then another dialogue would appear -“which mulitmedia applications should be compiled with support for additional media -check the following a) mplayer b) xine c) xmms d) gstreamer” and once the user has selected which apps he/she wants a script should be excecuted which then does configure/make/make install) That way users could decide if they want these things and the company is then free of legal liability because they did not distribute compiled binaries containing stuff with questionable licenscing……this would add at the most one additional hour of post-install setup time for compiling and installing support for this stuff- and that is a lot less time than newbies spend having to figure this stuff out the hardway…..
Great review! Is that an SWF authoring program I see in your second screenshot?
It is great to know that Linux with Redhat is going to be a
world best operating system…
Although because of my strong RMS tendencies, I tend to tend toward Debian, 686 optimization is nice without having to babysit a Gentoo install for 24 hours on a fast connection. Red Hat has them all beat now on ease AND configurability during the installation process. That said, I just can’t bring myself to use it. Too commercial… too desktop user in the dust…. too business oriented…. All those are positive qualities for capatalist pigs though. I’ll stick with Debian. RPM’s suK, though they have become a bit more tolerable because of APT and Synaptic. I’d rather FreeBSD than RedHat. At least I am assured of met dependencies, at least on the installation disks, unlike the very sloppy RedHat.
Red Hat has them all beat now on ease AND configurability during the installation process. That said, I just can’t bring myself to use it. Too commercial… too desktop user in the dust…. too business oriented…. All those are positive qualities for capatalist pigs though.
XP Pro, one of the finest desktop OS’ of all time, is business orientated….I use it as a home OS and it does everything i need and more. Why would these qualities make a bad OS, or one solely for ‘capitalist pigs’ as you put it. Pull your head out of the sand my friend, the world doesn’t want hardcore CLI…..they want sexy GUI and ease of use….as per RedHat 8 and onwards.
I am strongly encouraged by this release, I can finally see an OS able to offer the platform for home users upon which a usable environment can be based. All that’s needed now is the apps!
@rajan r: There is no need to discuss wether other people could afford thousands USD for the QT licencse. This is up to them. I won’t and thus I will use GTK if I ever make a Linux app.
@RonG: I feel quite the same. Try aranym. I will do so If I have a usable Linux running at home.
http://aranym.sourceforge.net/
to Ludwig:
“@rajan r: There is no need to discuss wether other people could afford thousands USD for the QT licencse. This is up to them. I won’t and thus I will use GTK if I ever make a Linux app.”
Does that mean that your are planning to charge for your linux app if you ever make it? If so, that’s nice, you don’t want to pay for the tools you are going to use, but want people to pay for your app. It’s really nice!
Personally, I think you would have better time to market with Qt. $2000 isn’t all that much, unless you aren’t aiming high (meaning just want to make a shareware and target guys that actually browse around freshmeat finding for new stuff to try).
Meanwhle, if you are too stingy with $2000, then I would go for something like FOX or wxWindows (not obvilion to the fact that wxWindows on Windows is based on GTK+). Besides, Red Hat could have very well fixed this situation if they have gone the KDE route as opposed to GNOME.
” I believe, or heard at one time, that Mozilla is going GTK on Unix systems, I could be wrong. On the ones above, you are definitely telling falsehoods, Rull. Go check.”
I wasnt talking about GTK, I was talking about the Gnome2 platform/API. Evolution, mozilla and openoffice does not use Gnome2, that is a big problem for creating a consistent desktop. Nautilus seems out of place in the Gnome2 desktop (regardless same toolkit), nowhere nere as smoothly integrated in the environment as KDE:s Konqueror.
My basic point still stands. There is no future in a desktop using multiple gui toolkits. I dont mind there are several DE projects, gui toolkits etc, choice is good, but the result when mixing them up on the same desktop isnt really great.
Now, I have not done a lot of programming in Linux, but I have made use of the QT and KDE APIs before. If I understand things correctly, these APIs take all of the hard work of rendering graphical components, such as a button, to the X Window System. In my browsing of articles concerning programming graphical apps for X, I have come to the understanding that it is fairly complex to draw something as simple as a button if programming directly to X. QT and GTK+ make this easier by abstracting away the difficulties of programming directly to X. So, why do QT and GTK+ apps take a little longer to load up? Well, by using QT and GTK+, you’ve added another layer. So, it takes a little longer than if the programmer had written directly to X. Just my 2 cents.
RMS…blah Sorry… maybe I should change my name to flame bait. All due respect to his contributions to technology and the world in general, that man scares the piss out of me. I think his take on where technology licensing should be at this point in history is very much like Lenin’s take on where russian and world politics should have been in his lifespan.
All comparisons between RMS and communism aside, at the root of it, it’s really quite similar. Trying to bring something in (force in lenin’s case) that the world was not ready for.
Thanks for the mini-review Eugenia. I downloaded the iso files, installed it, and am very pleased with the changes.
I have tried Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse, and Xandros(yep, the Deluxe model) in their most recent releases and was not pleased with them(for various reasons regarding each one). This Red Hat beta release even found my scanner, printer, etc.
and appears to work great so far.
I use WinXP and have been looking for a Linux distro to migrate too. It appears Red Hat is getting closer.