LinuxPlanet reviews Red Hat Linux 9. Another story, by Guru Labs, is written mostly for system admins. Also, MozillaQuest has published a brief interview with Mark de Visser, Vice President of Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat 9 Offers Continutity, Transparency for Users
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Another difference between GNUCash 1.6 and 1.8 is that 1.8 offers scheduled transactions (i.e. monthly bills, rent, paychecks)
someone tell mozillaquest to make the font size smaller, it’s unreadable, like it’s designed by a 10 year old
“We do not do point releases anymore on the free versions”
duh ?
I’ve got RH 9 installed, I’ve added apt from shrike.freshrpms.net, installed synaptic, then from that I’ve installed ogle, mplayer, xmmx mp3 plugin, and various encoders/decoders, etc. I’ve installed flash 6, java 1.4.1, and acrobat. I’ve installed the bluecurve theme for mozilla.
RH 9 seems fast and stable. When started for the first time after a fresh reboot, OpenOffice.org starts up in about 11 seconds, which is about 8 seconds faster than on my Mandrake installation.
The new samba gui tool is nice. I’ve used the nifty new nvidia driver installer and I’m now getting 10-20% more fps in glxgears.
I’ve got Quake 3 running beautifully. UT2003 is next.
All is good. Really good.
What did you do for sound in quake 3? did you have to load alsa or did it come with it (working out of the box)?
I did’t have to do anything to have sound working in Quake3. It just worked out of the box for me. It’s not alsa, though. But, you can get the alsa stuff at the freshrpms site I referenced in my first post.
Please explain about the nvidia driver installer… ut2003 may have some problems installing. If you do, just disable supermount and mount each CD manually. Watch what you say about Mandrake. I got flamed to hell and back for posting an honest experience w/ Mandrake.
Yes, nvidia released new drivers yesterday that are now contained in one simple installer that works across all distros. Very nice. Works great in RH 9.
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_ia32_1.0-4349
Not sure what sort of problems you are having w/ UT2003. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve heard it works fine. You mention supermount — RH doesn’t use supermount. That’s a Mandrake only feature.
In the words of Google the search engine:
Did you mean: Continuity
🙂
“continutity” is such an amusing word! Just say it out loud.
The headline was taken verbatim from the LinuxPlanet article, spelling mistakes and all. Perhaps if Linux had a standard, systemwide spell check service like OS X this wouldn’t be an issue.
It should be Continudity, Transparency …
Imagine this: beautiful girls with transparent clothes …
Redhat 9 isn’t exactly what one would call “fast”. It is faster than release 8 ,however, cannot touch the speed of slackware or a probaly configured gentoo box.
It’s just as fast as Gentoo or Slackware, quit spreading lies.
haven’t used it.
Eugenia wrote that even the power and glory of a properly configured Gentoo box isn’t as fast as stock FreeBSD. SSO either I can spend hours, even days compiling and building Gentoo or just install FreeBSD from cd. Hmmmm…
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=937
I’ve got all three on my system. RedHat is the most useable. Slackware uses the stock kernel and suffers from interactivity dropouts – Gentoo and RH do not. There is no perceivable difference between the speed of Gentoo and RH except for the boot-up process in which RH is slower. Gentoo does suffer from minor stability problems related to the pre-empt kernel patches it uses though.
Yes, what you say is exactly the same as my experience. I have slack 9 on another partition and I used to have a gentoo install. Slack definitely boots the fastest, without a doubt. It boots incredibly fast. But, day to day tasks like running mozilla, openoffice etc., it’s all the same between the three as far as speed goes. Mozilla for example, doesn’t load any faster on a clean reboot of any particular distro. Gentoo just take too long to get to a point of usability versus no real perceptible speed difference, in my experience. For me, the best overall is Red Hat. YMMV.
With my current installation of MDK9.1, I can only assume from this experience is that out of the box.
Mandrake 9.1
KDE = fast
Gnome= slower (not as snappy)
Redhat 8.0
KDE=average
Gnome=fast
This is also a result of where there priorities lie in desktop environments.
don’t know HOW to use it.
Does anyone know the details on the kernel that ships with 9? I’m curious if it has the preempt stuff and the vm changes.
Of course red hat 9 isnt as fast as Slack or Gentoo, but slack is a very basic os as it, desgined for you to add what you need to it, and gentoo is designed for speed and stability. Red Hat has turned to focus on ease of use and a good set of tools and apps.
Btw, move both my boxes to red hat 9 this morning, both working beautifully so far. Surprisingly, 9 works with surprising speed on my 500mhz K6, something 8.0 never dreamed of.
It is good to hear Redhat is making progress. It is probably my favorite of the “corporate” distros. Redhat just seems to feel more professional to me than SuSE or Mandrake did. Hopefully they keep with that feel as a lot of people coming from a windows world feel reasonably comfortable there.
I find it strange that the “newbie” focus so much on eye candy, while Windows 98 (I believe the most used Windows OS?) was so simple and basic.
Ah well, Redhat is a good distro with smart people behind it.
I think Redhat should finally drop KDE. It’s clear that they focus on GNOME anyway. Why waste the limited developer resources on KDE? I think other commercial distros did the right think by focusing on one DE.
I use KDE only but I strongly agree that RedHat should really think about droping KDE altogther.
1.Why waste the limited developer resources on KDE?
2. Too confusing for newbies to have different DE
3. RedHat is for corporate users, two DEs does not make sense.
4. Halfass support will win over any serious KDE users.
Please RedHat drop KDE and those other WM. Spend your time wisely.
Just fix it, I don’t mean like the way you did last time. In which many parts of it only appear to work but do not really, because some programs have missing features.
Mosfet explains a little on this: http://mosfet.org/noredhat.html
Oh bascule you’re such a tease sometimes
There is such a beast, it’s called GNU aspell. Unfortunately, developer awareness of this thing is quite low. GTK1.2 used to have support for spellchecking in edit boxes, it highlighted incorrect words in red, but GTK2 doesn’t seem to have any equivalent
I’ll go file a bug in bugzilla about that.
Riight, like there’s any credibility there. LOL
OK I had a Gentoo box running 1.4rc3 then ended up in the situation where kdeutils-3.1.1 would not emerge at all… So I decided to move this box to LM9.1 and I have to say that I’m really pleased with it (appart from a pbm with my Zip drive which I think is due to the kernel they used). I also installed it on my laptop and it’s fine so far although I expect endless troubles when I’ll try to setup my wireless network card…
I do not want to start a troll or a distro war or whatever but is there anything RH9 can bring to me that LM9.1 does not (appart from the brand name)?. I prefer to use KDE in general although I dabble with Gnome from time to time.
The things I like about Mandrake are:
– wealth of up-to-date packages on the 3 CDs
– urpmi
– the unified menu
– some nice config tools
– easy to setup LVM with EXT3 or ReiserFS partitions
The one distro I’d like to try is Debian (unstable) just to be able to make up my mind on apt-get
When I setup a new box for myself or at work I need to be able to do it quickly so as much as I love the Gentoo concept it’s almost a no-go at work and even at home it take s way too long to setup to your liking.
If Mandrake 9.1 is working well for you, then why are you considering switching? All distros are more or less the same. I prefer RH because of its stability, large adoption (meaning there are rpms for just about anything for RH), and excellent written support (books) that are available. I tried Mandrake in the past and yes, it’s nice and very newbie friendly, but just seemed a little … flaky to me. Of course, everyone’s experience is different, so YMMV.
So, long story short: stick with Mandrake since you are pleased with it.
Thanks Anonymous.
It’s not so much I’m considering switching but I like to try different distro to know what I’m talking about
… and yes I agree some gremlins in LM9.1 may push me to try something else even if it works fine for 98% of what I need to do.
Well, Woollhara, I understand what you’re saying. As to some of your specific questions, there are not as many packages on the RH CD’s as the Mandrake CD’s. However, any packages that are not there can be easily obtained, mostly through the great apt repository maintained by Matthias Saou at http://shrike.freshrpms.net. There is no urpmi equivalent in RH, but one can use apt4rpm available at the aforementioned freshrpms site. It makes updating packages very easy. As for unified menu… do mean same menus across different DE’s? If so, then yes, I think RH does this, but I’m not entirely sure since I do not install KDE — ever since GNOME 2.2, I’ve switched away from KDE to GNOME.
Nice config tools, yes RH has some very nice GTK2+ gui tools for most everything, like networking, printers, adding users, samba, etc.
Not sure about LVM, but I would imagine it’s there.
Give it a try!
Cheers.
woolhara, if you *do* have trouble getting your WLAN card working with MDK 9.1, you can drop me a line if you want – I’ve got it working fine and I know most of the gotchas, so I might be able to help out =). The email address I’m using for this post is valid.
I am just moving to Linux and was wondering what it is.
urpmi is a tool developed by MandrakeSoft to allow easy installation of rpm packages with dependencies checking (sort of the equivalent of apt-get in Debian). It alleviates quite considerably the pain of dealing qith rpms.
For more info:
http://www.urpmi.org/en/index.html
Enjoy.
I just upgraded from RH8 to RH9 entirely via APT, including the kernel upgrade to 2.4.20-8. Surprisingly, the upgrade seems to have worked perfectly.
wow, I had always wondered if that would actually work. The reason I was thinking it might not is because even in debian when you upgrade from one distro to the next they usually recommend using aptitude which handels “recommended dependencies”. Also in debian many packages have scripts to set them up. So xfree seemed to upgrade ok and everything? Please let me know the details and if since you’ve posted u’ve run into any problems