Today, Red Hat Linux 9 has been “officially” released to the masses via the FTP servers, and we host here a mini-interview with Matt Wilson, Manager, Base Operating Systems at Red Hat, Inc.1. What is in your opinion the most important new feature or update found on Red Hat Linux 9 that could ‘push’ users to upgrade or purchase it?
Matt Wilson: For technical users, the new Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) will be the most interesting addition.
For the desktop or home user, the improved menu layout, refined Bluecurve look and feel, anti-aliased Mozilla font rendering, and alpha blended mouse cursors are all features that could influence users to upgrade.
And, of course, each release of Red Hat Linux supports more hardware than the one before it. Switching our printing system to CUPS helps here as well.
2. How does Red Hat see the competition around its business? Do you mostly compete with other Unix variants or your main focus is
competing against Windows/Macs?
Matt Wilson: Red Hat’s main focus has been and will continue to be the enterprise.
We’ve had great success in migrating enterprise customers from
proprietary UNIX.
3. On the much discussed topic of the absense of mp3 codecs from
your products: While it is easy for a user to install the needed
codec manually (if he/she knows where to get them) and while it is
known the GPL incompatibility with mp3, don’t you think that “making it less convienient [for the user] and with less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users” as a Red Hat Linux user said recently? Is there any way around this limitation of Red Hat Linux 9 for future releases?
Matt Wilson: In Red Hat Linux we attempt to provide feature parity for mp3
playback by including Ogg Vorbis. If the codecs were not patent encumbered
we would certainly include them. This applies to all areas of Red Hat
Linux. We would prefer to enable the patented TrueType hinting algorithms in FreeType to improve our font rendering, but this is not possible.
4. Why there was no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat Linux 9’s
XFree86 4.3? The current tool still requires you to unload/reload X
in order to change a resolution.
Matt Wilson: We’re planning to include RandR support in our X configuration tool in a future release. We were not certain that XFree86 4.3.0 would be released in time for us to depend on the RandR functionality. In the meantime, one can modify the screen size on the command line by using the ‘xrandr’ utility.
5. What features were left out of the 9 release because of time
pressure or other reasons?
Matt Wilson: Extended Attributes (EAs) and Access Control Lists (ACLs). During
our testing we found deadlock conditions in the code. We have the fix
now and EA/ACL support should be in the next release.
6. Red Hat does a lot of work in the desktop area with Gnome and
GTK+. What are the plans for the next few years regarding the
[corporate] desktop? What changes need to be made to the system to
look and feel more integrated to the underlying system in your
opinion?
Matt Wilson: The needed changes are a matter of a thousand details, rather than a
dozen huge projects. It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen as
much of it will come from the community of vendors and volunteers
outside of Red Hat. For our part, we’ll probably continue to focus
efforts on integration work (bringing together open source components
and our own enhancements into a unified whole), platform
infrastructure (such as GTK+, D-BUS, X Window System improvements),
and increasingly on applications such as the web browser and office
suite. One large area that needs to be addressed is enterprise
manageability; there are partial answers in GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice,
and Mozilla, but something more unified and comprehensive would be
beneficial.
7. Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich
filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about? While I am
aware of the rare cases of instability found on these filesystems,
couldn’t Red Hat work on resolving these issues in order to provide
a more feature-complete fs?
Matt Wilson: I would argue that ext3 isn’t feature deficient compared to ReiserFS or XFS, they just have some different filesystem approaches. There is tremendous value in being able to improve the filesystem that all of our users are currently using, allowing them to continue to use their existing filesystems while taking advantage of new developments as they appear.
8. Why isn’t Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel
crashes and bugs that happen very often when running the accelerated
Nvidia drivers on many PCs (e.g. with some VIA chipsets)? (A strategic alliance of a sort, similar
in the way Apple does it, which ensures highest compatibility and
testing.)
Matt Wilson: I do communicate with NVIDIA informally to provide them with assistance as they develop their drivers for new releases of our products. We are unable to provide any additional assistance on their code due to the binary-only nature of their driver.
9. Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses
(e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD
applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback
support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing
Microsoft’s Web Fonts too? Is Red Hat open regarding licensing
technologies and services from other sources?
Matt Wilson: We will not include technology that prevents Red Hat Linux from being freely distributed. Including software that places these kinds of restrictions on our community of users does not help drive Open Source software.
10. Currently, no matter how I turn it, downloading RPMs from the
web can create many dependancy problems most of the time. Is there
any “plan” at Red Hat to find a way around this? For example,
“enforcing” developers to statically link needed libraries that
don’t ship by default with Red Hat Linux (only for small library
deps). Or to create a web site, e.g. apps.redhat.com, where people
can download tried and tested RPMs from the dev. community that
“work out of the box” with only a few clicks away. Any thoughts on
something like this?
Matt Wilson: It sounds like an interesting idea. Though if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have
dependency problems.
“Though if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have dependency problems”
I am finding it tough to believe that the reason for RPM dependency hell is that developers don’t follow LSB standards. I mean either this fact is a closely guarded secret or it implies that the Linux developers are not competent enough.
I thought that the reason for dependency hell with RPM is that it does not intuitively look for dependencies.
Anyhoo, As far as usibility goes…RPM will never top apt-get or portage for that matter.
/troll off
The man’s answers sounded like he was responding to a lawyer’s probing. The questions are interesting, but but the answers are neither informative nor useful. This is very poor PR.
Anyways, Redhat 9 is more like Redhat 8.00001. You can barely notice any difference between 8 and 9. In fact, coming from 8, Redhat 9 is totally anti-climatic. Redhat would have to be the one catching up now, because the new Mandrake and Suse are both much better than Redhat 9. On the desktop anyhow.
> The questions are interesting, but but the answers are neither informative nor useful.
Unfortunately, I will have to agree… Normally Matt is quite verbose from what I make from their mailing lists, but for this interview he seemed not very willing to talk about future plans…
Maybe it is a policy at RH to not talk too much, dunno…
I wanted to put a tip here. I’d been waiting for Linux distros to support the Intel 845 chipset for months. It seemed to me that this was the logical next set in the tradition of the 810 and 815. It took a long time though.
Red Hat 9 does support it. However, watch out for one thing. I don’t know if this is due specifically to the chipset or the Compaq 7550 monitor I am using. At any rate, you install RH 9 and all seems to go well and, then, at reboot, the default bootloader, grub, hangs and all comes to a halt. If that happens to you under these conditions, during installation, choose LILO as your bootloader insteaf of Grub and all will be well.
Uhh no, the differences are very obvious. You just have to use it for more than a minute or two to see them. Bluecurve is more fluid, the menus look better. It’s faster, you can put it under a heavy load and still function. There’s a new kernel with a TON of new drivers (including my AGP adapter that isn’t supported by Linus’s 2.4.20). Use it for a few days, and you’ll see why as well.
dependency hell from RPMs is a load of Bull$h!t, i have compiled software from sourcecode and on occasion (not very often) the sourcecode will not compile because of depencency problems, Linux does not care what type of install you do, it is just that some software depends on other software in order to function properly…
apt-get does a pretty good job of resolving dependencys and finds/downloads/installs the dependant packages, and gcc will make a list of library files that are needed in order for the sourcecode to sucesfully compile/make/install, one is more automated & the other just leaves it up to you to find & install the needed files…
Anyhoo, As far as usibility goes…RPM will never top apt-get or portage for that matter.
Of course, and dpkg will never top urpmi.
Please don’t compare rpm to apt, they are not aimed at the same functionality. One of the issues is that RH does not have a similar tool (as Mandrake does in urpmi).
I am so disapointed! This release is nothing like I hoped it would be. It’s sad that there is so little new stuff. Thank God that Suse is releasing 8.2 soon. At least they have made an effort to give something new. Redhat looks nice, but from a home user perspective I must say that nothing much has changed. No hotplug support, terrible scanner support, XSane 0.89 while Mandrake 9.1 has chosen 0.90 with updated libs so more scanners are covered.
I had high hopes for this release, but I can promise that Redhat has lost me! I will no more go for Redhat softwarel. Create something new and I will think about it.
Wishes for å new release.
Graphical boot, instead of the boring old text based. Suse 8.2 has done this. Much better support for HW. Hot plug support. MPlayer included. There should be no reason why this is a problem for Redhat when a lot of other distributors are including it.
I agree with the comment above, it should be Redhat 8.000001. This release sucks.
So then add apt-get to your Redhat install. I did this with the beta (Phoebe) and it worked great!
Go <a href=”http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/?section=3“>here and follow the directions.
If for some reason the above link’s not interpreted correcty by your browser, here it is in long form:
http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/?section=3
eugenia, ur so 1337!
No, I am just Greek. That’s the real word. 😉
Redhat is much better than Mandrake IMHO.
Redhat uses Nautilus to access samba shares. Perfect. I do not know what mounting shares is anymore. GNOME-VFS for you there. Creating Samba shares is a breeze. And so is settin permissions on them. I do not care much for a ‘graphical boot’ Nothing in it for me yes. Nice graphical touch. an Redhat could do it in a flash if they wanted to. I prefer knowing exactly whta the computer is doin at boot time to enable me to find problems if there are any.
Do people here not care about NPTL???
Why should Redhat do a radical UI change with every release. It is based on GNOME2.2 and KDE3.1 which are point releases. Redhat has done a sterling job of polishing up the menus. They are very Intuitive now.
Redhat’s hardware detection is the best. Period.
MPLayer might have legal issues anyway. Better safe than sorry if you are Redhat. Too large and too nice a target.
The biggest omission IMHO is a way to uninstall third party rpms. But they are working on it. Anyway stop complaining about Redhat. They are not a monopoly. If Mandrake does it for you, then good, you do not need Redhat. You probably do benefit indirectly from it though. You will be thankful for NPTL soon enough. And for all those kernel developments.
>Redhat uses Nautilus to access samba shares. Perfect.
Too bad that it doesn’t work for me though. I have already filled two seperate bug reports on the Red Hat bugzilla for two different bugs about Samba/Nautilus on RHL9…
http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
Nothing more than the usual pathetic PR lingo, Bit Torrent is doing it’s job as I type this and can wait to see “all new things”. Besides total mmedia nakedness I was disappointed how slow RH 8.0 was. Anyway, I’m starting to miss the topic of this post.
Will you please stop plugin your review every time we have a red hat story over here? YES, we know about the review, we already linked it, it was linked a number of times from the forum, it was good, now get over it.
>Though if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB,
AHA. and how to write LSB applications ? Maybe not that hard, but compiling it? That’s harder. I tried with a few of our custom apps. Downloadet the lsbdev-base , and lsbdev-cc. Now, our app compiles fine on everything from Solaris 2.6 to Redhat 6.1 to RHL 9. But LSB ? Nope. LSB didn’t specifie the SunRPC headers/structures we needed. It also failed on an fcntl call using F_LOCK. On the apps that did compile, the lsbcc didn’t make correct LSB binaries on RHL 9
/opt/lsbappchk/bin/lsbappchk for LSB Specification 1.3.0
Checking binary dorigen
Incorrect program interpreter: /lib/ld-linux.so.2
Header[ 1] PT_INTERP Failed
Found wrong intepreter in .interp section: /lib/ld-linux.so.2 instead of: /lib/ld-lsb.so.1
Section .eh_frame: sh_flags is wrong. expecting 3, got 2
Symbol __ctype_b_loc used, but not part of LSB
To bad. I lost my faith in LSB for this.
—
[email protected]
Custom RHL 9 RPMs at:
http://utelsystems.dyndns.org/
It think that RHL 9 have several improvements that I like too much. But I also think that they must wait for a couple weeks and then add the gnome fixes, the new gaim/GTK2, add their ACL and EA (as they already have the patches) and they also could improve Open Office a little bit.
I just wait two or three weeks more and then deliver a more complete, homogeneus and bug-free product. So, I think that I will install Ximian Desktop to solve these problems.
I like the Open Source politics of RH. If anyone demands patents issues to any linux distro, RH will not have problems with that. And I think that they motivate the Open Source standarization.
I like these things, just because you want NTFS, Quicktime, Media Player, DVD, mp3s, you dont need to have something that could be illegal. But I will offer an alternative selling must-be-closed software and then pay a fee for that. It must be cheaper than Windows.
I think that RH could do it, just because is big. And, if you want some Open Source programs that could be illegal, do it at your own risk.
Anyway, I think that all Open Source companies are great, and RH is one of them. Very wise decisions, but it could be better.
Say what? My USB keyboard, mouse, and camera all seem to tell me otherwise.
Could you elaborate on the 2 bugs you filed ref: Gnome & Samba? Are they asthetic or show-stoppers?
“I just wait two or three weeks more and then deliver a more complete, homogeneus and bug-free product.”
In software development, you can always wait two more weeks! Then you never release anything! Sure latest fix for gnome will be nice but then there will be KDE or Gaim or kernel or whatever fix that makes you wait two more weeks. Oh, and by then, why not wait two more weeks for the next major release of Gnome!
I think the Redhat Network is here to precisely deliver the incremental bug fixes.
>Are they asthetic or show-stoppers?
Show stoppers. They used to kill Nautilus, then the RH guy fixed the crash, but he was still not able to fix and mount my samba share on a WinXP PRO machine (macosx mounts it just fine). Search the red hat bugzilla for the two bugs submitted by me.
Too bad that it (SMB browsing via Nautilus) doesn’t work for me though. I have already filled two seperate bug reports on the Red Hat bugzilla for two different bugs about Samba/Nautilus on RHL9…
What are your problems?
Anyway, SMB browsing on the file manager is IMHO the “right” approach. Tell people “you can browse your local files with the file manager but you cannot browse your network with it” is bad. Hope it’s also default in KDE.
Funny that. It always worked for me. No offense, but maybe some of your settings were wrong. But I like Redhat 9.
And, it found my USB mouse before without problems. With MDK it used to jump all over the place. Although it is not a problem now i got an optical PS/2 mouse. But even windows xp had trouble with that when installing, although it worked fine when done. What we need is a proper sound standard for Linux which should encourage driver writers to write drivers for linux.
>No offense, but maybe some of your settings were wrong.
Are you kidding me? What kind of “settings” do I need to mount a samba share on a winxp machine on my network?
And if you want to know.. Lindows 3.0 can mount that very same share “just like that” under Konqueror (and MacOSX can too), while both Red Hat 9 and SuSE 8.2 can not, neither via konqueror or Nautilus. The Nautilus/Konqueror bug seems to be a samba backend bug.
Search the bugzilla if you want to read the bug reports, don’t ask me to copy/paste here a page of full explanations. It is not the right place. Go to Red Hat’s bugzilla and search through my email address and then reply there regarding this.
I should probably clarify the comment from Matt about the LSB….
At the moment, the LSB provides some recommendations that you can use to build portable packages. Unfortunately, because there are no standards for package metadata, that means you can only depend on interfaces in the LSB. Because every app that’s useful needs more interfaces than just that, you have to statically link it all. Because that sucks, nobody does it.
Yes, the lsbcc program isn’t perfect, we know that, I’m wrestling with it at the moment in fact to try and get it to build a hello world GTK program. The general idea is sound, and the agreement is the important thing, but right now documentation on how to actually make use of this standard is practically none existant. Writing some (and perhaps some better tools) is on the todo list for us at autopackage HQ
To say that “there would be no dependancy problems if everybody used the LSB” is somewhat incorrect – there would be no dependancies. Doh. RPM is quite clearly designed to do dependancies in a very flexible manner, so Redhat obviously do believe they are useful. The number of CDs needed if all the packages were strictly LSB compliant would probably more than quadruple, that’s being conservative.
Finally, the reason redhat don’t ship with apt4rpm is QA issues, their customers tend to shout at them if things break, that is what they are there for, and apt-getting random packages from the net tends to break things. C’est la vie.
Oh…. I don’t believe in user space VFS systems anyway – they work great until the moment you try and drag a file from a SMB view into say TextMaker, at which point it barfs because TextMaker doesn’t use gnome-vfs (or kword, or mozilla, or….)
They’d be better off doing proper samba integration at the kernel VFS layer, but that’s a bit harder + they get the gnome-vfs stuff for free.
When did people start looking at updates are merely skin deep.
This is NATIVE POSIX THREAD support, if that is not enough reason why to upgrade – I don’t know what is.
>>eugenia, ur so 1337!
>No, I am just Greek. That’s the real word. 😉
So, Gr33k then?
In software development, you can always wait two more weeks…
Of course, but RH strategy for desktop are mainly GNOME + Mozilla and they participate on both projects and they know about the status of both projects. And both projects release their version before RHL 9 annoucement. If they wait a couple of weeks for that, they will have the latest version, Mozilla and GNOME will deliver a newer one posible in 6 months! and RH also…
Well the only thing that is true is that this Red Hat version is theoretically dissapointing to me in theory. But I have installed the latest previous beta and I could tell that maybe you cant see, but you can feel the difference a lot.
redhat has to make sure it can anticipate the problems its clients might have. Jumping on to the latest and greatest may become somewhat problematic. They ratehr release what they know and provide the rest as updates. That is why Redhat 8.0 still had Mozilla 1.0 tree and now the 1.2 tree, completely jumping the 1.1 release. 1.2.1 was the one available when they started beta testing and they stick to that. Its good for the customers in that they get tried and tested products, but the geeks always want the latest an greatest. But then again, they are the ones who can install their own stuff.
Its a common mistake to compare RPM with APT. RPM is at the same level as dpkg. The rpm in Red Hat 9 will suggest dependancy resolutions but that isnt its job. Multiple tools sit on top of RPM to do that (apt4rpm, Red Carpet, Up2date etc)
They can also test with Mozilla Beta (as they do with xfree)… but you’re right.
I almost say that I like the RH policies, but I think that RH desktop is a little conservative, mostly because they have a lot of competition of Mandrake and SuSE, but I agree with them in General.
This evades the question of DVD playback.
No license is required to play DVDs on a linux computer. DVD players such as Ogle and Xine are GPL.
And no, it is not a violation of the DMCA to employ DeCSS to watch media you have purchased or rented on hardware that you own.
Otherwise, RH9 sounds great!
[in the U.S.]
That’s the fact, not what I ‘think’ or ‘feel’. I asked a lawyer without trying to influence her. She said,
“Ogle & Xine DO violate the DMCA since they circumvent a copy-protection measure.. as did Dimitri’s pdf-decryption software.”
I AGREE WITH YOU: THIS STINKS! But
Companies can be held liable for assisting/enabling felonious conduct, so RedHat is doing the right thing.
Otherwise they could distribute DVD & MP3 playback, AA font hinting, OS-X icons, etc — you get the idea. Suse & Mandrake just aren’t viable target$ for a law$uit yet.
Remember: just because you can get transcode/dvd-rip (from plf/freshrpms/etc) does NOT make it legal to do so.
And, of course, each release of Red Hat Linux supports more hardware than the one before it.
My experience tells me otherwise, and many other reviews extant support my position.
Red Hat 9 supposedly supports the ancient ATI Mach64, but I couldn’t perform a graphical installation because my laptop’s LCD display isn’t supported. I tried generic LCD display, and all I got was a bright white display plus a fringe of red at the edges. Nice.
It’s funny that last time I tried Red Hat it did something quite similar, but ONLY after that aggravating package selection routine. Red Hat is well versed in creating anger and hatred. Don’t piss me off immediately, no, that’d be too easy. Wait until I’ve wasted an hour poring over thousands of duplicate programs and command line crap I’ll never use, and THEN spring the trap. All too clever.
Linux propagates only because misery loves company.
After installation, there is no power management whatsoever. Zip. Nada. My BIOS is an ancient APM unit, which is nice because Red Hat still doesn’t support the quite-old-now ACPI standard. All I want to do is dim my laptop’s standard XGA-resolution LCD display, but that’s beyond the abilities of Red Hat Linux 9. I suspect that power management features do not exist for Linux, but who can be sure? With creative program naming as exhibited by grip, PAN and less, plus thousands of other unintuitively-named specimens, one can never tell simply by name what a program is to be used for. The descriptions that the installer provides are generally useless unless you have previously experienced a Red Hat installation and suffered the default installation options.
Carefully note that USB devices, like portable MP3 players and USB drives, and cameras too, can’t be accessed reliably since the device namespace is hooped by design. Unplug, and your device loses its mounted position so that the next time you plug it in, any links to that device will need to be updated MANUALLY – unless, of course, you only have one USB device. WTF.
For those still waiting for a central Control Panel-like app, your search is not yet done. Obviously proponents of decentralized controls will be pleased, but for the other 99% of computer users this is a major failing.
Side note: all fonts are – well, my text looks smeared with vaseline, so I guess you’d call that “anti-aliased.” How obnoxious. The good news it that this AA doesn’t intrude on Evolution, which is the best email app I’ve ever used. Outlook is nothing compared with it.
Web browsing: Mozilla has some very unique middle-click functionality – sends me to the default Red Hat Home Page, despite the fact that I’ve changed the home page to the Register. Why? I’ve set the middle-click to open new tabs when I middle-click on links, but when I middle-click anywhere else I go to the useless Red Hat page cached on my disk. Am I supposed to tweak it? Replace this file? WTF? In Opera (or IE, for that matter) I can scroll smoothly when I middle-click on an empty space. Even Mozilla on Win32 behaves semi-appropriately. Since it takes ten seconds to load this sucker, I won’t be doing much with Mozilla anyways.. what a pig.
I dare any Red Hat user to make the taskbar smaller, to make more usable space. Why is so much room devoted to a few icons? Who knows.
The “Preferences,” “System Settings,” and “System Tools” should be consolidated into one bloody menu, but that’s darned near impossible to do. Why didn’t Red Hat consolidate this stuff into a Control Panel? No, that’d make it too easy, and therefore useful.
Side note: click on “Control Center” in the “Preferences” menu, and you will get a window holding many of the settings, including an icon labeled “Control Center.” Nice! You can finally access the Control Center! Except, when you click it, you’ll get kicked into a duplicate window with the same old crap. Welcome to the magic of recursive linking at its best. The least somebody could have done is to LABEL THE DAMNED WINDOW “CONTROL CENTER” to at least provide a clue that you’ve have already found the fscking thing, instead of endlessly hunting for an application which apparently doesn’t exist. Either rip out the icon for “Control Center,” rename it to “Preferences,” or INCLUDE the fscking application called “Control Center.” Honestly, how hard would that be? I’ll bet it’s plenty difficult.
Sorry dude, this falls under fair use, which supercedes any anti-circumvention legislation. It is my understanding that this is an exception stated in the wording of the DMCA, as it can be conclusively proven that the tool (decss) can be used for purposes other than breaking copyright (watching legitimately acquired media).
See section 1201 of the DMCA (excerpt):
`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that–
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
… (this is the critical bit)
`(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Here’s some other links. This stuff is fuzzy law since it hasn’t been conclusively decided in court. It isn’t worth the risk to a company like RedHat.
I won’t get into the heirarchy of law (constitution,statues, USC). But the MPAA/RIAA/DVD cartel have the fund$ to nullify our rights.
Here’s the timeline of events:
http://ipjustice.org/decsstable.htm
See what Harvard Law says:
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/
That’s why 2600 gave up: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20020703_eff_2600_pr.htm…
And Jon J. is about to get re-tried:
http://www.grammy.com/news/artswatch/2003/0113decssteen.html
To you and me *remember I agree w/you* this is a Bad Law(tm). It IS fair use. But the court$ & several congressmen have been bought.
And, of course, each release of Red Hat Linux supports more hardware than the one before it.
My experience tells me otherwise, and many other reviews extant support my position.
>Red Hat 9 supposedly supports the ancient ATI Mach64, but I couldn’t perform a graphical installation because my laptop’s LCD display isn’t supported.
Yeah, you must have an old Omnibook. They barely work in Windows too so quit complaining.
>It’s funny that last time I tried Red Hat it did something quite similar, but ONLY after that aggravating package selection routine.
Click, click, click, go. I can see where your becoming frustrated.
>Red Hat is well versed in creating anger and hatred.
Huh? No, people without patience are the ones creating hatred and anger.
>Linux propagates only because misery loves company.
Riight, “This application has performed an illegal operation” dialog boxes proagate joy and bliss amongst all.
>After installation, there is no power management whatsoever. Zip. Nada. My BIOS is an ancient APM unit
Yeah, don’t blame the OS for your vendor’s inability to ship a product that conforms to standards. Write a letter to your vendor demanding drivers for the platform or shut the hell up. Whining about it only makes you look bad.
>I suspect that power management features do not exist for Linux, but who can be sure?
Yeah, there’s an educated comment. How much time did you spend researching before you made that claim? Lemme lay it on you in elapsed seconds *0*
>With creative program naming as exhibited by grip, PAN and less, plus thousands of other unintuitively-named specimens, one can never tell simply by name what a program is to be used for.
Right, watch the install process and read the descriptions. You do know how to read right?
>your device loses its mounted position so that the next time you plug it in, any links to that device will need to be updated MANUALLY
Huh? That’s just not true at all. My Camera is ALWAYS /dev/sda1 and ALWAYS mounts on /mnt/camera.
>Side note: all fonts are – well, my text looks smeared with vaseline, so I guess you’d call that “anti-aliased.” How obnoxious
PFFT, go to preferences and change it then. Click RedHat, then Preferences, then Fonts. Now choose from the many options available until you find a setting that suits you. See, that was easy even for the more simple minded beings.
>Web browsing: Mozilla has some very unique middle-click functionality – sends me to the default Red Hat Home Page, despite the fact that I’ve changed the home page to the Register.
No, it doesn’t. I have mozilla on a dozen systems with tabs turned on on EACH OF THEM, and NONE of them exhibit the behavior you describe.
>Even Mozilla on Win32 behaves semi-appropriately. Since it takes ten seconds to load this sucker,
I use Mozilla on both platforms, I have yet to see any difference. They both perform VERY well.
>I won’t be doing much with Mozilla anyways.. what a pig.
Riight, it’s a PIG. OMG it uses more memory than IE, WAAAAH!
>I dare any Red Hat user to make the taskbar smaller,
Right click in an empty slot, select “properties”. Click the drop down in the center of the dialog box, and choose small or x small.
>to make more usable space. Why is so much room devoted to a few icons? Who knows.
Then change it, see above.
>The “Preferences,” “System Settings,” and “System Tools” should be consolidated
WHY? System Tools: Hrm probably System Tools! System Settings: Oh, I’ll bet Network settings and stuff goes there!. Preferences: That’s where I’d go to change my wallpaper and screensaver!
>Side note: click on “Control Center” in the “Preferences” menu, and you will get a window holding many of the settings, including an icon labeled “Control Center.” Nice! You can finally access the Control Center!
OMFG, are you a damn baby or what?
>Honestly, how hard would that be? I’ll bet it’s plenty difficult.
If it’s a problem, submit a bug report. Did you pay anything for it? I doubt it, you sound like the typical leech that expects everything to be handed to you on a silver platter without having to lift a finger.
I too have issues with my laptop. Not everyone has the time or inclination to google for answers, so
—> Why don’t you send bug-reports to RedHat? They can’t fix it if they don’t know it’s broke. And it takes time to fix things.
USB: Don’t get me started… It’s NOT meant to be a poor man’s hot-swappable interface, or a “just hub-connect everything solution [keyboard/mouse/monitor/cd-burner/external hard disk/scanner]”. More like a SCSI that won’t damage devices when unplugged. Dynamic configuration of USB has been vastly oversold IMHO.
Dynamic configuration of USB has been vastly oversold IMHO.
What problems have you had? It works perfect for me on XP, and well on FreeBSD. I have a mass storage flash card, mouse, and a graph link for my calculator that all work instantly when I swap them.
Some questions in the interview, in this reader’s opinion, seem to be leading the interviee.
Take, for instance, question 7: “Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?” It seems to have removed any debate as to the virtues of the various filesystems with regards to RH’s objectives. Questions like “are ReiserFS and XFS more feature-rich?”, “Are these the features we want/need in RHL for our customers?” and “Should RH divert resources from helping develop ext3 to either (or both) ReiserFS and XFS?” are just assumed to be moot. Or does the interviewer assume its readers know this already?
Question 8: “Why isn’t Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs that happen very often when running the accelerated Nvidia drivers …?” Is there something the interviewer knows that the readers don’t? Do we know that RedHat ISN’T working with NVidia? If I were to make a guess, I’d even be so bold as to guess wager that RH DOES indeed work with RedHat based on the timely release of their latest drivers (1.0-4349) for RH9 *on the same day of RH9’s release*.
Other than those, it’s another very thought-provoking and informative interview from OSNews, in general, and from Ms. Loli-Queru specifically. Kudos!
People expect Redhat to overcome the shortcomings of hardware manufacturers. The hardware manufacturer has the responsibility to either write drivers or release specifications. Preferably the first. The graphics guys are doing this. Next time you build a computer for your buddies, make sure you buy components with Linux drivers. Even if they will be using windows only. Manufacturers should not be supporting this monopoly.
Redhat does not have the time or resources to be writing every driver under the sun, some of which invariably are used by a handful of people. Redhat’s policy is clear on this one, If you do not ship open source drivers(heck what IP is in drivers), then they do not get included. Demand drivers from your hardware manufacturer. I do not buy branded computers, and I specify the hardware I want so I do not have a problem either undr Windows or Linux. But stop giving Redhat grief for a problem not of its making.
Yeah, don’t blame the OS for your vendor’s inability to ship a product that conforms to standards. Write a letter to your vendor demanding drivers for the platform or shut the hell up. Whining about it only makes you look bad.
Linux fault tolerance reached!
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:QY0BuiW6USYC:www.adequacy.org/…
You have misquoted the question 8 and you took it out of context.
Yes, the interviwee (me) has evidence that the nvidia drivers do not work ON SOME Via-based chipset computers, and nvidia knows that (I got response from an nvidia engineer). For example the VIA KM266 has trouble with ANY Linux running nvidia’s accelerated drivers, not just red hat. It would crash hard the kernel even on plain 2D mode.
[quote]Linux fault tolerance reached!
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:QY0BuiW6USYC:www.adequacy.org/…]
Questions
1. If the wheels you buy do not fit on your car, who should you blame.
2. If your antenna won’t work with your tv, who do you run to.
3. If the tape you bought refuses to work with your VCR, who do you run to.
The Answers (if you are reasonable)
1. Your wheel manufacturer. They should adhere to the standard
2. The guy who made the antenna. It should have a standard connection jack to your tv.
3. Your tape manufacturer. He should clearly say whether it is Betamax or not, and should also guarantee it works with whichever vcr.
My guess is MS screwed everything over. They have power to make hardware manufactureres only roduce for them, and leave the rest alone. Maybe someone should actually start a company that only sells computers built from fully standard compliant parts. And strongly advertise that. Or maybe I should rush to patent that idea.
What is it with some users that seem to think that more eye-candy and the funkier apps are what make a Linux distro great (or, in this case, worthy of a new major version number)??? I’ve just read the technical review at GuruLabs http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html and find myself excited and warm and fuzzy with this latest offering from RedHat.
I think that RedHat has done a good job of 1) choosing the next greatest technology to introduce (stable, primarilly) in order for Linux to move forward, and 2) integrating them nicely into their distribution. If they hadn’t gone ahead and upgraded to gcc-2.96 when they did, how much longer do you think would it have taken app writers to develop for it? Same goes for gcc-3.2. And now there’s NPTL. I have no doubt in my mind that it is stable and tested enough. That’s how much confidence I have in RH’s engineers.
As for the lack of user-visible apps, what else do you need to add to make it worthy of being called RedHat9? More multimedia apps like Xine and MPlayer? (While I agree that these would be great to have on the distro, I doubt RH has enough resources to allocate for testing and maintaining these apps.) If I were in RH’s shoes, I’d probably wait around some more and see which multimedia app would easilly integrate well with their Bluecurve interface before adding it, but it’s certainly not a showstopper nor would it stop me from upping the major version one.
> My guess is MS screwed everything over. They have power to make hardware manufactureres only roduce for them, and leave the rest alone.
I suggest you leave behind the conspiracy theories and get back on topic, as this old article at adequacy.org is not ontopic.
> You have misquoted the question 8 and you took it out of context.
Pardon me for not quoting the entire text.
> Yes, the interviwee (me) has evidence that the nvidia drivers do not work ON SOME Via-based chipset computers, and nvidia knows that (I got response from an nvidia engineer). For example the VIA KM266 has trouble with ANY Linux running nvidia’s accelerated drivers, not just red hat. It would crash hard the kernel even on plain 2D mode.
Thanks for the added information, but while you say that there is evidence that the drivers do not work ON SOME Via-based chipsets (I read it from the driver README as well), are you saying, then, that the engineer has mentioned that RedHat, specifically, isn’t helping them on that? On second thoughts, I guess it doesn’t really matter since one can’t expect RedHat to help NVidia support every video subsystem unless the problem were RH-specific, yes?
Although from what I have heard and read nothing really new, just some bug fixes. As for the LSB standard. At my workplace we develop our software for Linux using the LSB standard and we have no issues with any dependancy problems.
IMHO Anti-Aliasing looks horrible in linux <full stop>. It’s just blur.
The only decent KDE that redhat shipped was the one in 7.3 – Although it crashed all the time, at least the fonts were not all blurred to crap.
Mozilla anti-aliased looks _really_ unprofessional.
Why can’t the fonts be like in windows? In windows they look perfect an crisp, without all the bleeding and blur. Anti-Aliasing sucks!
What I tried to ask in the question is if Red Hat can form a relationship with Nvidia to have better and Red Hat-certified drivers for Red Hat. By having such an alliance, Red Hat would also need to test the drivers with their OS on many various systems on their labs, and whenever find bugs or problems, nvidia will have to fix them.
This way, you get an “rh-certified” driver that would run on more systems, less headaches for the user, and up to date support for the latest OS of the company, no matter what might have changed in the OS itself since the last version.
Nvidia is still the no1 graphics vendor, so such alliances that could better the product, are mandatory IMO.
>Anti-Aliasing sucks!
Have you ever thought to load the gnome and kde preference panels and turn off AA?
It seems as if RedHat is allocating 70% of its resources in developing the core subsystems (ie. kernel, glibc, networking and video subsystems .. IOW, the OS!) and 30% on applications. At least that’s what _I_ think and used in making my decision to use and continue to use RedHat.
Can one imagine the alternatives?! I’d really prefer kernel stability over anything else … and it’s nice that they’re supporting more hardware as well as better networking (think wireless) as well as video (latest ATI drivers) subsystems. RH9 has only been out a week and already there have been 9 upgraded packages: 5 core (krb5, openssl, samba, sendmail, vsftpd) and 3 applications (balsa, eog, evolution). Adding more applications would also mean allocating more people to maintaining these new apps. RH is already trying to cut down on its resource-eating maintenance jobs (ergo the shorter lifespan for its products).
Excellent interview.
Regarding Matt’s answers, *that* is why I happily handed over the $40 to the CompUSA cashier for RH8 and RH9.
They have got it together.
If the COTS box was available first on the RH site (and not at the store) I’d’ve bought from RH’s website.
you surely must be referring to the 4191s.
they were horrible. 2d was crap…you could actually SEE the screen being painted.
i tested this on dual/single intel machines, athlon xp, athlon thunderbird, redhat 8, 7.3, kde/gnome.
kudos to nvidia, because the latest ones with the nice installer fix a lot of stuff.
i’m sure some people will still have some issues, but 90% of mine were cleared up.
i should mention that with the infamous 4191s, people of all distros were having issues. just look in the nvidia forum, where 50,000 and more views were not uncommon on the 4191 thread.
nautilus smb mount of a share on a REDHAT/samba server results in a password prompt at every folder and file for me.
> Have you ever thought to load the gnome and kde preference panels and turn off AA?
Yes but the problem is when your running an AA’d system, when you turn of Anti-Aliasing the fonts look even WORSE. They are all broken and jagged.
Whereas if you don’t compile XSFT et all, at all, you get nice crisp windows like (dare I say it) non-AA’d fonts.
The problem is the later is quite difficult to do without re-compiling 1/2 your system.
>when you turn of Anti-Aliasing the fonts look even WORSE. They are all broken and jagged.
This is because you still have selected fonts that are meant for AA. In that panels, you simply have to select Helvetica as the fonts of your choice, and then the fonts will run fine on non-AA.
> This is because you still have selected fonts that are meant for AA. In that panels, you simply have to select Helvetica as the fonts of your choice, and then the fonts will run fine on non-AA.
I’m confused. Whadda I have to do? (At least for KDE)
I long for the days of non-antialised jagged http://www.unleadedonline.net/images/misc/centericq.jpg“>
That screenshot was supposed to depict the nice crisp fonts of RH 7.3. Not screwed up as I accidently made the link
The interview questions sound like a bad translation:
>Why there was no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat Linux 9’s XFree86 4.3?
ick. Try using english, man!
Either,
On why there was no RandR GUI tool shipped…
or better…
Why was there no RandR….
>Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?
ick. Again, sentence structure.
Why is it that RHL9 still uses ext3..
or
Why is RHL9 still using ext3…
Come on, Show that you have at least a hs Eductation.
Erm… the screenshot you are showing me has no jagged screwed up fonts. The fonts showing there are normal non-AA fonts…
>That screenshot was supposed to depict the nice crisp fonts of RH 7.3. Not screwed up as I accidently made the link
Ah, ok.
So, in order to get these fonts back, go to the kde control panel/fonts and change the fonts to use the font called: Helvetica.
>Come on, Show that you have at least a hs Eductation.
I do. GREEK High School Education, plus GREEK college.
Go elsewhere to troll now.
Cool.
Can I do that with any other fonts?
Yes, you can select any font you want, but Helvetica is really the best that comes in your system for non-AA. Change its size as well to bring it in a shape that you will like it.
> They’d be better off doing proper samba integration at the kernel VFS layer.
I totally agree. All filesystem mounting & vfs stuff should be done in the kernel. There’s no other way that it will work with all apps. IMHO, you should be able to use it with the command line too.
thats a nice question you asked eugenia, i think Redhat should really think about it.
Redhat already provides up-to-date so why not add an extra feature so that we can modify the source list (ie apt-get) to point to another website to download applications like xine, mplayer, etc…
A lot of things should be be done at kernel level I agree. Could I have a comparison of GNOME-VFS and the kernel vfs layer to though.
I know the GNOME one makes it harder for all apps to access it, but it does seem ideally suited for GUI applications, whereas a kernel level one would be more be more suited for the back-end stuff IMO. Or maybe, the GNOME one should extend the capabilities of the kernel one. I don’t think people want to just add functionality to the kernel when it could be supplanted in the future. That would then bring about the curse of legacy code to Linux, carrying around weight for coimpatibility’s sake.
But the reason I had mentioned it, the GNOME-VFS was that it seems to be put to good use in GNOME. You can now have all these little tools accesible from Nautilus, and you do not have to have one big app to configure all your stuff, unlike some other distro specific tools which are sometimes rather large.
One of my other issues with GUI’s in Linux, or rather, KDE is that I have to configure twice to be able to get onto the internet. I have to configure system-wide settings, then configure LISA. This to me is duplicate functionality and is confusing. I do nto know if this has changed recently, I now use Gnome. Such things should be avoided. Set proxies once, and that should be enough. Set LAN settings and that shuld be enough.
Ogle & Xine DO violate the DMCA since they circumvent a copy-protection measure.. as did Dimitri’s pdf-decryption software.
First of all Ogle and Xine do not violate DMCA at all. All either of those programs has the power to do is use a library that may or may not violate the DMCA (this is libcss of course, better known as DeCSS).
And Dimitri’s pdf-software was ruled legal in a court of law because it’s primary purpose is not copyright violation. The same may or may not be true for DeCSS. We know that it the program is just fine in it’s native country (at least so far), but in the U.S. it is as of yet uncontested. Chances are we won’t ever see a big stink over it due to how widespread it has become. Who knows.
The point is this: RedHat is being safe by not including software with questionable legal status. It is much, much better for RedHat to make you install these things with apt-rpm than crossing their fingers and hoping Microsoft doesn’t pull out a patent on NTFS and sue them to hell with it, or the licensors of the MP3 codec suddenly decide that RedHat doesn’t fall under “free”.
-Erwos
for posting to bugzilla and your suggestion about RedHat partnering with/NVidia.
Efforts that will improve Linux for everyone.
I have not grabbed the newest release of redHat yet and do not plan to unless I can find out if Mozilla loads faster on 9 than it does on 8.0. When I first boot into Xserver And everything is finished loading, if I try to launch the browser right away it takes like 2 minutes ( no joke ) to even open.
After this of course it only takes a few seconds if I were to close it and re-open it. It only happens on the first time after startup. Has anyone else had this problem and is this fixed on version 9?
I seriously doubt that it is my system lagging due to the fact that I am running 8.0 on a p3 733 with 512 MEG of SDRAM.
I have heard great things about the new Mandrake. If I cannot be convinced to switch to RedHat 9 then I think It will be Mandrake for me.
“I seriously doubt that it is my system lagging due to the fact that I am running 8.0 on a p3 733 with 512 MEG of SDRAM.”
edit /etc/sysconfig/harddrives
uncomment 32bit mode, dma, and anything else that looks reasonable.
I don’t know why RedHat doesn’t offer a GUI tool or attempt to figure the settings out for you, it’s one of the areas where I feel they need work.