“Red Hat has become one of the most widely deployed Linux distributions in the Enterprise space, and has long been a favorite of Linux devotees. Red Hat 8 introduced a new Gnome-based GUI that gave the OS a unique look and feel, and the company has continued to add more proprietary configuration tools designed to make system tweaking a graphical, rather than a command-line process.” Read the article at ExtremeTech.
I hate the phrase “strategic shift.” I really do. I know it’s nothing bad in RedHat’s case, but it still gives me the willies.
Personally, I still find that the menu system on Redhat 9 remains confusing and not very logically ordered. Mandrake 9.1 has done much better in this regard. Also, the UI graphics can be made more attractive than it currently is.
That said, I think most linux distributions have gotten to the point where they are good enough for the desktop. The big show stopper now is application support by third parties. Hopefully, that too will be sorted out.
“to add more proprietary configuration tools”
Last time I checked all RedHat config tools are GPL’ed.
Does RedHat include, in the menu, a way to edit the menus in Gnome or KDE? I know in 8.0 I couldn’t find anyway to edit the Gnome menus and the KDE menu editor had to be run from a command line.
>> to add more proprietary configuration tools
> Last time I checked all RedHat config tools are GPL’ed.
I agree. Not ONLY are the tools GPL’ed but they are just gui front ends that are used to edit config files of GPL’ed software. The tools don’t stop anyone from editing the text configs themselves…
he shouldn’t be sounding so damn experienced. he just claimed that there was only 1 threaded app available on rpmfind. What the clueless idiot doesnt reallize that there is a crapload of linux apps that make use of threading..Moz, apache, most java ones, etc.
Ian Christie: You can edit the menus by drag n drop directly on the desktop.
But KDE can be edited in both 8.0 and 9 by right clicking on the menu icon. I am not a gnome user, so I can’t tell you how to do it there.
HeY yoU, I am An El33t haxor and i ONLY stanD By tHe GpL. DoWn With ReDmond-Hat!!!!!
Oh wait, ReDhAt is the MoSt GpL CompLiant maJor DistrIbutoR. Ooops,, ha ah . .. i mean, i like redhat…
/me crawls away
the company has continued to add more proprietary configuration tools
Huh ? I can take the RedHat CDs, take the RedHat configuration utilities, rip off all their artwork and alter, distribute and/or sell the resulting utilities any way I see fit as long as I don’t include any patented stuff in my distribution (artwork, redhat logo, shadowman logo). As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking about porting some of these utilities to FreeBSD…
RPM sucks, especially for development…
Slackware has as much on one CDrom as redhat has on three, plus the development tools actually work in Slackware…
Funny, that’s the exact same language that 14-year old pro-MS “Windows-XP-is-the-end-of-all” script kiddies use.
The menus are editable, but not easily. I have never edited menus so I do not miss a thing. I really find their menus good though, the only thing is that they should rename some things. But all in all, much better than Mandrake IMHO. And I am all for the whole Browser thingy instead of saying Mozilla. Some people do not know what Mozilla is.
In fairness to RedHat, I’ve got Gnome 2.2.1 installed on a Gentoo box here and there’s no way to easily edit the menus on that either. Nothing as simple as just right-clicking on the menu icon or launching an app or at least nothing that I can find.
I’d say it’s something they just haven’t gotten round to adding yet. I suspect it may also be because the XML files that are used to create the menus are stored in a read-only directory.
Double click your home icon, or “Start Here” if it still exists on your desktop. If you use “Start Here” then select applications, right clicking any application and selecting “edit launcher”. If you open your home directory, type “applications:///” in the bar at the top and press enter. Follow the same steps as shown above to edit menus.
The browser thing makes more sense than that. I like the icon, but it executes htmlview, which is a script in /usr/bin. This script will read you ~/.htmlviewrc file, if it exists and use whatever browser you set in the X11BROWSER variable. It defaults to mozilla, galeon and konqueror when X is running and lynx and stuff when in text mode.
My current ~/.htmlviewrc file looks like this:
X11BROWSER=/usr/bin/galeon
I grabbed the rpm for galeon 1.2.7 on RedHat 9 using those nice AA fonts. Can’t wait to get one of the 1.3.x versions working.
Oh and a hint for those GNOME devs… why not just make a link from nautilus applications:/// to an edit menu entry when you right-click on the panel? That would be a temp fix to save a lot of headache until you get around to making a real menu editor.
I’m neither a GNOME nor a KDE dev because of the instability in previous APIs but I am a UNIX dev, still trying to learn the proper organization of all this dynamic freely flowing code.
I want a system and constantly prunes itself, where you get to select which packages to be automaticly upgraded when new releases come out. Automated build systems package each stable release so you know your system can be kept up to date without falling behind, waiting on someone else, etc. There’s no reason to ever upgrade again, if you design it the right way the first time. Debian and Gentoo both seem to have this down, but I think it can be done better.
“But in looking at the time required to start up OpenOffice’s Writer versus MS Office’s Word running on Windows XP Pro, and OpenOffice Writer for Win32 running won Windows XP Pro. Microsoft again holds a decided advantage:
Time to load up OO Writer: 40 seconds
Time to load up Word from OfficeXP: 6 seconds
Time to load up OO Writer on Windows XP: 8 seconds”
This is a shameful problem with all major graphical applications in all Linux distributions. Why do our apps perform so badly?
“Time to load up OO Writer: 40 seconds
Time to load up Word from OfficeXP: 6 seconds
Time to load up OO Writer on Windows XP: 8 seconds” ”
Are you in a rush?
Doesn’t this whole start-up issue sound similiar to the FPS wars that gamers go through?
I have only one Linux distro that has caught my eye, and I am faithful to it, It is the best Linux distro on the planet and is light years ahead of Red Hat, it is called SuSE Linux. SuSE is the best Distro and its a heck of a lot cheaper than Red Hat. SuSE is da bomb in the Linux world.
This is a shameful problem with all major graphical applications in all Linux distributions. Why do our apps perform so badly?
Uhm.. I don’t think someone “got the memo”. You are not allowed to say this on a public forum. “They” are deciding your punishment now, but you musn’t do this again. ever. I am on the phone with your ISP as I write this.
Why does he say that you can use either BlueCurve, Gnome, or KDE? Isn’t BlueCurve simply a set of themes/configurations for both Gnome and KDE, and not a separate DE?
The problem is primarily with large C++ apps. Mozilla takes forever on my box to load. I am running 800Mhz Celeron Laptop with 128MB at it takes OOwriter about 35 seconds to load cold and about 20 seconds on first launch with a quickstart script running. It is something about how g++ handles linking and load paths or something. It is a real problem.
However, it is very app specific.
It does not take Abiword or even a better example is gnumeric that long to launch. Gnumeric takes about 8 seconds and Abiword takes only about three and I am talking about the gtk2 version with footnotes/endnotes and table support people.
Dia takes about 5 seconds on average. Gimp takes about seven.
I do not say this as an excuse either at all. Mozilla and OpenOffice should launch quicker or distros should include pre-load tricks or something to handle this on a desktop box. As a sysadmin user I could care less as long as the apps launch quicker. BTW, this is an issue for all distros except I heard that Yoper did some pulled some kind of pre-loading, pre-linking trick to make things better. I thought kdeinit was in fact a way around most of the slow startup issues for kde which is another large C++ project.
Otherwise except for launch I would say that apps are very responsive. The newest X on RH9 has really made a difference for me in terms of the feel of the environment the mouse and redraw reponses feel a hell of lot less jerky. I can still load down a 2000 with a number of major apps performing operations at the same time and watch the box lag. The same kind of operations running on a linux box and the response is better. ie Linux feels better under load but Windows apps still launch quicker.
All in all the issue is real but needs to be seen in context of performance as a whole and the issue had to get addressed.
“In truth, the primary differences between Bluecurve, Gnome and KDE are mostly cosmetic, and all three graphical environments will get you up and running. However, because this GUI and the underlying OS plumbing are coming from the same company, there is tighter integration between Bluecurve and RH9, and utilities are generally well placed, and intuitively found for making system tweaks.”
How much more of this? Bluecurve the new GUI!? It’s only a GTK+ engine with a theme and in KDE 3.1 almost the same…ugh!
BTW: On my Athlon 2200+ OOo loads in 9 secs….and RH 9 boots faster than winxp:P
First let me say that I prefer Win XP to any Linux distro even though I’m forced to use one (so far RH 9 and SuSE 8.0 are the best and can’t wait to get my hands on SuSE 8.2) Boot time is inherent to OS and you can trim down Linux boot time by avoiding to load unnecessary deamons, similar steps you can take for Win XP and a few weeks ago I found Bootvis on MS site, recently PC World wrote about it too, and use this app to optimize boot process. As far as office type apps go have you tried to install OOo loader, it was on one of those SOMETHING-FORGE sites and SuSE 8.2 preloads OOo just like Win does for you preloading MS Office (take a peak at your Startup folder) I bet when both office suites are partially preloaded they startup similarly. Mozilla on my comp (AMD Duron 1.3 GHz, 512 MB) starts up with the same delay on Win XP and RH 9 if you do not have Mozilla Quick Launch enabled.
I see here between RedHat comments, comments about Icons, cursors, stuff like that… People, there are tons of them out there, even better themes than Bluecurve, GTK+ engines and KDE themes… Why not talk about NPTL, improvements, and other stuff? Halfe a page with menus… why?
And to the Slackware guy: I used Slackware in the past: The development tools work in Red Hat to, ya know. I sugest one thing: try removepkg qt* and install a newer version or remove something and put after a *. Lets see how the old tgz sucks. I agree, Slackware is rock solid, but its old. BTW: I wrote a review about it on osnews, try to read it.
Isn’t OpenOffice.org a Java program? In which case, slow startups are common for Java apps. Plus, like Marc, my P4 1.5GHz starts OOo in 8 seconds in both SuSE 8.1 and WinXP, compared to 3 seconds for Word 2002, and 6 seconds for WordPerfect 9. Personally, I’ll wait the five seconds for the money it saves me.
redhat 9 on a dell optiplex gx240 p4 1600
startx: gets me to my desktop in 6 seconds
click on office writer in menu: it’s up completely in under 5 seconds.
i’d really like to insult some of you, but i won’t…cause you’ll always have some kind of smart ass come back, some explanation as to why you’ll discount new information, or you are from the show me state…or just plain assholes.
something.
i don’t know.
get a job, get laid, something….just take your whiny, bitchy asses some where else.
mozilla takes a bit over 3 seconds to load.
(all times are precisely calculated using my eyeballs, applications are not rerun, times are from first run after X starts up)
Get some professional psychiatric help!
People in this comment forum are just talking about their experiences and you kick in insulting us/them? WTH!!!
i should not have come in busting balls.
i have experienced dreadful load times as well. but i thought redhat 9 with a modern computer was the subject….to which i was giving my results…which seem really decent.
anyway, i forget sometimes that we don’t have to be thick skinned battle bots launching salvos at each other.
i shall *try* to live and let live. my apologies.
shields down, cannons down, red alert cancelled.
Time to load up OO Writer: 40 seconds
Time to load up Word from OfficeXP: 6 seconds
Time to load up OO Writer on Windows XP: 8 seconds
This is because in Windows they are preloaded in memory during the booting.
such little memory. red hat has attempted to destroy kde
and so many people just put this out of thier minds. they
are so locked it that it doesnt matter.
whatever happened to freedom ?
it got tossed along the way.
Oh bullshit, please keep your assanine 100% incorrect comments to yourself. RedHat has done NOTHING to damage KDE. They did what they felt they needed to do to bring the desktop to the masses, and it’s working. I’m inclined to believe that you have either never even put a miniscule effort into educating yourself on the matter, or you are jealous.
What happened to freedom?
This includes RedHat’s freedom to change the damn default theme in KDE! Get over it!
How exactly has RH tried to kill KDE? Somebody please tell me, because the ONLY differences I can spot between RH KDE and standard KDE is that RH KDE is freedesktop.org compliant so shortcuts for GNOME may also show up in KDE and vice versa. There are also minor differences in the naming of items in the Control Center. That’s it! Have any of the RH KDE bashers actually used it or are they just basing their opinion on heresay?
The biggest problem in the Linux community nowadays is the asnine “the biggest and most successful person sucks” mentality which infected the Linux community with the beginning of competition with Windows. We don’t hate Microsoft because their OS is inferior, we hate them because they’re big and successful. Why do most people who hate RedHat do so? Because RH is the most successful commercial Linux distro. If SuSE were to overtake RH in the market, I guarantee you, we would see people calling it SuckSE regardless of how good it is.
This is stupid cannibalism. Why is it so hard to accept that there might be more than one way to do something right?
-Erwos
Here’s something for you to chew on. If one can even attempt to destroy KDE. What does that say about the future of Linux and other OSS? Bill Gates awaits your answer.
Methinks ‘leet haxors would be using Slackware (for being most Unix-like) or Debian (for being cool and very GPL-compliant), or possibly even Gentoo (for being bleeding edge, built from source, and like Debian).
“But in looking at the time required to start up OpenOffice’s Writer versus MS Office’s Word running on Windows XP Pro, and OpenOffice Writer for Win32 running won Windows XP Pro. Microsoft again holds a decided advantage:
Time to load up OO Writer: 40 seconds
Time to load up Word from OfficeXP: 6 seconds
Time to load up OO Writer on Windows XP: 8 seconds”
This is a shameful problem with all major graphical applications in all Linux distributions. Why do our apps perform so badly?
On Windows, OpenOffice and Office XP have something resident in memory when you log into windows, meaning that you get some excess hard disk activity after logging in, and some extra memory usage, bu they both start relatively quickly when you click their icon (because they’ve got less to do at this stage).
OpenOffice on Linux doesn’t do this, so has to load the entire application when you click on its icon. This takes 40 seconds.
Also, in Microsoft office, they’ve made effective use of DLLs, so when the app starts, there are lots of libraries that aren’t loaded. They are only loaded if you need to use that part of the product. If OpenOffice on Linux does this, it’s not doing it as well as Microsoft made theirs do it.
To take another app as an example, Blender on Linux starts immediately on my system. I can’t tell the difference in time between Blender starting on Linux and Notepad starting on Windows. Does 3D Studio Max start this quickly on Windows? Blender manages this by minimising the bloat. I don’t think it’s as easy for an all-in-one office app to do this.
they are making their own code that does not use any OSS code and they have the nerve not to release it!!!
sue them!!!