The up to now highly anticipated Red Hat Linux 9 is finally released. OSNews had its hands to the final version of Red Hat Linux 9 for over 3 weeks now and we were able to evaluate it in a number of ways. The final version is not too different than the Phoebe-3 beta for which we wrote a preview recently.I wouldn’t like to repeat myself, as most things apply as in Phoebe beta 3, so if you want more info on the product in a “review-mode” please read our article as linked above. Only new additions are the cursor theme for XFree86, a few cleanups on the system and some bug fixes. Also, a lot has been said in other reviews on the web about the installation and the feel of the OS. This mini-article will only focus on what’s missing, or what’s not there yet.
First, I will list a few things of what you can actually find in the new release: you will find a good choice of apps on Red Hat Linux 9, from office to fax apps, some entertaining games, a fully featured web suite and more. The NPTL library offers better responsivess of the system taking care of how the Linux kernel is dealing with threads, there is a cleaned up start menu, a bug fixed Nautilus (however it still has disabled the ability to edit Gnome’s menus), Mozilla’s good looking AA font rendering and more. KDE 3.1 and Gnome 2.2 are included, in addition to a number of servers like Apache, Postgresql, mysql etc.
So, now let’s see what — in my opinion — still missing from Red Hat (the below is indented just as constructive criticism btw).
Many users and admins will define this version as an “incremental” release rather than a full blown new featured version, despite the major version bump. The OS still lacks a number of GUI setting panels, like dealing with partitioning, boot manager, visual partition mounting (e.g. automatically show the partitions on the context menu under Gnome’s “Disks”), Internet connection sharing, Bluetooth support, a visual way to install fonts for both GTK+ 1.x apps and fontconfig, a way for a user to easily install applications in its own space without the need for a root password and without the almost always accompanied dependency hell, a way to add new services easily, a Gnome Gamma correction tool, energy saver tool, a better Camera app that is more integrated to an image viewer or an image manipulation tool.
Other Server config tools might be needed, like a client/server config tool for NIS/OpenLDAP, mail server config, and GUI mysql/postgresql database config tools. I would like to see GConf used more, and not just for Gnome stuff, but also for things like “enable/disable DMA” and other under the hood operations. The ability to mount NTFS partitions is also needed… And just a few minutes ago, I needed to change the MIME type of a nautilus script file, which won’t get recognized if it doesn’t get changed to text/x-sh. However, I found no easy way to do this simple change via the GUI (the “Open with an Application” gui panel just doesn’t do the trick here).
However, the biggest lacking I find on Red Hat Linux 9 today is the lack of multimedia and video tools. There isn’t a proper video player included that supports common codecs, and while normally that wouldn’t be a problem as on other OSes (you just download a package and double click it to install it), on Linux it’s more complicated than that. Most of the time, most users including myself will be able to go around these problems, but newbies might need the ability to download packages that are similar to the ones on Windows, BeOS and MacOSX, where no dependency problems occur. Things just work in these platforms (and no, I don’t see apt-get as the answer in this problem, it is not the cure to the root of the problem).
Unfortunately, most of the bugs I found on Phoebe3, are still on the final version of Red Hat Linux 9. KDE’s Bluecurve engine is nowhere near as cleaned up as Gnome’s (white non-transparent pixels are in place, while the taskbar font of an open app gets white sometimes making it difficult to read), mp3 will skip sometimes when loading a new web page with Mozilla (athlonXP 1600+ here), Samba via the command line or via Nautilus/Konqueror will still not connect to my XP PRO share (MacOSX, and even Lindows on the same machine don’t have a problem with this); *many* KDE apps will load under Gnome without a written titlebar, other KDE apps won’t load at all via Gnome while they do via KDE (KOffice does that some times), resizing any Metacity window is just painfully slow (I am able to see the redrawing!), while loading OOo takes more than 20 seconds. I was also able to hard crash this installation when running a configure script (crashed when dealing with libjpeg). This seems to be a rare condition for Linux in general, as I have also crashed SuSE on the same machine doing a configuration. These are just a few of the bugs I encountered on both Phoebe3 and the final version.
Personally, I like consistent workspaces with expected behaviors and, unfortunately, the Linux platform is not ready to offer me this yet. But it is getting better, with every release. Another thing that annoys me is GTK+ itself, which seems slow. Right clicking on apps like Galeon 1.3.x I will see the popup window coming up for a split second and *then* populating it with the menu options. This is mostly visible on Galeon as its background is a complex HTML page, but if you look closely to the desktop or other context menu items on *all* GTK+ apps, you will see the same behavior too (most people will have to look hard to see this behavior, but if you switch systems and OSes frequently, it is more easily distinguishable). It is not really a problem, but it just kind of annoying when you are used to instantaneous UI responsiveness.
Despite all the above, I consider Red Hat Linux 9 still to be the most polished and professional Linux distro out there, while Mandrake has closed a big gap recently with their 9.1 release, but SuSE is staying mostly on the same level as they were on 8.1 a few months ago. If Mandrake makes one more such leap in 6 months and Red Hat hasn’t, Mandrake can surpass Red Hat, but I don’t believe that this will be the case. I believe that Red Hat 10 will be as much evolutionary as revolutionary. But for this specific release, sorry, but I am not as enthusiastic as I was for Psyche. It’s good, more polished, but not without some serious bugs that get in my way when things don’t work as they are supposed to.
Installation: 9.5/10
Hardware Support: 7.5/10
Ease of use: 7/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 7/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.66 / 10
would make a great redhat-config tool..
sir mix alot said: However, I followed Aitvo’s suggestion and added “/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd” to /etc/rc.d/rc.local and now DVD runs smoother than a baby’s ass .. dare I saw it looks better than on Win2k on the same machine.
GASP….
cant believe my eyes….runs better in linux then win2k
hell did freeze over
That’s the last thing I would have heard from Darius aka Sir MIx Alot
I really like the new upgrade option from the installation program, it just works, without any problem, it’s perfect!
I use Linux every day at work and at home. I do absolutely like living in a linux world over a Windows world but that is entirely my preference based on a half dozen aspects of my career and my life that is pointless to go into here.
That being said, every other frickin’ major distro including Mandrake (been awhile guys correct me if I am wrong) and SuSE enables DMA by default. I use Gnome and RedHat is the best distro and most integrated with Gnome. This is not a XP versus Linux thing. XP pro enabled DMA by default right? Well so does SuSE. Redhat should be like this too.
RedHat has tons of potential. I love the system configuration and services configuration tools. Those tools look and feel so much nicer than many other distro-specific tools. There just needs to be more of them for goodness sakes.
…but i’m curious, what’s the name of the music on the (already famous) mp3? 😎
GASP….
cant believe my eyes….runs better in linux then win2k
hell did freeze over
Ok, well … did you ever once hear my day that everything runs better in Windows than Linux?
And you thought I was an MS fanboy
My loyalty to MS goes about as far as the apps I can’t (yet) get in Linux, but that’s about it.
What I meant was …
Ok, well … did you ever once hear me say that everything runs better in Windows than Linux?
install redhat 9 just a minute ago
as root
go to: /etc/sysconfig/harddisks
uncomment these lines if you have harddrive that is less than 3 years old
USE_DMA=1
EIDE_32BIT=3
LOOKAHEAD=1
save and reboot
OO should load in less than 6 seconds
Everytime someone posts the slightest hint at a negative comment about Linux, it gets flamed to death with the usual crap:
“you don’t understand how it works”
“you havne’t been trained to use it properly”
“of course its’ not easy to use”
“it’s not windows” – my personal fav!
“you haven’t configured it properly”
all basically saying the same thing..
Linux is rubbish to use. Every computer OS should be simple enough to pick up and use, learning as you go. Even the most complex things should be simple to do, simple to understand and easy to achieve. Linux fails at every single step.
Let’s face it- it’s a nerdy OS for nerdy geeks with way too much time on their hands and definately not for “real” people who just want to get on with actually doing things!
You don’t know how it works. It’s not Windows.
What I really mean to say here is, hey; if you’re too stupid to learn how to use something else, then don’t learn! Ignorance is bliss. I’d like to know what “havne’t” means, by the way, you seem to have heard that one a whole lot..must be a secret code word of some sort.
Oh, as an aside Mr. Real Person(tm), exactly what are you doing posting under a Linux article if you have so little time for a “rubbish” OS? Came down off your high horse long enough to let a little oxygen back into your brain?
Hey, Eugenia. What the fuck does this mean exactly?
“You are so easy to pull your finger and cross me…”
Is that how you view the user base here? As a bunch of uninformed morons farting in your “general direction?” Last I checked, you were the uninformed moron in charge here. Maybe it’s time you came out of the Ivory Tower of Ignorance and conference with your people for a while, straighten things out.
Or you could just go on writing shitty, worthless articles and swearing at the visitors instead. Seems to be what you BeOS rejects are good at.
<quote>Let’s face it- it’s a nerdy OS for nerdy geeks with way too much time on their hands and definately not for “real” people who just want to get on with actually doing things!</quote>
Like what? I use it every single day at home and at work. I am a Unix System Administrator and a Software Configuration Manager keeping track of software developed for linux/unix.
I work up spreadsheets with software version matrixes in gnumeric and send it to my boss through evolution. Real work like that? Is that what you mean?
I converse with the testers on availability for installing the new per through gaim. I scp files to the test servers by highlighting in Nautilus and choosing the Scp to host script.
I work on documentation send to me by our tech writer for install instructions in OOwriter and send that back to her with edits through Evolution or I use LinNeighborhood and throw it on the network shares. You mean real work like that?
One of the serverside scripts dumps all this information converted from troff into large nasty postscript files – a little over a hundred of them every month. I highlight all 106 and convert them into pdfs and sort them all by customer based on file flags. Once again, browse to them through Nautilus and use a nautilus script straight from the file manager. Is that too geeky for you?
I use Rhythmbox to play my ogg files and my mp3s. I did not personally get the skips Eugenia talks about. But it does not mean that it does not happen and in fact RedHat needs to dump OSS for ALSA like too quick. What about toying around with shadowing in jpeg or png files through Gimp? What about browsing the WWW with Galeon2?
I get a lot of work geeky and non-geeky done in Linux.
If you don’t like it then don’t use it. But don’t tell me that I do not do real work with it. In that regard, you have no clue.
“all basically saying the same thing..
Linux is rubbish to use. Every computer OS should be simple enough to pick up and use, learning as you go. Even the most complex things should be simple to do, simple to understand and easy to achieve. Linux fails at every single step. ”
Well the reason comments like yours get criticised isn’t because it’s a negative comment, but because it is a unilateral comment. If one applied the metrics you just mentioned in a uniform and fair manner across the computing landscape. Would anyone in good conscious be able to make the claims you just did, without looking hypocritical?
BTW Here’s something complex. I want to fly a 747. Why don’t your tenets hold? Think about it.
Why should anyone enable DMA for? I read on a redhat mailing list, linked from OSNEWS ages ago, that the kernel tries to detect the safest settings for the hardware.
Therefore if the kernel thinks the HDD is capable of DMA it is switched on.
Although that doesn’t answer the statements that redhat switches off DMA for CD/DVD/CD-R by default.
“if your mp3s are skipping might I recommend using ogg? I just put RedHat 9 to a test on my Dual Athlon 2000+ workstation. I was streaming some of my ogg 311 collection while streaming A Clockwork Orange at 720×480 xvid/ogm with its own 256 kbps stereo ogg track and loading 6 or 7 web pages simultaneously in Galeon. Not a single skip.”
LMAO! You need a dual Athlon to do that? And people wonder why I call Linux slow.
Man, you should see Windblows when it runs into trouble. I remember how much trouble I had with it in the last couple of years. Windows XP is the best that they could come up with, and not because they are stupid, but because they don’t care. That happens to all commercial stuff. Linux is a UNIX OS, maybe more or less POSIX compliant than others, but it has a different architecture. It doesn’t cost 399 like WinXP Pro, and its free by the way. Its not hard to use and I don’t have to put in the 50+ CD’s to install software and when its “kaput” make a clean install. Think about it. Yes, there are out there Linuxes that are hard to use for some, but the 3 Linuxes (biggest) that are everywhere are not hard to use. BTW next time when a window pops up out of nowhere in Windows with a message “I’m hot http://www.xxx.com” then think about how (in)SECURE windows realy is. Is easy to hack trust me. Everybody uses what can and likes, so please…
Ok, if you don’t like her reviews or the articles on this site, fine – then don’t come back here and cease with the personal attacks.
Ungreatful bastards.
Man, you should see Windblows when it runs into trouble. I remember how much trouble I had with it in the last couple of years.
Why do you (and I’m speaking to a select few zealots here) call people who get frustrated with Linux too ‘stupid’ to learn it, when most of you can’t even run Windows properly?
Dude, I learned how to use Linux when I was in highschool, 1995. The documentation was non existant, I couldn’t run XFree86, I couldn’t even use my then current ISP…
But I learned. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to pick up something new. If someone’s too lazy to read up on something new, they don’t deserve to learn it, period.
Windows has made people lazy with their defacto standard interface. If you don’t like not being able to clicky clicky on little icons and having to edit text files, stay with windows or buy a mac. This is NOT a desktop operating system for people who don’t want to learn. This is a UNIX like operating system.
I would like to learn how to use Linux more thoroughly but unfortunately, I don’t have enough space to intall linux indefinitely *I have a 20 GB hard drive and I have a lot of games in there
*.
But I may do a spring cleaning and delete some programs and files that I haven’t used for years.
There are various linux distributions that will install straight to a windows hard drive and run a lot like the BeOS Personal Edition from a couple years ago. Encapsulated file that holds a filesystem…
Or you could just play with Knoppix…it will boot right off of the cd and give you access to play around with stuff.
http://www.knoppix.org
Really, I don’t get all these nonsensical comments. The review was fair enough. In fact, coming from Eugenia, it was a pretty mild review (Actually, all her recent reviews of linux distros have been milder than usual. Me wonders why). If the review was unfair, that’s only to the extent that it wasn’t half-as-harsh as Redhat 9 actually deserves.
Anyway, I am actually a fan of Redhat, but if I had to review the 9.0 release, I’d be a lot more harsher than Eugenia has been. Redhat 9 is plainly dissapointing. After 6 months, they could and should have done better. If you are going to do a full version jump, the least you can do is do a thorough job. 8.0 was a milestone. By comparison, 9.0 is childs play. Mandrake did a much better job this time.
Kevin:
Linux slow? It all depends. I got ogg files playing right now and I am flipping around between Galeon and Evolution. No skips. Sometimes, I get like a skipping lag right at the start of playing an mpeg. Just a second slow down before it skips once and then plays normally.
Darius:
Thank you for pointing out the zealots and keeping everything on a even standing.
Quake:
If you are a big gamer then Linux is not even the best OS for you. The best tool for what you need. XP is probably the best deal for you unless you just want to tinker.
I meant an mpeg mpg video file.
Were you using the 4191 nvidia driver, eugenia? It has a known problem with breaking 2D acceleration for some cards (yes, even if you set it to on, it just doesn’t *work*). If you were, try upgrading to the new driver or downgrading to the 3000 series, see if that helps.
My dear Darius I use a computer since a barely could spell my name right, I speak a couple of diferent languages (reading/writing) and I’ve started coding when I was about 11.
I’ve used every version of Windows. I hate to compare Windows with Linux because they are 2 diferent worlds. That Linux got on everyones desktop is a good thing, but people call it names. Its a piece of code (big piece) and by being free and comming in so many flavors its diferent from Windows, If you actually would have used Windows in the perriod 94-95-96-97 and even later you’ve noticed how it sucked. I had only brand-name hardware and proper drivers and it still sucked, until I’ve turned to NT so I can get work done. Back then NT was as “hard” to use for some people as Mandrake 9.1 or RedHat 9 this days. It was a desaster, I think most people would agree with this, Then 2000 came out and it started to be ok, atleast somehow, because until SP2 came out for it it was dificult to play games on it. No, I am not arogant and I’m not a zealot. I use whatever I can to get work done. AND JUST SO ALL OF YOU KNOW: why is said that some user unfriendly OS is stable and better? BECAUSE its not economics or company driven. Its a comunitty efort, and every time I’ve wrote a piece of code for pleasure I did it with passion and as good as I could, but when I did it for school or for a job, I just did it. Not because I didn’t want to write it good, but because I was given a time-frame. So, how long have you been using Software/Hardware Mr.???
Mandrake disables or enables DMA on an individual basis, via a hardware database, so on some which haven’t been reported as safe for DMA-enabled you’ll still find it’s disabled (it disables DMA on one of my four CD-ROM drives, by default). But for most devices, DMA will be enabled.
And I’ve forgot: Learn how to read, because I didn’t mean the people, I ment micr0s0ft. “The best they could come up with…” after so many versions that sucked.
You where just trolling btw…
Jonhatan Bailes: I’m not really a gamer by the stance that I can’t live with games. I’m usually browsing the web, Making small programs in VB, learning PHP and C++…
But, since I don’t have a large hard drive, I can’t reserve a lot of space for Linux as I always want to tryout new programs and games in Windows. But If I had another drive then it will be a different story
Btw. I already know how to work in Linux a little. I know how to compile programs, edit /etc/fstab to mount the windows’ partition…
Instead of I can’t live with games it’s “I can’t live without games”
Well, many said that RHL 9 was a child play or nothing. Well, actually the things are like this:
I’ve played with RedHat for some years and they’ve always released alpha/beta quality code in theyr stuff. To be fair and square all Red Hats that I’ve run where stable and I could get work done, but: there where problems, I knew how to fix most of them without having to post stuff on god knows what mailing list and wait. My most recent example could be with Red Hat Linux 9: They’ve shipped it (as ussual) with some broken stuff: One of this was hpoj and the printer configuration utilitty: First of the bug (which by the way is not a hpoj native bug, it got there because of various patches applied by RH) is that it won’t work, so its broken. They have the fix but its not released to RHN, god knows why. So I had to get release 15 (it came with hpoj-14) from Raw-Hide. And surprise, it works. Same thign with other packages.
Conclusion: Red Hat Linux aimes not at the desktop market, it aimes at the enterprise. And while the comunity is ideal to test its code, the ship theyr commercial version to companies with containing stable code. And it works. They don’t care that people are bitching about them. Even so it is not a bag distro, and it was always stable, but they let problems there to get fixed by the comunity. Also NPTL implementation had trouble, take a look at the updates: kernel-2.4.20-9 came out and fixed glibc. So thats about RedHat, Not a bad company, a good distro, it just depends how you’re using it.
Yeah, its late. Lots of typos. Sorry.
I find linux to be a nice development environment. I use Bluefish for html and I am almost on the bleeding edge using the gtk2 version of anjuta (compiled it from an hourly snapshot and I have been using it for a couple of days now — nice). If I was really on the bleeding edge I would be using anjuta2 but it is still so very beta. KDevelop is supposed to be really nice but I prefer gnome.
Bluefish has some decent basic php tagging and such and makes a good color contexted editor.
Like the simple code editors especially for web stuff if you want a commercial equivilant I am more a BBedit person as opposed to a Dreamweaver fan.
If you find the space to try out linux I have a bit of advice. Prepare. Research. If you choose a spartan distro without a lot of the browser plugins or apps or whatever then make yourself a postinstall dir on your win partition or on a CD. It is still an alternative OS no matter how much most of the distros want to make you pay for it.
Since you know a bit about the *nix-way I would suggest trying a less spartan distro even though I really enjoy RH. Probably Mandrake would be a good choice because you get all the plugins and urpmi makes the dependency issues a little easier to live with and they handle downloading the MS fonts and nvidia drivers I believe. If you like KDE then SuSE is also a good distro with lots of the above stuff except no urpmi but they do include all their yast2 tools inside of the KDE Control Center. What the hell does that mean? One Control Center with all the tools you need to deal with your system and your desktop. RH does this in a way. The start-here icon on the desktop has all that stuff but it is less clear. Another bit of advice. Distro hop just long enough to find a distro you can like and then stick with it for awhile. You are only going to realize whether or not you like Linux if you actually live it for awhile.
Linux may be a good fit for you. It may not. It all depends on what you like and what you do with your computer. No one tool is the perfect fit for everyone and every job in my opinion.
Have fun.
BTW: DVD playback is also very jerky in both Ogle & Xine on an Athlon 1.2ghz with 384MB RAM & ATI Radeon 7500. And yes, my hard drive settings are fine – both mp3 & dvd playback work flawlessly in Win2k.
Redhat doesn’t have dma turned on by default for cd or dvd drives. To turn it on do hdparm -d 1 /dev/hd? where ‘?’ is the letter of your dvd drive. You will also need to do this every time you restart unless you add it to /etc/conf.d/local.start.
It seems like a lot of underlying systems work was done on RH9… I hope that they’ll start investing more time into the graphical configuration utilities next release. They’re actually pretty useful right now, but there’s so many ways they can be improved.
I’m OK with grabbing RPMs off FreshRPMs. This alone alleviates 95% of the issues that RH9 has. The other couple things I need to fix up are generally simple configuration fixes, the Flash plugin, and the Java stuff. I can’t complain too hard about a couple command-line edits (who doesn’t have to eventually head into the Windows Registery to fix something, right?). Java and Jikes are annoying to install, but again, no worse than Windows ever was. OK, installing Flash is too much of a pain in the ass, but I’ll assume it’ll get better soon.
Unfortunately, Linux is hitting the point where some of the serious problems will only be solved by commercial software manufacturers. Flash is only going to be packaged properly to work with Mozilla when Macromedia gets its act together.
-Erwos
Funny, because DMA is ON for my hard drive on XP PRO, by default.
That is funny because that will only happen if XP has a suitable driver for your IDE conroller chipset. If it is on by default then XP obviously does. The same goes for Linux. Clearly all chipsets aren’t supported equally (as with any other piece of hardware).
Um, because it’s possible to do in other operating systems?
How? All other OS’s have the same problem. They mostly solve it by static linking as much as possible and including all dependencies in the main package. I know windows has problems when you install programs that use conflicting versions of certain dlls. Microsoft is planning on dealing with this by using some sort of new method, but as far as I know it isn’t in place yet.
Dependencies are something all OS’s that I have used have had problems with. I know there have been many times I have tried to install or use a program on windows only to get a .dll error.
that the freaking mp3 was STREAMING
So it is strange that an streaming mp3 skipped when loading a web page in mozilla??? net congestion anyone?
LMAO! You need a dual Athlon to do that? And people wonder why I call Linux slow.
Do they really? I thought it was pretty clear that you were just ignorant.
Why should anyone enable DMA for? I read on a redhat mailing list, linked from OSNEWS ages ago, that the kernel tries to detect the safest settings for the hardware.
Heh, key word tries. Trust me, it doesn’t always work as well as it should.
RE Eugenia (IP: —.client.attbi.com)
ATA-66 Samsung 40 GB IDE isn’t very descriptive, what is the rotation
speed? if it is 5400rpm, rip it our, smash it into tiny little piece and buy a 7200rpm and you life will be easier.
RE: James Warkentin (IP: —.va.shawcable.net)
What video card do you own? have you installed the native drivers? is dri enabled? has the agp module loaded?
I am running a PIII 550 w/ 768MB RAM, and a Matrox G550 video card, rock solid and fast (and this is on FreeBSD 4.8). XFree86 4.3.0 isn’t the fault, it is the being between the desk and chair.
Linux surrounds a decent kernel with crap, which gets further compounded by having distros layer their own customized crap upon the pre-existing general crap. This produces a kind of craptastic synergy, where nothing works as expected for long; except the kernel. (It ovbiously has to work long enough so that everything else has a chance to crash.) A prime example of this would be RedHat 9 and its effect on grammar. From what I’ve seen here, installing RH9.0 seems to break a user’s grammar and spelling. Personally I think its due to GCC 3.2 incompatabilities, but then again we could just blame it on the X server like everything else.
At least windows is just pure crap – they don’t waste a decent kernel. They build it with crap in mind from the ground up. Thats how a crap OS is supposed to built. You don’t see windows users filling up forums every weeknight complaining, being cranky, or telling everyone else they are retarded for not wanting to “do” their computer thru the CD drive because it runs linux. Its because windows users know their entire OS is crap, they don’t have a decent kernel to give them some kind of twisted sense of hope that things will get better. So they just accept that their computer blows, and they go out and party at night instead.
The only people that I’d say do things right are mac users, not only do they know their computer is “slow” (read as “crap”); but they go a step further and make it look sexy. In essence they are going for the dumb blond look of computing. Not too much upstairs but damn she gets a lot of phone numbers. As yourself this, when was the last time linux got you a date? A friend of mine, Sarah, studies in the law library with her iBook – granted its slow and she hates how long it takes to get Office to do anything – but she’s also gotten 3 law students to hit on her. (All starting off with “Nice computer…”)
So finally, and conclusion. I think 1 of a things should happen to make everyone feel better.
– Give up hope, getting a crappy kernel could go a long way to helping that.
– Take some prosac, of if you need to take a lot of prosac.
– Find some way to Linux look sexy – maybe put a “I have a 6inch tongue” sticker on your laptop.
– Or plan for the future and have lots of daughters, so you can brain wash them into finding linux sexy instead of macs that way some other frustrated linux geek can have a better life.
Dude – keep away from baby’s backside
man, gentoo is the way – er-actually I don’t use gentoo, but I do miss hearing from their pr crowd (do I sense the heavy hand of the big editor in the sky?).
I have used RedHat for a while and it’s OK. Actually the company I work for has moved almost entirely to linux and we run several versions (RedHat being one). From my perspective, the things genie the greek (sorry, that is awful) mentioned don’t bother me at all. The real problem is the inability to get some things to work at all (software or hardware). SuSE wouldn’t run our scanners and often neither RedHat nor SuSE will run certain apps because of dependency problems. I personally spent about 6 hours trying to install some app on SuSE one time and finally installed it on RedHat with no problems.
As for using linux for work, I do it 15 hours a day so it’s absurd to say that linux is trash. I’ve found that it’s good to have several distros available to make life a little easier. Besides, installing an OS is addictive.
99% of the time I use Linux. Currently I use SuSE 8.0, but
it’s very customized on my on terms.
I love Linux and I want to see it succeed.
From my experience, all Linux distribution release
versions WITH A USER INTERFACE which would be considered at best “beta quality” in most respectable development shops. For me this is not a problem because I always figure out how to fix things. However, I think it reflects badly on Linux. I’m talking about the obvious bugs that make the OS look broken, that is, the ones which you encounter and say to yourself, “how could they do something like this”. I’ve hit those kinds of bugs with every distribution. I’m talking about bugs that can be fixed in a short time frame, perhaps a few days or even a week all together.
If distribution X releases version 9.0, and they know they leave in a ton of broken things/bugs in the UI, why can’t they release version 9.0.2 which is dedicated to critical bug fixes?? Oh yeah, that’s what RHN is for. Well, I’ve never downloaded an update from Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, or any other company which fixes obvious UI bugs in their respective configuration tools. Yes, they are very good at providing bug fixes for critical server items, critical OS programs, and security issues, but they rarely, if ever, provide fixes in the UI.
They all need better quality control in this aspect.
Eugenia,
I’m just curious, do you use AA fonts in XP? I’ve noticed quite a few XP machines that don’t use AA. AA slows down the inerface considerably.
Also, I also found this:
//
All the text processing utilities, grep, awk, sort, etc all work significantly slower when using the Unicode UTF locale. To speed the bootup, in the /etc/rc.sysinit and other SysV scripts, because the configuration is using 7bit ASCII these utilities are now invoked with LC_ALL=C utility to force the C locale.
\ [http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html]
I’m a total linux noob and just tried redhat phoebe. I managed to tunnel it through my proxy (winxp nat) for web browsing and other net related activity. Web browser: Mozilla i entered the proxy address and port for each service and i also had to enter this in the proxy settings in the system config (2 areas had to be entered or it wouldnt work). Konqueror wouldn’t work for sh*t cause it kept saying i had a wrong proxy address when mozilla and xchat etc were already working on that address. Konqueror looks like a nice browser, shame though… Also have to mention that RH seems to boot up real slow.
I also have to raise the question, If they are aimed at the server/network market, why do they have their personal edition in the “community products” category.
Honestly I think they claim to not be aiming at the general public cause its the easy way out of not taking responsibility for deficciencies.
I use Maya (a 3d program) and it runs that was made to run on redhat and uses redhat libs. Now if my OS isnt user friendly, how the hell will i get any work done?
A point and click solution is most often the fastest and most comfortable way of doing things. When something is created, I expect it to do what it was made to do. RPM dependencies are insane, if it takes packaging together everything needed fine, isnt that the windows way? EG. “This game/app requires direct X to install, would you like to install it?” yes…
Anyway I’m rambling here…
I have been using Red Hat 8 since it came out at office and at home. That applies to all the people in our company. We use it for all daily office work. We have only one Windows machine that is used for testing www interface with Internet Explorer.
In Eugenia’s review, she pointed out several issues that I have not even bothered to notice. Really, I haven’t paid any attention to window resizing slowness, for example. Perhaps it is done better in a commercial licensed operating system – perhaps there are missing features in Red Hat that might be nice to have.
But please notice: Red Hat was free to us, we did not pay a dime for it. Comparing it to a commercial operating system is close to saying that it’s better to get a clean 100 USD bill from your own bank account than pick a dirty 100 USD from the street.
We are making a very narrow profit, and every cost counts. Getting rid of the license costs altogether has been an important saving to us. And yet, perhaps with some problems every now and then, we can serve our customers and make business.
If your business enables you to charge license costs from your customers, please do so – please purchase commercial operating systems and applications. But we can not do that. Going for Red Hat and free software has been a must to us. There is no going back any more.
” Java and Jikes are annoying to install” – Really?
” installing Flash is too much of a pain in the ass” – Really?
For java you make a symlink and flash has an install script…
End of storry…
PS: Hope thei-ll port install-shield so I don’t have to see more of these:{
Maybe its due to GStreamer?
“GStreamer uses its own threading implementation, which has some known issues. They are discussed in more detail in the GStreamer 0.6 Release Notes.”
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/rnknownissues.html#id2867154
-magg
Man that was cool…yeah, linux the BSDs and the others belong to … they distroy lifes … realy … ruin people … And in the end semi-geeks wich don’t know what #include <conio.h> does hit the forums and talk nothing…
” I had wonderfull experiences with Linux …” “FreeBSD is far superior”… “Mac is the best”…
Get a life! I got a life a long time ago and I’m still happy with my Linux, and I’m not using it to look geeky or cool… Just to do my stuff…
1st) Comparation 2 Windows:
Try putting 100+ apps in start-up, lets see how it performs, and then add some more services.
Solution: Just eliminate what you don’t need at startup, like all daemons that are useless on the desktop anyway.
Problem: Those startup thingies are confuzing for a n00b.
2nd) Final Solution: If you get frustrated because of Linux quit using it because it will ruine you. Get another OS you can live with, because all it matters is happynes. Linux won’t make you look smarter, or better, it also isn’t faster than Windows. You won’t be cooler and you won’t get more chicks. All you get is frustration. Trust me. Linux is another world, its an open development system. Not everyone has to know to make a hard transplant or how to fly a 747, so not everyone has to know how to use Linux. Linux is like a pacient on the operating table with the guts out waiting to be operated. Then the good Doc comes in and makes it healty using GCC or some other tool.
Live your life people and use what you like. I like Linux, irs fun, and I can tell ya, I had the time of my life on OSNews, I’ve never laught so much…:)
Peace.
The problem about Mozilla and mp3 internet radio skipping is about how TCP works (best effort).
I would suggest Eugenia reading this -> http://lartc.org/
Of course this is not for newbies, and you *have to* read. I know, i know …
It’s not the OS. If the OS doesn’t like your hardware, no matter what OS you use, you’re going to get a preview of hell. I’ve installed linux without a hitch where the same hardware gave windows fits and vice versa. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s just the luck of the draw. Hardware config problems are rarer in windows because of broader hardware support but when they occur they are much harder to deal with than linux probs by and large. The inescapable conclusion: computers suck. This whole linux vs windows thing is an argument over who is the taller midget.
God have I had a bad day.
I install Redhat 9 and DMA enable both on the harddrive and dvd by default.
If its not detected then copy and edit /etc/sysconfig/harddisks.
There’s an instruction on how to do this in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
Boot-up time, you can reduce it by just disabling some one the services like kudzu
Finally, I was not able to reproduce the error Eugenia stated with mms and mozilla. I had a DVD playing, mms streaming mp3, and browsing with mozilla rendering complex html without any skipping in either the dvd nor the mms.
So far so good, except the wireless tools or lack of (mandrake handled my card like a champ). Fortunately the new verson of wlan-ng now compiles with redhat 9.
Well, Red Hat ships an admin tool with their Red Hat database.
(which in essence is posgresql)
People can get an RPM for RHL 9 at http://utelsystems.dyndns.org/ (requires the tktable and blt rpm as well). Note that that version doesn’t support some new features in PostgreSQL 7.3.x
A while back I read there was a problem with X and some video drivers.
Basically, the X buffers would do some do-hickey thigymabob (technical stuff I didn’t quite understand).
This *could* interrupt the stream of data to the sound card and produce skipping of all sounds.
Sorry, I can’t remember where I read this, but I had a skipping problem on my lappy back with RedHat 8.0 which disappeared when I booted up into Windows2000. The answer I saw did make perfect sense to me though (despite me not quite being the most hardcore X/kernel/driver coder).
Dunk
Has anyone tried prelinking to see if that helps startup time for OOo? Install the prelink rpm and read the man page for prelink(8) and maybe that will help 🙂
mp3 skipping does indeed happen to me when resizing a windows in Mozilla. It is not consistent though, it might not happen resizing mozilla for an hour and suddenly every resize makes mp3 jumping. I don’t think it is a performance issue: it does happen only on my faster machine (an athlon XP2400) and not on my slower machine (Athlon 1.2ghz).
/***********************************************************
This is the part you don’t understand.
I KNOW that Red Hat only targets the server space and the workstation/corporate desktop and not the home desktop.
HOWEVER, that does NOT mean that if you make it hard for even the administrators to hunt down what they need is “ok”. It is not ok. The fact that a user is not a newbie, does not making the OS any better for puitting extra work to the user.
> I’d check out your harddrive settings, maybe you hvae a terribly slow harddrive.
It is not slow.
>Is this an OS review or a desktop review
It is nothing of the two. It is my opinion on how to make Red Hat better. Server settings and additional tools are mentioned in the article. The fact that you can do something with the command line does not mean that an advanced user wouldn’t like to see a GUI equivelant tool to make his/her life easier.
************************************************************/
I have been using Linux mostly Redhat for about 6 years now. I find this review to be a load of shit, like that comment that it feels more like a point release. If you actually took the time to study it properly you will see that there is a big difference between RH8 and RH9. Instead you focused on the GUI. The first major change is the back porting of Kernel 2.5 code to 2.4, this has made it incompatible with a lot of older binaries. Secondly Redhat are making a shift to woo customers into buying the bigger better “Enterprise Ready” Linux distro which gets updated much more slowly.
Right sorry for babbling here, it just pisses me off when people rip the crap out of something they actually do not know much about. There is a simple saying in the open source community “RTFM —> Read the F**king man pages”. Right I am also going to give a decent example of how easy it is to use redhat.
-> open mozilla / konquereor / galeon
-> go to http://fedora.mplug.org or http://www.freshrpms.net
-> download apt
-> install apt by double clicking on it in your file manager
-> open a terminal
-> run apt-get update
-> apt-get install synaptic
-> close your terminal
-> use your start (go) menu, go to system settings and
run synaptic
-> install packages to your hearts content!
Its that simple. One other important things you should know.
RH is aimed at the corperate desktop and has everything you
need for that area. You should not even be thinking about
installing multimedia apps on your RH box at work. Plus
another beautiful thing is you can call your systems administrator, and if your administrator struggles, then he is an idiot because the steps I put above is how bloody easy it is!!!!
So please in future and I am sure everyone will agree with me here, write more in depth reviews and try to keep them to what everyone is interested, the CORE and a little desktop
What’s with all these modded down comments? Looks pretty ugly…
During using redhat 8 I installed apt4rpm.
The problem I have is that I don’t understand synaptic, how do you install new packages.
From the terminal it is easy to install mplayer but from synaptic…I just don’t understand the interface. To me it always looks as if it will update the whole distro.
Ok…lets go for the record here. See if RH9 can more reviews than 8 did not to mention any other superior distro. Come on….lets beat this dead horse.
This was just an opinionated mini-article. If you want a real review, check this http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
<joke>
You must be kidding, how do you want a newbie to understand such review?
The main difference I saw from RH8 to RH9 was that the default desktop is a bit darker. Not darker enough to grant a number increase though.
</joke>
The gurulabs is an excellent review. I’d wish osnews links to more in depth article like that instead of always bitching to the same points that are choices by Redhat.
What I would like is for a way to remove packages regardless how they were installed. i.e., if by the source or rpm. Have a way of registering what is installed on the system, i.e., monitor core folders where you would expect to install stuff, and everytime soemone installs something, have that updated. Then we would not need rpm to uninstall packages. I have now stopped using source to install packages.
It makes it hard to keep track of what is on the system. That was also part of the reason to move to Redhat. On other ditros, finding prebuilt packages is impossible. On redhat, there is a striving community of users who do just that. Thank you to them, things are much easier in Linuxland.
“The first major change is the back porting of Kernel 2.5 code to 2.4, this has made it incompatible with a lot of older binaries.”
There were some discussions on LKML. There are even some Red Hat voices who speak of unstable and unfinished stuff in Red Hat’s kernels.
I think first that we as users need to understand that desktop use is not RedHat’s target market. I think it is a good idea that they have split into 2 versions: Enterprise and Personal. So Eugenia’s comments are about what’s wrong with Personal. I completely agree with her. All you people who say that She is not RedHat’s market are mostly wrong. She is their target market, with one exception. RedHat now has a desktop market, but, they don’t really care too much about it. It’s not their bread and butter; it’s not where most of their money comes from. Personal is pretty much a marketing tool. Think about it. Now, as far as whether personal is any good or not. I agree that it is very good, but it is not quite their yet. I wrote some similar comments about this in an article (Easy Distro) on my website. I agree with Eugenia, and I can’t wait for Linux destro’s to rise to the challenge.
Matt
Being a newbie to Linux doesn’t mean that one cannot handle it. Simply means there is a new environment to learn. I know when i boot up to redhat everything I need to do is possible, just need to learn how. I think linux has a lot of potential to eventually compete with the general OSes out there in more areas than simply the server/data market. While I cannot verify everything that Eugenia has said, I agree completely with her opinion for what it is, and I will read. In order for an OS to mature, every little thing has to be fussed about at some point, no matter how petty it seems to you gurus. Microsoft got where it is today cause it has a large coding team and beta-testing panel that made sure every small detail was fussed about. Several people I know enjoy setting their networks up with windows server cause of the simple click to turn this on or change that value. I’d say what we need is more people that would fuss and write articles about how this didnt work or this window wouldnt resize quickly etc. Next thing you know we have a resposive and comfortable UI. Others can feel free to write about the technical things that work great or dont work. Feedback of these types are what make the OS better. Personally, I like Redhat and can see myself getting into it to use as a more serious workstation OS. But I love to read that I’m not the only one that has problems setting it to run on a proxy or that stupid Konqueror wouldnt work. That means it will be fixed. Eugenia, you’re doing a great job and I’d like to encourage more people to write about their experiences with linux instead of playing the blame game or challenging one’s competence.
First I had Red Hat 7.2 playing sound fine. I upgraded to 9.0 and now there is no sound, does not recognize the sound card even though the kernel has sound support.
Searching for sound related stuff on Red Hat site
is a nightmare.
What is happening to Red Hat?
i liked the article, you did well, don’t mind the flamers, they have nothing positive to say, they just don’t understand that a Desktop OS should really be a Desktop OS without the need to make many changes in the ‘terminal’.
I’m going to patch my RH9 with acpi support, perhaps i’ll post a howto for you guys,
cheers
anyweb
Who said it was supposed to be a desktop OS? You know the diference between desktop and workstation? It also comes with several servers, so you can install it as server. I know one ISP who has lots of clients and uses the download version of RedHat on the Server. And it just works fine. If Linux had been something commercial and expansive then not so many people would had acces to it, so its free and everyone can bitch about it? How about Windows? Is it realy so stable and cheap? I don’t think so. A shame that my machine came with it because I had to pay for it and didn’t even get a proper CD to reinstall it. Huh!
“he ability to mount NTFS partitions is also needed…”
This is a patent laden issue. RedHat has *repeatedly* stated that they would *like* to include NTFS read support, however they cannot until the legal status surrounding NTFS code in the Linux kernel is resolved. It doesn’t matter if other distributions are willing to take that legal risk. RedHat is not. There’s also the question that if it is indeed patent encumbered how it can be GPL at all without the person who wrote the code having the rights to the patents. STOP HARPING ABOUT THIS ISSUE THAT THEY CANNOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT.
“However, the biggest lacking I find on Red Hat Linux 9 today is the lack of multimedia and video tools. There isn’t a proper video player included that supports common codecs…”
Yet again you fail to see the fact that there are PATENT ISSUES SURROUNDING THIS. RedHat *cannot* legally provide an item that provides this functionality. STOP HARPING ABOUT THINGS THEY CAN’T LEGALLY CHANGE.
They CAN do something about it. License it from Microsoft. As every company would do. As for the GPL, the GPL clearly states that if the patent holder submits in writing that will allow Red Hat to do it (for the right price), then there is no problem at all.
The question here is not the legalities. Is if Red Hat is serious about its market and if they have the balls to put their hands in their wallet and license whatever is needed to offer a modern operating system.
Do you think I don’t know about these issues? My point of view is that it CAN be done, for the right price. The real problem here is Red Hat not feeling like do what other companies do: license technologies and pay the price asked.
“The question here is not the legalities. Is if Red Hat is serious about its market and if they have the balls to put their hands in their wallet and license whatever is needed to offer a modern operating system.”
Wrong again. The GPL says the patent must be available to *ALL*. There is no way Microsoft is going to license their codecs to be freely available under the GPL to *ALL* people of the world. It can’t just be in writing to RedHat. Sorry, that doesn’t work.
“Do you think I don’t know about these issues? My point of view is that it CAN be done, for the right price. The real problem here is Red Hat not feeling like do what other companies do: license technologies and pay the price asked.”
No, it can’t, and not still be considered free software.
“The real problem here is Red Hat not feeling like do what other companies do: license technologies and pay the price asked.”
Name one Linux distribution or Free Software OS that has done this. You can’t. There’s a FREAKING REASON.
> Name one Linux distribution or Free Software OS that has done this. You can’t. There’s a FREAKING REASON.
Yeah, there is. Linux does not make enough money for them to be able to license anything. Poor linux distros, trying to make money off free software.
>No, it can’t, and not still be considered free software.
I don’t see the need for the mp3/movie/ntfs support from Red Hat to be free. I am perfectly fine if these particular programs will have to be rewritten, modified or whatever in order to stay closed source. As long most of their software is open, having a bit of closed source just to be able to offer more to your users, can’t hurt. At least not myself.
Anybody know the name of the new cursors rpm for Redhat 9? I have a perfectly running Redhat8 laptop that I’d like to install those cursors on.
BTW, Eugenia, you have more balls than most men on this forum.
Yeah Red Hat is really going to pay Microsoft money to use this media format. This is what MS wants, Linux companies paying them money to use their media formats. Now that MS has even the Linux companies supporting their media formats, we will really see the Linux community move forward with their own standards… gimme a break.
Aren’t you making a bit of an assumption here? Just because you dangle money in front of someone. That doesn’t mean that they have to license it to you.
Second your also assuming that said license would be on economically beneficial terms to RedHat. MS could want a $1000.00 a box. Something that would push RedHat out of a lot of markets.
Remember, when running a business your suppose to take actions that benefit *your* business. Not the competition. Last I checked RedHat has shareholders, and so does Microsoft.
it’s not at all hard to keep track of what you install with source, if you do it in a vaguely sensible way. virtually everything you compile from source will install itself in /usr/local, so you can find most of it just by looking in /usr/local/bin . or you could get a tiny bit of organisation and do what I do…I have a ~/source subdir, where I keep all the source code for stuff I’ve installed. a single “ls” in that dir shows me everything I’ve installed from source. easy.
You are missing the point. Unless you are buying the license for the Open Source project itself and therefore benefitting your competitors as well as yourself you have two options:
Make your own NTFS module closed-source and buy the license.
Make your own mp3 module to use with xmms and buy the license.
etc…etc…etc…
It would actually make a hell of a lot more sense for a coalition of distros to pay the licensing fees for those projects but does the taint of license purchase dirty the open source purity with trademarked code? That is the big question RedHat is avoiding.
Half the time I think RedHat is paranoid to the point of being stupid about being sued.
The other half of the time I think they are the most annoyingly moral/pure company around trying to steer their customers to the one true way of open source software.
Honestly, I like Redhat because I like Gnome and it is still the only really Gnome centered distro. But, gods the postinstall is steep if you do not prepare a proper postinstall CD and use apt to grab mplayer or xine or whatever.
MSTTcorefonts
Java rpm.bin
Flash rpm
plugger
Acroread rpm from gurulabs
Acroread plugin from gurulabs
mp3 in xmms from gurulabs
gtk2 gnome apps (gnumeric and such new Mozilla and Galeon2 as well) from Nyquist’s sites
NTFS plugin
ltmodem driver
Nvidia or ATI drivers
Considering the spider’s web of dependencies out there for multimedia apps use apt to get the one that strikes your fancy. I just tried out xine and mplayer again and I back to mplayer which is an incredible pain to get working without freshrpms.net and apt. Hell, I got the codecs from the mplayer site and now I even have the quicktime going really well. Cool stuff.
For me I also have to reinstall my old Loki Games and Castle Wolfenstein if I do a clean install or restore the backup of /usr/local/games.
If you really don’t want to use Mandrake 9.1 then make a postinstall CD. It will save you a lot of heartache and time after install.
BTW, does everyone know the trick to enabling menu editing and making it work right in RH9? I just found out today but hate to list the obvious.
I don’t know that trick.
“BTW, does everyone know the trick to enabling menu editing and making it work right in RH9? I just found out today but hate to list the obvious”
Please share.
NTFS read/write, mediaplayer etc… are all nice and things I want. Honestly I dont mind if that is in the box or not. I dont mind those as a post install. Not like you dont do that with windows anyway. (winamp, powerdvd or windvd) instead of win media player. As for NTFS, there are workarounds… as long as there is a safe read/write “plug” available out there.
go to the Terminal
su –
<give root password>
cd /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules
cp default-modules.conf default-modules.conf-no-menu-editing
cp default-modules.conf.with-menu-editing default-modules.conf
For any user you want to have the right to edit their menu you need to do one other piece of business.
You need to do this:
As the user in their home dir.
cd ~/.gnome2/vfolders
cp /etc/X11/desktop-menus/applications.menu applications.vfolder-info
Be careful and don’t try and cut and paste these commands. Not sure how this is going to look and if all the commands will appear to be on the right line but I hope you guys get the idea.
Samba works for me
open nautilus
type in location bar: smb://user:password@servername/sharename/
Let’s be clear on NTFS…no distro includes NTFS WRITE support because it’s not possible to do at all well yet: writing to an NTFS partition from Linux is still quite likely to stuff it up. It’s only NTFS *reading* that has patent issues which worry Red Hat (but not, apparently, any other distros…)
Listen I read Eugenia’s article. I love Linux. Been using Linux for 6 or 7 years now. I like Redhat from the way it handles the menus to the unified theming (others getting this I know) to the way it integrates with Gnome which I like etc…etc…
However, I am NOT blind to its limitations and drawbacks. Most of which could be taken care of and have been for other distros. Once you go through a decent postinstall process to get the plugins, msttcorefonts, ntfs read support, third party drivers, apt, synaptic and then use those to get the multimedia support you crave then it is a fine distro that is just a bit sparse in terms of system and server graphical tools though the ones they are really good IMO.
What amazes me are the number of apologists who are blind to this and painting the review as blantantly anti-redhat or anti-linux which it is not if you read the review or the scores she gave to the distro at the bottom of the review.
That is poor solution.
Get LinNeighborhood. Put a shortcut on your desktop.
Go through the preferences and set up your NT domain user and password and file manager choices.
It is much more robust despite being an older gtk1 app. Honestly putting your username and password in plain text in the uri location field just stinks to high heaven. Its nuts.
The Gnome folks need to resolve this horrible whole in terms of features to gnome-vfs but I am not holding my breath.
Please take note that Eugenia bases her ideas of success upon BeOS and YellowTab. Obviously she doesn’t have a fucking clue what’s good for other companies, or the computing industry in general.
I believe that RH 8 was a tremendous GUI breakthrough for Linux and still do feel that way. Aside from adding much needed hardware support (which I am grateful for), I do not see why this was released as anything more than 8.1. I like Eugenia’s way of doing this – having already reviewed Pheobe, focusing on RH 9’s shortcomings was the good thing to do, for there are many, especially considering a whole version number jump.
You nitwit teenagers out there, when a person like Eugenia writes something like she did here, it is a treasure chest of things to comment on. Instead, you tear her apart. Where I come from, this type of behavior is considered a sign of ignormance.
Personally, I like consistent workspaces with expected behaviors and, unfortunately, the Linux platform is not ready to offer me this yet.
Sure it is. Pick one and stick with it.
On my Mandrake Linux server, which my entire family uses, I generally run only KDE and have no issues. Between KDE and the other GNU applications included with that distribution I have no problems getting things done. Looks consistent to me.
This is desktop review not a O.S. review.
You wrote comments only for how s the look-feel of the GUI.
As a result does not give to the reader the full story of rd9.
Now, who told you that after the installation of any Linux dist. you will end up with everything working without any extra effort from the user????
ee who?
It is much more robust despite being an older gtk1 app. Honestly putting your username and password in plain text in the uri location field just stinks to high heaven. Its nuts.
then just do smb///
click on the window share and enter the user name and password.
more than one way to skin a cat, after all this is Linux
Just ran a little test: XMMS playing (local, hdd mp3), Ogle running DVD movie, 3 windows of Mozilla, Evolution, Limewire, and then run and play Quake III Arena. Quake ran at 100 fps (the max fps I have set in the qa3config.cfg file), no skip on the mp3 playback, nor DVD… not scientific or anything, but interesting (to me at least)
Athlon XP 2100
512 MB RAM
SB Live! Soundcard
nVidia geforce3 64mb RAM
Thing is – I am running DEBIAN/unstable with custom kernel!
Tried Red Hat 8.0 on same box – dog slow with the aforementioned mp3 skip issue! For that matter, Windows XP Pro hiccups on mp3 playback occassionally on the same box! But not my Debian
For shares that are only accessible to certain users this will not work. There needs to be a way to browse as user especially in a multi-domain environment.
smb:// does not work on shares that are simply not there because you are not browsing in a way that passes on your username. On the same server if I put it in explicitly (ie browse directly to it) and include my username and password I am in like sin.
I am a gnome user and use it everyday. Samba browsing through Nautilus is hit and miss at best.
Yohoho RPMs and dependancies.
After installing a non redhat RPM on RH8 and not finding it listed in their package manager. I figured I would get the sources for Kpackage and stick it on the system. At least it tells me about missing dependencies. Trouble was it broke RedHats package manager. What a hassle to fix that up.
Then I thought I’d be even smarter and install apt-get for RPMs. No worries until I wanted to install some tgz sources. I used check-install to configure the install step and make an RPM in the process. I forgot about the security key. Totally screwed my rpm database. Had to delete /var/lib/rpm/*, go through my kickstart listing and do a reinstall without reformatting to get back to square one.
Other than that I’ve go no complaints.
As always, a lot of ignorant people here, make the mistake of thinking that RH is Linux. RH is not Linux, folks. Linux is fine, thanks.
You talk about mp3 skipping (again). It’s a well known fact among the community (those who at least make the efforts to do a little search on linux ML, through the search text entry …), that these are due to bad (OSS) sound drivers, and chances are you’d have no problem with ALSA (though ALSA still has some bad drivers, fault to the card manufacturer). I use Linux almost exclusively on my desktop from 3 years ago. I never had a MP3 skip, from my old Celeron 300@450 to my actual Bi-XP 1800+ Desktop/Server (In case you say of course it’s fast, bear in mind that it has three desktop with each 4 virtual desktops, making 12 of them, switching happily).
I quit using distros a long time ago, when I saw they couldn’t do what I want. ALSA is out and working from at least three years ago, even though it was beta, and it is still not in RH ???? And there are more missing or not well integrated :
LVM, simpleinit (blazingly fast boot, though I see it only when changing kernels, can be more than 6 months without rebooting), CUPS, …
I have all of this working perfectly since 3 years ago, upgraded many times, no dependancy hell, no crash (except when I tried the 4191 Nvidia shitty drivers), no slowness (far faster than WinXP, even faster than Win98, and I have still not installed any interactive patch in the kernel), no nothing, and all my small family (wife and a child) use KDE happily.
I’m happily using my desktop too (Gnome). I can do anything now with my Linux desktop, and the WinXP, which I use only to use the Pinnacle software that came with my Firewire card (I will try to install it under Wine when I have time), is nearly unusable to do my task : I always, like 3 years ago, lose too much time trying to repair this OS, even though I do not start it more than 3 hours a week. I threw the towel a long time with all Windows OS, I must admit. Even booting it so few times (with all energy saving settings disabled, or it would crash) and it manages to have problems nonetheless
I know every one can’t install a Linux machine like me (I use LFS as my base), because I’m an experienced Linux user now (started my first try with Linux in January 1999). I’ve learned a lot since then. Linux is perfect for me.
To say the truth, no experienced Windows user around me managed to do the half of what I do with my Linux desktop, they’re just jealous (it’s better, faster, even more beautiful) : they keep on ghosting their partitions
)
I see the distribs, the only way to approach noobs, are still not there (at least not RH). But I’m doing my research.
But the distribs are not there, Linux is there since a long time …
I installed Mandrake 9.1 for my brothers, because they are total noobs, and they don’t understand Win98 (I never managed to make them understand how to access some divx videos on a CD under Win98, had to make a shortcut and detail the procedure on paper). So far, they understand Mandrake better than Win98, I just had to explain to them, that they didn’t need to doubleclick, that’s too complicated. And btw, one video would not play on Windows, and played right off the box with MPlayer on Mandrake
)
No way in hell will I read all those comments…
But I installed Red Hat 9 (because I was happy with RH 8, even though I couldn’t do much with it) short ago and my impression so far is very pleasent. The mouse cursors are awesome. 
Very decent and easy on the eyes. Everything just seems to be a bit more polished, which is a good thing. This operating system is in a good state already, it just needs loads of evolution now (no pun).
The thing that impressed me most was, that I had a printer icon there on my taskbar. I clicked this icon and it showed me a printer. I then tried to print a website and it was printed. Now why is this impressive? Because I have no printer.
The printer which is shown there to me is actually the printer of my father which is connected to me via the local network. We always thought about sharing this printer but we never cared to actually set it up as a network printer. Now this went completely automatic, my father is running Mandrake 9.1 btw, so they seem to work well together.
Things like this clearly mark the future. It just has to work. Not everybody wants to read several HOWTOs just so he can print a document on the network printer once in a month (when I could just as well go over there and ask my father to print it for me).
This is the right track. I believe what’s really important now are three things:
– Better performance
– More killer applications (like Mozilla, Evolution, jEdit, …). It doesn’t matter weither they are native or not, they just need to run and work well with good performance and reasonable integration. Vor example jEdit is a great application, but it’s pretty slow under RedHat (not so much under Windows) and all available fonts look horrible, at least in italic (much worth than non-aliased ancient X fonts actually).
– A general shift of mind to not expose the user to the commandline, unless something broke (or the user prefers it). This is not very important for development tools but for user tools. For example I had to enter a very cryptic line (after finding my java binary first!) to invoke the (very convenient!) jEdit installer. What’s the point of having such a nice GUI installer if you have to be a semi-guru to launch it?
This isn’t really a thing of the distributions anymore (they are mostly completely GUI driven these days, just some details missing), but of third person developers. I’m pretty sure that this change of mind will come, just not at once with a big bang but one after another. To reach this we also need more interoperability on the desktop, so GUI applications can assume certain things to just work/be available, no matter weither it’s a Gnome application, a Java application or something completely unique like Mozilla. Common user interface guidelines would be a big plus as well.