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
Galeon is pure speed. It’s faster than any web browswer I’ve ever used on either Linux or MS. On the other hand, I agree with the newbie installation issues brought up in the article. This isn’t a problem for anyone who has read a book on Linux though.
I am using Linux Mandrake-9.1 on a duron 750MHz/256MB and there is no skipping during mp3 playback in xmms, even if I am loading pages in konqueror and mozilla parallelly. I have tested using both these xmms plugins:
oss
esd
and there seems to be no problem. I have also used different sound drivers:
via82xx (ALSA-0.9rc8)
via82cxxx_audio (OSS/Free of stock kernel)
and I had no problem anyway.
My hard-drive has DMA on, since I am playing from hard-drive (I know that Eugenia’s problem was from mp3 streaming). I am wondering if Eugenia has the same problem when playing mp3 from hard-drive.
Also GTK+ is a higher quality GUI set than basically any native platform widget set or system interface including Win32. The limitation of GTK+ is that the Standard C++ bindings are not preinstalled. I would like to be able to reuse the design of the library objects by inheriting their implementation or interfaces, as can be accomplished in middleware Java2 and .Net/Mono. I’m not sure if this is the job of RedHat though.
Could it be possible that the DMA settings for the HDD are either unconfigured (think “Safe Mode” in Win9x), or are too conservatively set? I am merely user-class skill level with Linux, but general PC knowledge tells me that if MP3s are skipping on such low demand operations as a browser starting, it seems logical that the DMA buffer may be too fragile. Check out this post for specifics on how to remedy this:
http://k-lug.org/pipermail/klug/2002-October/011545.html
Sorry for the sloppy URL, HTML tags not allowed ;-(
please try to change sound output driver in xmms. don’t use noatun.
i had same problem when i run noatun in kde3.1 in redhat8,
i configured xmms to use aRts driver, and promlem when away.
IMHO don’t belittle redhat as could not even play mp3 file correctly.
redhat is a highly stable and power full os that widely deployed in servers and now in corporate desktops
i am yet to try redhat 9 as a successfull redhat linux 8 user
Hey y’all !
If you complain about RedHat’s new dope … switch to SUSE and you’ll know what complaining is really all about!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everybody seems to like SUSUE’s pile of junk … donknow why !
I’ve been into RH from 6.2 and installed this dope on SPARC and I386 platforms .. never failed, never problems, whether in business environment, workstations or home environment.
Greets from Germany
I have a 450 Mhz amd pc…512 ram…mp3’s -never- skip with rh 9.