I keep reading all these tales of woe of people having bad experiences with Linux. Sure, I’ve had my own bad experiences, across many an OS, but just lately I’ve been running a Red Hat Linux 9 desktop full-time at home and have yet to run into any major issue. What follows is an overview of my personal experiences with Linux. But first, a bit about me.
Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
I’ve been involved with computers since my Dad brought home an Atari 400. That must have been around 1979 and I would have been eight years old. It’s now 2003 and I earn my living from IT, architecting and supporting a datacentre full of wintel servers. I work with Windows enough to love it and loathe it in generally equal amounts.
My first playful encounter with Linux was in 1999, I think it was Red Hat Linux 5.x. I got as far as installing it on some old and abhorrent IBM PS2 486 complete with MCA architecture and 16/4 token ring. After configuring network connectivity and using Netscape for a bit I git very bored and began tinkering. Naturally I broke something and (shock!) Linux crashed, dead. Nothing for it but a hard reboot. This was before Linux used a journalled filesystem and the box never recovered. It took me a long time to forgive Linux for that.
In 2000 I was a well paid IT contractor and I came across a security consultant who ran Windows2000 atop Red Hat Linux 6.2 using VMware workstation. I was impressed, albeit confounded by the seemingly pointlessness of the exercise. Until I saw tools like Nmap, Ethereal, Etherape and Samba. Tools like that could cost a fortune on the Windows platform, certainly at that time. I wanted to know more about Linux. I still considered myself an utter newbie and began researching for the easiest to use distro. I considered at the time that Red Hat Linux was for experts so it didn’t really get a look in. All reviews and personal opinions seemed to point to Mandrake 7. I don’t remember using it for long – just long enough to break it through my own mix of exploration and stupidity. It’s very true that a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing!
Another contract later and in 2001 I kept reading great press about SuSE 7.1 and how it was a ‘Windows Killer’. Well, if nothing else that must mean it’ll be easy for a dumbass like me to get it up and running. And it had ReiserFS! Hurrah! I began running my business on SuSE/KDE – webserver, mailserver, desktop (I used Smoothwall on my ADSL/USB connection). At client sites I would fire up VMware on my laptop (running at 500MHz) and boot into Windows for the daily chores while all the time trying to make the most of my SuSE Linux experience.
The pinnacle of my SuSE experience was 7.3 on that 500MHz laptop – Linux was still improving and I wanted to take those improvements onboard. When it came to buying my next laptop I chose based on Linux compatibility – mainly the graphics card. I opted for a 1GHz Dell Inspiron 4100 with a 16MB Radeon and a combo DVD/CD-R which I still use as my main desktop computer today. It came with XP and I kept a dual-boot system for gaming purposes. From SuSE 8.0 upwards I’ve found the distribution wanting. They left out the GLX packages meaning that 3D didn’t work out of the box. SuSE 8.1 and 8.2 are still wanting – 8.1 had horrid and small fonts on my 1400×1050 display and neither ship with kernels that support my laptop APM fully. I’d also come to realise that, although it ships with a plethora of software, the Apt4rpm repositories were nowhere near as brimming as other popular distributions.
In the interim to all this usage of SuSE the IT contracting market slumped and I was forced to close my business and get a permie job (where I find myself today, a year later). Because I was so disappointed with the SuSE 8.x series I began to look elsewhere. For a while, Mandrake 9.0 was it. I’d discovered Apt4rpm and URPMI and excellent website resources to help get me going and bring back things to my desktop that Windows users take for granted – namely multimedia. The single best general Linux portal that caters for all ‘consumer orientated’ distros that I’ve found is PCLinuxOnline. It’s a great starting point for anyone new to Linux, and EasyURPMI is a fantastic timesaver. Of course, a broadband connection is essential.
Through using URPMI and Apt4rpm/Synaptic I managed to uglify my desktop and break my RPM database. Well, I didn’t (and rarely do) have time to fix stuff so I knew it was going to be a reinstall. Besides, I still had my XP install on the other partition so I had a working system one way or another. About this time Red Hat Linux released 8.0. Well, I figured I’d been using Mandrake long enough, and Mandrake was originally a KDE-biased fork of Red Hat Linux so how hard could Red Hat Linux be now? (I’d used Red Hat Linux 7.3 with Ximian desktop for a while but was frustrated with Gnome 1.4)
My first impressions of Red Hat Linux 8.0 were good. It installed flawlessly and KDE wasn’t broken (although I do understand the KDE developer’s point). My laptop would suspend and resume okay. It was trivial to install fonts (at last!) and there were other nice, polished, touches. A previous stint using Red Hat Linux 7.3 and Ximian Gnome had me yearning for that Gnome/Nautilus look. It’s purely personal but I’ve always felt that Gnome has the edge aesthetically and KDE has the edge with functionality (Konqueror is awesome). Since I spend a lot of time staring at my computer desktop it should be as easy on the eye as possible. I could never get KDE to look ‘arty’ but I could never get Gnome to do what I wanted – it always seemed like things were half implemented (example – when setting file permissions with Nautilus it cannot be done recursively). My opinions had changed by the time Red Hat Linux 9 arrived.
I now run Red Hat Linux 9 and Gnome pretty much exclusively, and my WindowsXP partition is gone. Replaced by a virtual machine. I have learned that what you can’t accomplish in the Gnome GUI is usually some sysadmin related task. I am forcing myself to use Bash more. I think this is a good thing, and in no way a step backwards. I can create an ISO image of a CD in one line. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. But more importantly, it’s testament to underlying philosophies and concepts that are some 40 years old. While Windows struggles to become a true multiuser environment (trust me, it’s struggling – I administer WTS/Citrix farms) everything is already there in Linux. Linux has a solid foundation. Windows has its foundations in ‘New Technology’ which by Bill Gates own admission, NT was to become “more Unix than Unix”. If you ask me, Windows has its foundations in mergers, acquisitions and marketing; its underlying philosophy seems to be ‘on error resume next’.
So why am I so pleased with Red Hat Linux 9? Surely there must be something I miss? Let’s take stock, from basics upwards:
Q: How do I browse the web and read my email?
A: Mozilla. It looks georgeous in Red Hat Linux 9.
Q: What about typing a letter, writing my latest screenplay or doing some spreadsheet sums?
A: OpenOfficeOrg is good enough for me. Again, well integrated into Red Hat Linux 9 (though still takes a while to fire up!)
Q: I hate VI and EMACS with a passion – how do I edit text files from the console?
A: Joe is my current favourite since it doesn’t wrap lines by default and has useful help built-in
Q: How do I ensure my PC clock is telling the right time?
A: Easy! Enable NTP via the Gnome clock applet and use one of the preconfigured Red Hat Linux NTP servers. Nice touch.
Q: How do I burn a data CD?
A: Type burn:/// into Nautilus (if it doesn’t do it for you when you insert a blank CD) and drag in your data
Q: How do I create an ISO image of a CD? (great for attaching to virtual machines!)
A: In Bash, for example, dd if=/dev/cdrom of=someiso.iso
Q: How do I administer those Microsoft Windows Terminal servers (RDP)?
A: rdesktop someservername
Q: How do I run those Citrix published applications (ICA)?
A: Citrix provide a native ICA client
Q: What about administering non-TS wintel boxes?
A: VNC !!
Q: My two year old daughter broke my CDROM eject button – now what to do!?
A: eject /dev/cdrom
Q: What about multimeda? DVD, MP3, AVI, ASF, WMA, MOV …
A: There is MPlayer and associated win32 codecs, and an MP3 plugin for XMMS.
Q: And my digital camera?
A: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera – although your actual sda device and mountpoint may vary, and your camera must be a compatible USB mass storage device (most modern ones are)
Q: Games! I need more games! Are there any good games for Linux?
A: Amongst my personal favourites are Quake2, Frozen Bubble, Freedroid and Gxmame (a front end to Mame and all the roms I have downloaded from my collection of arcade machines 😉
Okay, so far I haven’t mentioned the ‘killer app’ that’s going to keep me with Red Hat Linux for the forseeable future. Well, first and foremost I would probably have stuck with SuSE if I didn’t get a broadband connection. But with my broadband I discovered the joys of downloading ISOs and testing various Linux distros and …. FreshRPMs. Here’s how I quickly overcome my Red Hat Linux woes after a fresh install of Red Hat Linux 9 (I’m not clever enough to use anaconda yet 😉
1. Download Apt4rpm for Red Hat Linux 9
2. Open a console and su root
3. rpm -Uvh apt*rpm
4. apt-get update
5. apt-get install synaptic
6. synaptic
7. Behold! Aladdin’s cave!
Actually, there’s a step I perform between 3 and 4, and that’s to joe /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following lines:
### Dag Apt Repository for Red Hat 9
rpm http://apt.sw.be Red Hat Linux/9/en/i386 dag
#newrpms.sunsite.dk
rpm http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/apt/ Red Hat Linux/en/i386/9.0 newrpms
That ensures I can easily get hold of Freedroid.
Summary
So I’ve succumbed to the corporate branding of Red Hat Linux? Well, yes (although frankly I detest Bluecurve and use ThinIce/Mist). If Linux is good enough for artists at ILM and throughout the Hollywood CGI effects industry then it’s good enough for my everyday desktop use. Red Hat Linux gives me excellent hardware device support and a good balance of new and useful packages via Apt4rpm. Linux could be a Windows killer, it will likely be a proprietry *nix killer. It could just as easily become as successful as OS/2 Warp.
About the Author:
I’m a 31 year old Datacentre Systems Architect and use Linux in conjunction with Citrix, Terminal Services and VMware. I’ve been known to play the odd game or two, too. In the last few days I’ve erased my Windows partition in favour of using Red Hat Linux 9 fulltime on my home computer.
Hear, hear! RH 9 is stable, fast, and easily configurable with shrike.freshrpms.net and fedora.mplug.org. I enjoy other distros too, but for me, RH 9 just works and looks gorgeous.
I really like RH9 too, but I can’t use it… yet. KDevelop won’t compile anything, or make for that matter. Since I’m a newbie, I’m pretty sure there’s something I’m not doing right. But just for comparison, Mandrake has always had everything setup and ready to go. With MDK, KDevelop always works everytime without me having to go out of my way to get it to work. Also, it doesn’t help that RedHat has an unusual directory layout regarding where it puts the KDE libs and headers.
Same thing here, folks. I’ve got mandrake 9.1 running on my laptop, and while there are a lot of things on it that need improving, none is close to being a show stopper. It works for 98% for everything I need a computer for. It also IS noticeably faster than my XP install. I am really, very happy and satisfied with my linux desktop.
And a couple articles previously, there was an anti-linux-on-the-desktop story. I really like OSnews, but lately it seems like the articles are playing ping pong with each other. It seems so weird… “Linux is ready!” “No it’s not!” “Yes it is!” “No it isn’t!” and so on.
I also had the kdevelop problem, but anjuta works (once you install the old version of glade ).
I installed RH9 on a spare 10GB disk and my Dual PIII 866,
expecting it to be a breeze, and that I would love every
second… Sadly, I have only gotten it to boot a couple of
times. All the rest it has panics in printk, very early in the boot. I suspect that it is either related to my USB keyboard/mouse, my IDE controller, or my motherboard.
So I am still waiting for Linux to ‘just work’.
I have a fianl program due in 4 days…I was not done but much of it was finished. I go to turn on my computer today and I get an error message that says a dll file is corrupt and the system cannot boot.
well, the only way for me to save my data is to take it to compUSA (where I bought the thing) and have them extract my data from the computer when they fix it (there is a problem with the back light of the laptop) and that will take 10 days…no good, or I can get it up and running again with a reinsaliing of windows which will erase all my data anyway (disks that came with computer)
so I am never going to use windows again for ANYTHING. XP was stable until this crap happened. thank god for debian.
Send patches, then eventually, it will “just work”
try playing with the user permissions…your user account might not have permission to compile on the system.
Linux is in use by millions of home and business users. It is not “news” that Redhat Linux actually works.
“Exploring the future of computing” seems to be focused on oshater bashathons, osfanboy praiseathons, and osquarterback rumormongerathons.
Can we please get some articles that have substance?
Is there a REVIEW of SuSE for Opteron perhaps? A review that includes what new apps people really are interested in for 64-bit x86?
How about doing some journalism and finding out how SARS is really affecting tech companies?
Pretty please?
Linux is in use by millions of home and business users. It is not “news” that Redhat Linux actually works.
“Exploring the future of computing” seems to be focused on oshater bashathons, osfanboy praiseathons, and osquarterback rumormongerathons.
Can we please get some articles that have substance?
Is there a REVIEW of SuSE for Opteron perhaps? A review that includes what new apps people really are interested in for 64-bit x86?
How about doing some journalism and finding out how SARS is really affecting tech companies?
Pretty please?
I like that..
What does it mean? It means that GNU is confusing the hell out of most people. They don’t know what to think of it. It usually just works and its free, which means a lower TCO by default. So its good for competition and bad for monopolies.
I would prefer that we didn’t have a dominant OS, instead that every PC hardware manufacturer made drivers for the top 5 or 10 OSs that ran on their platforms. Or that Microsoft was somehow forced by the DOJ to submits all its document formats and communication protocols to an open standards organization for peer review and cross-platform compatibility. But we live in a world controlled by the man and he likes things the way they are.
Lets see if the man can stop or even slow down GNU software.
Money isn’t entirely revelent when your product is intellectual property.
Sorry to heard about your story but this is more a bad organization of your part then a Windows problem. Granted the default installation of Windows with the system and data on the same partition does favor that kind of loss. But whatever happen, if you do not have backups, there is no guarantee that your data will survive. No linux or any system can guarantee it.
Please, can we stop this wave of ¨I am a newbie and it didn´t work for me¨ or ¨I am a noob and I think it´s great¨?
We already got past the XP vs. Linux vs. Mac OS vs. OS X vs BeOS, so can get get past this one too?
Can we go back to real news?
Thx
i run this nightly:
[/etc/cron.daily/update]
#!/bin/sh
#Add yourself to wheel
#if this is a desktop installation: apt-get synaptic
#workaround for db2 race condition
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get -y clean
#up2date –nox -u > /dev/null
find / -mount -perm -04000 -exec chgrp wheel {} ;
find / -mount -perm -04000 -exec chmod 4750 {} ;
#/usr/bin/reboot
There have been so many RedHat 9 reviews here, it’s scary. I include the beta reviews, too. I stopped reading RedHat 9 reviews on osnews after the 3rd. In fact, I have not read this review either.
As for “Just Work”, BeOS seems the only OS that fulfills it completely, to my very high standards. Sadly, lack of applications and games make it less attractive, but I can’t play Civilization III or HOMM IV or run Finale or Access on Linux, either.
upgraded RH8 to RH9 last night.
sorry, but how the F*&% does it NOT SUPPORT a Plextor CDRW?(PX-W1210A). no matter what burning program I tried, it keeps coming up as unsupported.
also, RH made a serious blunder shipping Apache 2. Ive searched through apache.org, httpd.apache.org, php.net all just to figure out how to DOWNGRADE to Apache 1.3.2…no info anywhere(Apache 2 will not properly render half of my PHP scripts!-I had to modify phpinfo.php JUST to get it to render in Apache 2)
other than that my RH box is running very smooth(Celeron 1.4 Ghz w/ 512MB PC100 ram, ATI Mach 64 video, dual nics, ZIP100)
what burning programs will work with my Plextor(or what files do I need to edit that will enable support for my Plextor)?
is there ANY info on how to downgrade apache 2 to Apche 1.3.2?
thanks
Well Why? Also, he didn’t mention why he likes Redhat 9 better than Mandrake 9.1 or SuSE 8.2 which have all the applications mentioned too.
Also Redhat’s KDE isn’t really broken but it has limited functionaliry, poorly made hacks etc.
http://www.mosfet.org/noredhat.html
And no screenshots!!?? I thought this was pretty poor of ana rticle, most of it just mentions his failed attempts at using Linux and how much Linux changed. Yet, it fails to say why he would choose RH 9 to the other recent distributions.
I seriously doubt that the comment section to an article on osnews.com is the best place to post RH support questions. Perhaps it would be wiser to post your questions to the shrike mailing list?
Not another one of these Linux articles. How many have their been this month? Three, I think.
try playing with the user permissions…your user account might not have permission to compile on the system.
The problem was it had an older version of automake (1.4 I think) which generated incompatible files, then I got error messages regarding aclocal, m4, and then I was lost. (I’ll admit, I’m a spoiled Windows programmer with VC++ IDE)
The App installer RedHat made just plain sucks. I don’t think it’s listing a reasonable number of available packages, or RedHat just doesn’t want those packages in their distro so it can’t be found even on ftp mirros. KDoc for example, could never find it to instal it. I don’t know what it does, but I thought the idea of Linux was to have freedom of software and functionality should I ever need it. I’m using Morphix now, a breed of Debian, and it’s the first distro that I’ve tried thus far that allowed me to install KDoc!
And I don’t see a problem with all these articles with the “ping-pong” effect. Heh, I think I remeber someone once commenting that they think OSNews is biased against a certain OS. Well, the “Linux is not ready” article proves that OSNews isn’t biased, they post good and bad news about every OS that appears here. Different people have different experiences, the more we read about them the better idea we get about a particular piece of software. If you base your opinion on something just from reading one and only one article, you’re not fully educated on that topic.
anonymous,
for personal preferences and other reasons, I DONT/WONT use mailing lists. the only reason why I asked the 2 questions was because the topic/story was relevant.
(I’d rather not get started in the pros/cons of mailing lists vs forums)
Ok, if you don’t like mailing lists, maybe you could check out this forum:
http://www.linuxiso.org/forums/viewforum.php?forum=3&0
Just trying to help ya out.
For those of us who wanna not reinstall our OS after 6 months, but rather just keep going and going, I assume we can expect nothing from RH9 or any other Linux distro yet…
no-one’s forcing you to upgrade. just because there’s a new version doesn’t mean you have to use it.
sounds like you want to use debian, anyway.
> what burning programs will work with my Plextor(or what
> files do I need to edit that will enable support for my
>Plextor)?
It’s just a mounting problem. I don’t know about RH, but I had the same problems with Mandrake… In Mandrake it was a simple login to Mandrake Control Center…. And Mount Points…
I loaded Mandrake on Sunday. Despite a couple of problems, it was VEY simple to load about everything…
Once URPMI was set up, I’ve found ttp://rpms.mandrakeclub.com/rpms/mandrake/9.1/contrib/i586/ByName.html and have been like a kid in the free candy store. I have found that I don’t NEED powerpack even though I will get it. I WILL support my distro… I also spent the $60 for MandrakeClub. WELL worth it…
urpmi this and rpm that….
This is what I dreamed of when I dumped Winblows 38 months ago….
My wishlist for Linux is just about gone now! If it exists anymore!
MarkP
Installed 9.0 yesterday. Very nice, clean, simple. Found a little bug in the kde control panel, but open office and mozilla and printing just worked perfectly. Biggest annoyance was having to download 3 iso’s to get it. How come Knoppix can fit sooo much onto one cd?
Use SuSE, much better distro and alot less problems
let me tell you why I will never entrust any data to windows again
When did this happen? Was it “after” Mandrake 9.1 got released or before?
If after then
If you were a bit smarter, you would have simply installed Mandrake 9.1. Resize the NTFS partition during install to make some space for Mandrake, install Mandrake 9.1 aside Windows XP and access your NTFS partition and files from there.
else
Try to insall some of the free powerful DOS partitioning tools and still make Linux partitions and get Linux installed and again access your files from Linux.
end if
>Eugenia… Go to cook. Computer is not for you.
Absolutly unbelievable. I mean why the f**k do d**kheads like you think that you should insult someone who isn’t even the author. Eugenia just looks after the site and digs out some stories and in return gets abuse.
These forums have been getting out of hand of late – I’ve definatly got to stop reading comments a only look at the actual story.
Some of you were complaining about burning cds, i think nautilus plugin for burning is awesome, but what to use when it comes to mandrake 9.1 ? Am I only one who haven’t found a tool for it ? ( or is it not on the 1st cd and i have to download other cds for only one tool ?)
Hey folks, small quirk with Red Hat 9, must be me doing something wrong.
I installed it yesterday and wanted to do what i did with RH 8, that was mentioned here, can’t remember exactly but was something like
apt-get update
apt-get install synaptic
Then use Synaptic. Problem is, when i type apt-get (or just apt) from terminal (su or not) it says no command found. I downloaded and installed apt from freshrpms and even downloaded synaptic from there, rpm seems to install fine but then the app is nowhere to be found.. any ideas?
Thanks,
DaaT
http://www.beosjournal.org
Did you do “su -” or just “su” from console to become root? You need to do “su -“.
The most serious problem is that really, in essence, all it can say is “linux on a desktop in the form of RH 9 works for me” – which is a universe of one single person. I’d rather read a review that tries to evaluate (_tries_), how well it may suit greater number of people.
Case in point – Mike Reed wrote:
Q: What about typing a letter, writing my latest screenplay or doing some spreadsheet sums?
A: OpenOfficeOrg is good enough for me.
HELLOOOOO?????!!!!! WTF?? For you – who CARES! Because it absolutely is NOT good enough for me! As a matter of fact, I have looked at all the linux programs available for screenplay writing, and they all suck rocks. Can you use OpenOfficeOrg to write a screenplay? Ummm, can you use a teaspoon to empty the ocean? Sure you _can_, but who would want to? The whole point of screen-writing software, such as Final Draft or Screenwriter 2000, is that it has powerful built-in features which you simply cannot duplicate by configuring ordinary word-processing programs. And it makes a HUGE difference productivity-wise. As a matter of fact, OpenOfficeOrg is as useful as a screen-writing tool as notepad is for writing complex workflow charts.
With this single observation, the author just completely lost any credibility in my eyes. Clearly, he is not a power user of screen-writing software, but none-the-less says OO is “good enough” for him – which says more about him as a screenwriter than about how good OO is for the task. A man who has so little understanding or use for the proper tools that he cannot utilize them, clearly is not a man who is serious or competent about the task.
And if that is so for this case, how do we know that this is not so for every other use he has described? For that matter, his vague statements about CD burning are also disturbing to a power user (find me ONE program in linux that even comes close to Nero Burning).
But then of course the disclaimer is “but for _ME_ it is good enough” – well, why not say: my needs are ridiculously tiny in many areas, and guess what, linux meets them just fine! LOL! And how is that instructive? Well here’s a newsflash, there’s a guy down the street who finds a Barbie toy computer quite adequate for his needs – of course, he only has a 3-rd grade education, but hey, FOR HIS NEEDS, Barbie computer is just fine! And what do we get out of hearing THAT?
If the author was a SERIOUS user of screenplay-writing software, and found linux meeting his needs, well, that would be BIG NEWS (and so for the rest of his list, CD burning etc.). But as it stands, the news that linux meets his Barbie needs is no news at all. Who cares. Worthless article.
I have read OSNews for some time but never commented although I must now say that I am tired of Linux is/isn’t ready for the desktop articles there have been far too many. Can we have some OS news please?
don’t read them.
i’m more tired of the idiot, unmoderated posts that come after the articles.
if it’s a mac post, a hoard of mac sux posts follow.
if it’s a windows post, a hoard of windows sux posts follow.
if it’s a linux post, a hoard …..
nothing wrong with the articles.
it’s us that is the problem.
I’ve never used Nero because the KDE app K3B does it all for me very nicely. I only wish I could do UDF writes [hurry up and finish implementing it, Linus]
the only problem is that for home computing people do not make backups everyday….you want to know how long that information was on my harddrive? 12 hours.
as for it not being wiondows fault…it is. period.
With this single observation, the author just completely lost any credibility in my eyes. Clearly, he is not a power user of screen-writing software, but none-the-less says OO is “good enough” for him – which says more about him as a screenwriter than about how good OO is for the task. A man who has so little understanding or use for the proper tools that he cannot utilize them, clearly is not a man who is serious or competent about the task.
Read what the guy does for a living:
I’m a 31 year old Datacentre Systems Architect and use Linux in conjunction with Citrix, Terminal Services and VMware. I’ve been known to play the odd game or two, too. In the last few days I’ve erased my Windows partition in favour of using Red Hat Linux 9 fulltime on my home computer.
Ofcourse everyone one of use is senstive to your Mr. I’m a giant pric needs. Most people don’t even use 5% of Ms’ Office features. They just want to type in a damn document, and get it done, which would be right for like 90% of everyones needs. But no, mr. screen writter is going to flame a person and program that wasn’t designed for writting screen plays. I don’t know whats worse, Linux zelots, or uniformed and ignorant Windows zellots.
If the author was a SERIOUS user of screenplay-writing software, and found linux meeting his needs, well, that would be BIG NEWS (and so for the rest of his list, CD burning etc.). But as it stands, the news that linux meets his Barbie needs is no news at all. Who cares. Worthless article.
Cause again, everyone in this world is a screenplay-writer. Surly it will make you feel better to make fun of the author, but that just proves what kind of rotten and bitter individual you are.
P.S: From what i hear K3B does everything Nero does.
Who cares, worthless comment.
Ofcourse everyone one of use is senstive to your Mr. I’m a giant pric needs. Most people don’t even use 5% of Ms’ Office features. They just want to type in a damn document, and get it done, which would be right for like 90% of everyones needs. But no, mr. screen writter is going to flame a person and program that wasn’t designed for writting screen plays.
Huh? Come again? What are you talking about? It wasn’t I who VOLUNTEERED about how great/bad OOO is for screenwriting!!!!
If it wasn’t designed for it, then why did the author make a POINT of mentioning that very thing? Why did he SPECIFICALLY mention screenwriting? Oh, and he is not a screenwriter – that’s supposed to somehow EXCUSE him? I’d rather think the opposite. I’m not a sys admin. It would be rather STUPID of me to pick up a Barbie computer and say: well, I’m a toy designer, but for my sys admin needs (practically non-existent), a Barbie computer is just fine! I think sys admins everywhere would be within their rights to object rather loudly to that. If you don’t use a program, STFU, and don’t announce loudly to everyone that it is JUST FINE FOR THAT PURPOSE. Yes, OO wasn’t designed for it, so don’t freakin’ claim it is. Either put up – show how it is good enough, or shut up. You can’t have it both ways. Only reason I piped up, is because of the idiocy of someone not qualified VOLUNTEERING about a program/function for which he is CLEARLY not qualified. Don’t talk nonsense next time. Talk only about what you actually know about, or expect to be called on it. Sheesh!
These forums have been getting out of hand of late – I’ve definatly got to stop reading comments a only look at the actual story.
I agree, what OSNews.com needs is… a login system with a real email required to allow make the comments. If someone trolls or whatever, just ban them by email and IP.
what OS u are using as long as it work 4 u?
M$? …Greate stuff; Gentoo? …. even better if u r a geek; OSX … I’d love to give it a go, but 2 expensive.
All these reviews? …. I’m sick to death of them.
That sick part of my brain that loved to watch shitty american shows like Jerry Springer always enjoys the 638746 shit comments that follow every review posted on this site. Thanks everybody, from the bottom of my heart.
As for the review, I liked it, always interresting to hear what “average linux users” have to say about the latest redhat. I’m too lazy to set up a box to try them all and gentoo is and always will be my OS of choice on my main machine, so yeah, I like those little reviews by normal people. Nothing wrong about not being “journalisticaly” (can I say that?) perfect. Most good journalists don’t have anything interesting to say about computers anyway.
Yeah..
Who really cares what he said. I use KOffice for everything I need except for presentations, for that I use OpenOffice, It doesnt matter what you use or dont use, if he wants to use Open Office to write screenplays then let him use it, I fail to see where it concerns you what he uses. stopdabombing stopdatrolling, grow up and just chill out you are getting bent out of shape over something stupid. As for this article, I really cant use Red Hat 9. Im satisfied with SuSE, Im sure Red Hat 9 is a fine distribution, but Im a lazy guy I like having YaST able to do it for me easily.
By the way K3B is better than Nero, IMHO.
When you are working cross platform, but I still use it as my main wordprocessor. I wish it would take a note from abiword. At least I can cut and paste between abiword and koffice.
@mario
Civ III for Linu, it isn’t available but you can get Call to power or try freeciv.
Civ III support under winex supported by transgaming
http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=52
HOMM III is available for Linux but not HOMM IV
HOMM IV support under wineX is not great
http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=402
Access 2000 works under CrossOver Office 2.0
I particularly enjoyed the “how to do X” list. I think a great general contribution to Linux documentation would be a web site presenting Linux / *BSD HOWTOs in a similar format.
Since there are a gajillion ways to do any one thing in Linux (TIMTOWDI as Larry Wall would say), there would have to be a way to narrow down your preference between the multitudes of choices. Often times I find myself asking, “How do I do X?” (and then trying to figure out the relative merits of the various choices) rather than “How does X work?”, the latter being the question most documentation is written to answer.
Well, I hope you read this:
1) CD-burner+Linux: In all Linux distributions you must full the kernel that your cd-burner is a scsi device. This means it will access it probably trough /dev/scd0 or another scd device if the burner is not master. If you use LILO you accomplish this by typing in lilo.conf “hdc=ide-scsi” or whatever device the writer is. This will point it to scd0 or another scd device.
2) Apache: Try getting the src.rpms for Apache 1.3.x from RH 8 will the sources for dependencies it needs. Make a rpmbuild –rebuild for each of them, uninstall Apache 2 and install Apache 1.3.x. That would be it, its not so hard….
3) The review: It was a nice review, and I enjoy using Linux 2:)
18n:)
… is unfortunately not as fast and responsive as Windows XP.
I just love this system.
This article was a bit weird IMO (as an article) but nothing bad. =) I didn’t know that Red Hat has included own timeservers this time, thanks for the tip! This works really great.
I really like the direction this is taking (especially with GNOME2 and Red Hat in particular). Now we just need even more polish, much better performance (in everything, sadly), mono/Gtk# for RAD for GNOME and cross plattform and more mature applications. Oh and not to forget more standardisation of the kind that freedesktop.org is doing. A common HIG wouldn’t hurt either (I really want this, even if it would mean to revert to some sucky interface decisions again, like “Ok | Cancel” instead of “Cancel | Do something”. I think that interoperability and integration is more important at this point than beeing right at every little detail (and in the end, dialog button position is an incredible minor detail).
However I absolutely don’t like the KDE idea to get consistency by forcing everything to be based on one single toolkit. That’s monoculture. I want to use the tools that are right for the job, weither they are based on Gtk, Qt, XUL or even Java (even though I enjoy Gtk the most). I do the same on Windows, so why shouldn’t it work in Linuxland.
It doesnt suck when working cross platform, if I need to share anything with anyone running MS Office, I save it as a RTF, as for spreadsheets, whatever I have on the spreadsheets is my business and no one elses so I do not share em.
Oh and another thing, KOffice is a very powerful office suite, I use KWord to write screenplays all the time.
I’m not really familiar with any of the document formatting systems (or indeed screenwriting, so be gentle :>), but couldn’t you set something like LaTeX up to do screenwriting stuff?
On one hand, it was a bit rosy.
As an experienced linux user the postinstall for RH9 in comparison to other distros is higher but you do get the benefit of your multimedia apps being configured for dvd and having qtx qucktime sorrenson support enabled if the codecs are there (apt freshrpms.net source BTW). Also, if you get the plugins for the browser yourself you know they are up to date. I went to the whatisthematrix.com from my suse box at work and had to run off for the latest flash rpm.
However, I was glad to see a living in linux article.
This has been way overdo. Listen the fuss with linux is not the installation where most articles emphasize but the postinstall and the jump in thinking from a Windows world to a unix-style universe and getting use to the new paradigms.
Good to see.
Ok, so the major distros are pretty much ready for prime time. Next thing I’d like to see is Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, etc., offer Linux pre-loaded & pre-configured.
No way!
If that happened and stuff actually worked out of the box then at least half the linux sucks for the desktop articles would go away and goodness we do NOT want that.
It is important to have at least two articles a day with fifty posts attached a piece with people arguing about whether linux is ready for the desktop.
Come on! You just want to cut out all the OS flame-war fun.
No, it’s faster.
Yes, Red Hat 9 just works. It’s the first distro that actually works on my laptop without hacking it, and with no bugs (Red HAt 8 was close, but had some horrible bugs).
The only bad thing i can think about Red Hat 9 is that the Spanish translation looks very “amateur” and not very professional (“remove” translated as “remover”, etc…)
Ok, so the major distros are pretty much ready for prime time. Next thing I’d like to see is Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, etc., offer Linux pre-loaded & pre-configured.
Nah, it’s not _there_ yet. It’s pretty cool already but there are so many little details that are a little bit off… For example some help files describe dialogs which are different then the one in Red Hat because they were modified. Those things aren’t really that important but they shouldn’t be in a mainstream offering.
I expect that some day Red Hat Linux will really be considered “ready” for mainstream consumption and then Red Hat will release a special desktop version which is not quite that up to date but compatible and polished up to the last bit. At least I hope so.
This chould then be the stable release for more than just six months (maybe two years) and mainly be upgraded via software installation (which should be easier then when you can develop for a stable target).
Um, to get the data back in windows would require some of the same steps you’d have to do in linux under the same conditions.
Use the boot disks you should have created or boot off of and to a recovery or boot off of the cd to do a recovery, which doesn’t format your drive, and you should be good to go to at least get to your data.
BTW, where was the backup of your data that you should have made whether you’re using Linux, windoze or MAC?
Perhaps you should read this story http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3297
It’s the OS’s fault that you’re too dumb to make backups of your critical work?
Good luck using anything more complicated than a toaster.
Adam W wrote:
I’m not really familiar with any of the document formatting systems (or indeed screenwriting, so be gentle :>), but couldn’t you set something like LaTeX up to do screenwriting stuff?
It would be almost trivial to set up LaTex or even OO or any word processing program to do screenwriting if ALL that a screenwriting program did was format and lay out the output.
The problem is that the format/layout – the way a screeplay looks is just the final RESULT, and the most trivial aspect of screenwriting programs.
To begin with, a professional screenwriting program has a special interface different from a word processor – you type into a window that has a bunch of other information displayed interactively – there is a running series of reports at which you are constantly glancing. So, right off the bat, you’d have to program a special interface with database capabilities – a complete distinct set of programs to add onto your word-processor. Other things, like extensive auto-complete features for things like recurring character names, location, scene headings, text behavior (f.ex. automatic transitions from action to dialogue or sluglines etc.), could be built into an OOo, but it would be a considerable enterprise. Other aspects of screenwriting software would also be impossible to duplicate in just OOO (or LaTeX etc.) – for example scene-navigators which allow you to look at the script in a completely different format where the software connects different scenes according to set criteria, or for example “text to voice” where you assign voices to your characters, and then get to hear your screenplay read out of the computer speakers as if actors were actually doing your play. Other issues: built in exporters to editing or production software for commercials or TV.
Bottom line, a professional screenwriting program is a lot more than a formatting wordprocessor, and so it immediately disqualifies anybody who claims that OO is “just fine” for this purpose. It is fine only if you don’t work in the industry and don’t have to meet tight deadlines and interface with other software – in other words, if you are not a professional. If you are aunt Millie doodling on a hobby screenplay, OO is fine, but then again, so is a pad of paper and a pen.
gosh, how did ANYTHING get written before computers then?!
you are correct that OOo will never be Final Draft, but so what? It also does not cost hundreds of pounds.
Just because you have professional equipment does not make you a professional.
stopdabombing made some valid points about full-featured screenwriting software.
full featured screenwriting software allows you to paint-by-numbers and do something far more formulaic and run-of-the-mill than aunt Millie could ever dream of.
the sad thing is, Aunt Millie’s screenplay will probably never get made into a Hollywood blockbuster. But Aunt Millie is probably happy with her life and doesn’t feel the need to diss anyone who may be an ‘amateur’.
the truth is, even professional screenwriters are treated like scum from time to time so it’s not surprising stopdabombing is a little bitter.
now i need to figure out – do I use three brads or just two?
One of the criteria I used when judging Linux on my home machine was that it must run a quality screenwriting program. There is more to it than just formatting.
There are a few Open Source apps in the works, but none of them have progressed past the alpha stage. I hope this changes soon.
Still, I have almost completed my conversion over to Gentoo — Wine runs Sophocles flawlessly. It’s not the biggest, most bad-ass, feature-packed scripting gun out there, but it suits me.
Installing Gentoo: $0
Purchasing Sophocles: $125
Running the app you want on the OS you want: priceless.
OSS is the solution to all the world’s problems. For everything else, there’s WINE.
GMFTatsujin
Funny how some folks just can’t stick to the issues. The issue is not whether one can’t write a “better” screenplay using paper and pencil, or whether Hollywood writers are all just hacks, or how much software costs.
The relevant issue that I addressed is one, and only one: it is a WRONG claim, that you can use OO productively as a screenwriting software in a professional environment. If I read a claim that a given piece of software does X, Y, and Z, I look to verify. If it doesn’t do so, I state that fact. Nothing more, nothing less.
The author made a claim that OO is just fine for screenwriting. To someone who has to actually work with such software, it is an absurd claim – and that’s all I’m pointing out. In return, there is a bunch of flames about how Hollywood writers are hacks, how the scribe must be bitter, and how expensive professional software is. What has that got to do with the plain ordinary fact that OO is a wholly inadequate program for professional screenwriting?
Really, some of the knee-jerk linux advocates need to relax. I’m not bashing linux or Open Office. But it does nobody any good to misrepresent what the software can and cannot do. It so happens, that I’m trying to shift all my computing to the linux platform. The screenwriting software issue is a major stumbling block for me personally – I have searched diligently for linux alternatives to Final Draft, and come up empty. I can run an early version of FD through WINE, but there is no feature complete linux alternative that runs natively. To then read someone making absurd claims is frustrating.
Long time reader, first time poster.
I am a big advocate of using open source possible. If there is an open source program that has the functionality that I need (emphasis on the need) I will use it. I have some familiarity with screenwriting software, and I do not think open source methodology applies to it very well. It is a small market with high demands. I do think, however, that there should be little problem porting already existing Win/Mac programs to Linux. Most of the functions aren’t heavily OS dependent.
Addressing the thread at hand, I installed Redhat 9 last weekend. The install was easy. The only hurdle was resizing an extended windows partition to make room. Post install was a slightly different matter. It wasn’t as bad as other distros I have used in the past. I did some quick editing of the XFree86.conf to get the touchpad on my laptop to work. I’ve been playing around with different multimedia players. I compiled Mplayer from source and found that it didn’t handle chapter indexing very well on DVDs (it didn’t show the main menu and skipped around on chapters). I installed Xine from binaries, but it didn’t play sound in DivX encoded files. I installed Totem from binaries this morning, but haven’t had time to test it thoroughly. The girlfriend will probably have a few comments when I get home tonight as the laptop is our main DVD viewing device. The other problem I ran into was recompiling the kernel. All I wanted to enable was ACPI, NTFS, and sonypi. I followed the Redhat documents for doing this and used the sample kernel-i686.config with the changes I wanted made in Xconfig. I did this several times and had no luck. Sometimes my USB mouse and/or wlan card wouldn’t work. Other times the root filesystem wouldn’t mount. Finally I gave up last night on doing kernel recompiles, installed the NTFS rpm, and gave up on ACPI and sonypi for the time being.
I still have windows installed on another partition, but only because I require matlab and don’t want to tackle getting wine working just yet. I also don’t want to buy the linux version of matlab just yet.
to get good DVD support I would try installing apt and synaptic from freshrpms.net. Then have synaptic grab OGLE, the Linux DVD player. Not sure about the rest but OGLE just works for me. Menus and everything. I’ve had some success with mplayer. And totem is just mplayer, so I know it might work but it probably wouldn’t support menus, subtitles, etc. OGLE was designed for DVDs.
The author of this review clearly must use SCSI disk and CDRW, as per his mention of “sda”, and not use IDE.
Had the author used IDE disk and CDRW, two things would immediately stand out about Red Hat 9;
1. Disk performance, IDE/ATA, has regressed badly.
2. Using an IDE/ATAPI CDRW is 50/50, and fails often
with data corruption.
Kernel 2.4.20, on which RH9 is based, has ripped out
the entire IDE subsystem from the previous releases and
replaced it with one not ready for production use.
If people review the “phoebe” mailing list at Red Hat’s
site (Phoebe was the beta list for RH9), they will find
a lengthly public message from the OS manager at Red Hat
discussing the serious problems in the IDE subsystem.
It is not Red Hat’s fault, but rather came from a huge
fight among the linux community kernel developers that resulted in the IDE key developer quitting, and Mr. Linus ripping the entire IDE stack out of the kernel, replacing it with a newer and not so finished one by some other developer. Red Hat got stuck, but the result is that if you need disk performance, and need to burn cdroms, you had
better get a SCSI based system, or else have a LOT of time and a LOT of extra cdr discs on your table.
Want proof? Run #hdparm -t /dev/hda on Red Hat 7.3,
then try the same command on Red Hat 9. Go to the
mail-lists and read about the IDE subsystem.
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phoebe-list/2003-March/004190.h…
The rest of Red Hat 9 is very nice. Hopefully a future kernel update will restore the ability to do reliable cd recording and full ide disk performance.
Also, Suse 8.2 comes with browser plugins for java, acrobat reader from adobe (because xpdf does not let you print), flash, and others. Suse 8.2 comes with full multimedia support, including mp3. So Red Hat 9 strips out mp3, some other multimedia, plugins, java from Sun, anything that is not GPL. While the spirit of GPL ideals are nice, they do result in an OS that leaves the customer to learn how to be a system integrator. Not fun. With Suse 8.2, the user can login and go. It’s all put together.
So while Red Hat 9 is very nice, it needs work, badly.
The world is 90% IDE/ATA, and small bit SCSI (unless you are a coporate/enterprise data center with servers). So shipping an OS with a severly busted IDE subsystem is just plain nasty. I wonder if MickySoft, IBM, HP, Sun, or Apple would ship a new version that has really lower IDE disk performance and cdr data corruption?
So we go back to Red Hat 8 for now? Hmm. Red Hat 8 has some really bad breakage in rpm. (Try rpm -vv -something…). The rpm db gets messed up due to race conditions, and you can’t use rpm any longer until the db is rebuilt. There are other flaws.
So the last version of Red Hat that had;
+ working RPM
+ Working IDE and CDR
+ good performance
+ full multimedia support
was Red Hat 7.3
Oh Well. So much for a detailed review.
Well, no doubt about Red Hat Linux 9 being very stable and containing oceans of functionality.
But what about DVD playing? I miss it so much. Of course, Xine is availible but I’ve never made it operate correctly with DVD’s
>Since I spend a lot of time staring at my computer desktop it should be as easy on the eye as possible.
ha ha, That’s a great sentence.
There’s a lot of filosophy in that one.
This has got to be one of the best GNU/Linux articles that I’ve read in a really long time. I agree with the author, Red Hat 9 is great. I’m an Information Security Consultant and run GNU/Linux almost exclusively at work and at home. It installed without a hitch on my 2 desktop machines at work and my Thinkpad T30 laptop. It also installed on my 3 machines at home without a problem. I also detest the Bluecurve theme. But it’s extremely easy to change to the “Traditional” theme.
Great Job!
How in the world did the author get Apt4rpm installed. I ran into so many dependency issues that I finally gave up.
You may want to take a look at this:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cdburn.html?c…
Linux is great. ReadHat has done wonderful but why is noone addressing the MSAccess need for the Linux world? How can we be happy if we need to boot into some windoze to have a decent inexpencive front end for a database. (Dont give me MySQL I use it, but I need a Rapid Development tool to create Forms, and Reports handle events etc.
Second As long as Linux is only giving us a glofified typrwriter situation (Linux with Open office) as great as this is it is not possible to replace windows. We are in need of a Desk Top Publblising suite on Linux as powerfull as Adobe, Correl, Quark. Running these things under Wine is not a solution for me.
I am running Redhat linux in my PC. Could anyone point to some help regarding coniguration of winmodem for dial-up access. I am having Lucent winmodem. I tried with some libraries but failed to connect.
thanks,
Kris