Red Hat Archive

"Red Hat is the biggest bandwidth user on the East Coast," company vice president Mark de Visser said. "If we wanted to make a killing in the retail market, we could, but that's not the intent. The intent is to get it into the hands of the most people." Read the article at NewsFactor. The article in a single sentence: Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the upcoming leader of the Linux market: Red Hat.

The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket.

"Reviewers like to evaulate Linux distros for the mythical Uncle Ralph and Aunt Faye, the prototypical clueless technophobes. Can Aunty and Uncle, who still rub sticks together to make fire, install and run Linux? Let's get real. Computers are complex machines for performing complex tasks. There is always a learning curve. No one sits down to any PC--not Mac, not Windows, none of them--starting from zero knowledge, and is instantly productive." The review is at LinuxPlanet. Another one at InfoWorld.

"With this release RedHat are making a concerted effort at integration and that is something that sits awkwardly with the open source model. Firstly, it forces a degree of cooperation between software developers - they need to adhere to standards but if they want to become part of the latest Linux distribution they need to adhere to those standards that it adopts." Read the review at LinuxLinks.

When you first heard about Linux, it was probably Red Hat Linux, and for good reason. Red Hat entered the market in 1994 and has become the largest and most recognized company dedicated to open source software. Red Hat now has more than 500 employees and 15 locations worldwide, with headquarters in Durham, North Carolina. The review is at ExtremeTech.

Red Hat has struck a small blow against the DMCA, by publishing a security patch which can only be explained fully to people who are not within US jurisdiction. The company's position here seems to be not altogether voluntary - according to a spokesman "it is bizarre, and unfortunately something Red Hat cannot easily do much about," but like it or not Red Hat has been recruited to the campaign to make the DMCA look ridiculous.

With all the hype surrounding the release of RedHat 8.0, I was eager to try it myself. I was particularly interested to see whether this really would be the release that the average user could install and run on a home pc. Regrettably, I don't believe it is. Reading the recent comments made by RedHat developer Havoc Pennington in reply to the question about the "Average Joe User" only confirmed my belief.

"Recently, I tried out Red Hat's new version 8.0 ("Psyche") on my testing machine -- a machine whose purpose in life is to prevent me from making stupid mistakes with actually important data, equipped with a hard drive that's frequently wiped and refilled from scratch. Without trying to strain your credulity, I will say up front that Psyche's installation process (and the finished, freshly-installed system) is the best combination of ease and power that I've seen yet in any version of Linux to hit my hard drive." Read Tim's review at NewsForge. Also, TheRegister hosts a RH review, titled "Red Hat 8.0's bid for the simple, easy to use Linux desktop".

I'm a long-time, frustrated Windows user. I have tried various Linux distributions in the past, but I haven't been satisfied with any of them. Today, I went out and bought Red Hat Linux 8.0 from Office Depot for $40. I am a dial-up internet user and I consider myself computer literate, although I don't have much experience using Linux on the desktop. I do however, have some experience using Linux and FreeBSD as a server (no GUI).

Well, here on OSNews, there has been plenty of discussion about Red Hat 8, what it is, what it isn't, the Bluecurve look and many other features and issues. I ordered Red Hat 8 Personal Edition and decided to see how close Red Hat 8 may be to a distribution that Joe and Jane User could install and use.

Gentoo, Lindows and Lycoris arguably were the big surprises of the year in the Linux land, but everyone is waiting the release of Red Hat 8.0 with, possibly, the biggest anticipation ever for a Linux distribution. Since Red Hat posted the Limbo and Null betas, fans of the most popular distribution on earth were making waves and even called this new version a Windows killer. Does this really hold up though? Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market? Read more to find out and view some of the high resolution screenshots we have for you! UPDATE: Red Hat 8 is out! ZDNews has an article about the new release of Red Hat 8.0.

"Red Hat 8.0 is scheduled to be formally released on Sept. 30 and many in the Linux user community are watching the development of the new "Bluecurve" desktop design very closely. In the retail edition of Red Hat that's coming out this Monday, the Linux vendor is replacing the traditional GNOME interface with Bluecurve, a Red Hat-created GUI theme combining elements of both GNOME and KDE, the major rival to GNOME." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

"Red Hat, to its credit and to the utter annoyance of some Linux purists, has engaged in a bold experiment: to produce a simple and easy to use desktop. It has tweaked the default KDE and Gnome GUIs so that they work almost exactly alike, by creating a more Red Hat-centric desktop with simplified menus and attractive graphics." Read the editorial at ExtremeTech.

Hewlett Packard has begun to sell Intel Itanium 2-based workstations running Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation. Advanced Workstation is the desktop companion to Red Hat's Enterprise-oriented Advanced Server. HP also sells versions of these workstations running HP-UX, and will probably sell Windows versions eventually, following a future OS release my Microsoft. This is yet more evidence that Red Hat sees some opportunity for Linux on the corporate desktop, at least in the engineering workstation area, where high-priced Unix workstations have traditionally ruled but have been pushed out by NT/2000-on-Intel in recent years. Read more about it at Silicon.com.