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New Red Hat Beta: LIMBO
joyoflinux writes: "Red Hat has released a beta version of its distribution, called LIMBO. It includes the latest desktop technology, gcc 3.1, Mozilla 1.0+, OpenOffice 1.0, and much more. You can download it here or use a mirror. Submit bugs here." Here's the announcement.
See here for a page that goes into more detail than any sane person could possibly want about the Red Hat release names.
All Red Hat code names so far have been connected by a double meaning. This page documents the connections found so far. The link between 'Valhalla' and 'Limbo' should be clear. The link between Valhalla and Skipjack hasn't been posted here yet, though ISTR that they are both islands.
Even if I have used RedHat for several years, I have never recommended it to new PC users. The reason is that (even if they probably be satisfied if I set up a Linux ystem for them) they be more happy if I set up something running MS Windows.
To be an alternative for the ordinary user on the desktop, Linux must have:
* A decent office suite
* A decent browser
* A decent e-mail program
* A streamlined desktop
* A sentralized way to change the system settings
A year ago, Linux didnt have any of this. Open Office 1.0, Mozilla 1.0 and Evolution (or KMail) are brilliant programs. I have no problems recommending them instead of MSOffice, IE, Outlook. (To be honest MS Office is a better program then OpenOffice, but MS Office is way to expencive for an ordinary user, and Open Office is GoodEnough(TM)).
With Gnome 2 and KDE 3 the desktop starts to look fairly streamlined. It still some work to be done on Gnome 2, but hopefully Redhat will fix the most annoying bugs before releasing 8.0.
With "a sentralized way to change system settings" I do mean that the most important settings should be reached from a "control panel"-like program. To the ordinary user it is very hard to explain that the desktop resolution have to be changed by editing a text-file, while the desktop backgroud can be changed by right-clicking the desktop. I hope Redhat have a better control-panel in 8.0.
If they fix the last two items, this could be the first Linux distribution I recommend to a novice computer user. Im looking forward to it..:-)
There was a time when Red Hat were seemingly pushing Linuxconf as the system admin tool. Now they have developed their own. Anyone know why?