Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed

Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.

Comments

A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

You can read a users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE here/ I'll update it soon with screenshots and soem more info on the services bug.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Telex4]

Not having any mod points atm, I just thought I'd say I thought that page was really good :-)

You answered Mosfet's points very well. So far as I can see, all of the points made against RH on this one have been driven either by ego or misinformation. I use KDE, I dislike GNOME, yet I use Mozilla, and wouldn't consider using Konqueror until it works as well as Mozilla. To an IE user, Mozilla is *far* nicer. Though Mozilla does use GTK+, you're right in saying that it isn't really a GNOME app. The same goes for KOffice/OpenOffice. You could almost say I use the "toolkit" that RH8 ships with by choice, despite KDE giving me othe rdefaults. Man, I'm so awful, I'm just hitting on KDE ;-)

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

1- you should consider that freedesktop.org IS mostly RedHat. So what standards are you talking about ?

That's simply false. Red Hat host the site, but non Red Hat developers from KDE, Gnome and many other projects have contributed to many of its standards - eg, the Window Management specification that's supported by both environments and a increasingly large array of leightweight window managers.


2- about Qt+Xft, it's simple: they have shipped Beta Software. This is not good, and, unsurprisingly, they have done it for KDE, not GNOME. The same about VFolders. About this, RH's attitude looks very close to a (bad) fork.

Both the QT addons and the standard VFolder support stuff are a patch by Red Hat. Just like your distro doesn't ship a standard Linux kernel (most major distros don't). Yes, they'll be in future versions, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat 8 hasn't goen through extensive beta testing.

3- Mozilla uses GTK, you're apparently not aware of it.

GTK is not Gnome. Especially when its a backend for XUL.


4- About Mozilla & Konq again, you're making a small mistake. You say that Konqueror doesn't render properly web pages. This is false, for the simple reason that Konqueror can use KHTML or Mozilla, precisely, to render web pages.


Its not false, I'm assuming the default renderign engine of the software - which is a reasonable asummption to make as kmozilla isn't anywhere near as maintained as khtml is.

5- about changing default apps, you failed to notice that this will prevent interaction between apps when using KDE. Namely all those nice interactions between KMail and Konqueror and KOrganizer and Kaboodle, through KPart or DCOP, that most users point as the "added value", the "big plus" of KDE, are simply nonexistent if you use most RH default apps (simply because these default apps are not KDE apps).

Then choose a different app. Or better yet, standardize the interface. The bug isn't that peopel dare use applciation from other toolkits, the bug is that doing so often gives them a worse user experience because these application use nonstandardized mechanisms to interact with each other.

Also, don't fail to consider that _most_ users _will_use_default_apps_ that they are proposed

Good - Red Hat have taken some time selection good defaults and its nice that they showcase the best of what OSS has to offer.

because this is the attitude that years of microsoftian lobotomization has lead to.

No offence (I think your post is quite intelligent), but many people won't take you seriously if you use words like `Microsoftian'.

For all Linux newbies using RH, the mandatory conclusion if they try KDE instead of GNOME will be "KDE is crap".

By that same logic Gnome is crap, because they're missing out in Abiword, Gnumeric, and Galeon, in favor of non Gnome alternatives. Wait a sec. Abiword can't open, edit, and save MS Office documents reliably. Neither can KOffice. If a new user is given these defaults, anmd reasonably assumes they're the best the platform has to offer, the user may very well incorrectly l assume Linux is crap.

Thanks for your post. But I think what Red Hat's doing provides for a better desktop experience for end users. I love and use KDE, but no matter how hard the developers try, my platform is Linux - not KDE. I can and will choose the best apps avaliable to me regardless of toolkit. If that means those apps will miss out on some functionality because of that, the solution is to allow those non-KDE apps to integrate with KDE to the best of their ability - not to tell Red Hat that they should include a beta-quality office suite as a default because it uses the Right Toolkit.

The same goes for Gnome too.

RH 8 is out

[hanwen]

RH 8 has appeared on the RedHat Network channel.

It's scheduled for release at 10:00 AM -4GMT.

No multimedia??

[tanveer1979]

Also, there is no Java installed. No Macromedia Flash or Real Player either. And that brings me in the multimedia offerings of this distro. Or its lack there of. Red Hat 8 has to be the poorest multimedia-ready distro by default that I ever ran (except Gentoo of course, which comes with virtually nothing by default :). So, there are no movie players on Psyche (except the limited Kaboodle which is not even installed by default). None. No XINE, no VLC, no XMovie, no NoATun, no nothing.

Wonder what the are trying.... it is a real funny business decision, I wonder how many home users will really want a distro without those...time to switch to mandrake 9?

And the KDE hacking sucks.. those people have not even given them credits... all abouts have been removed... It is really unethical

Re:No multimedia??

[Bert64]

Personally i think the "about kde" option in every app is annoyingly unnecessary self-promotion.
About boxes in programs should show information about the current program, not the toolkit it is based upon. About KDE should be placed inside the kde configuration tool, or somewhere accessible from the kde menu. Afterall, if your running kde apps under gnome, the about kde option may be somewhat confusing to people.
It would also be nice, if about boxes showed some compiletime configuration options and memory/cpu usage stats instead of just an advert.

Re:No multimedia??

[eastbam]

None. No XINE...

I made a few screenshots of the last RedHat 8.0 Beta installation that I did over the weekend and just to show that it DOES come with XINE:
Screenshot3.png

Well, they may have taken it out in the final version.

Re:No multimedia??

[jeremy_hogan]

Many things, like Flash Player and Acrobat Reader are available on the Applications CD.

We don't put closed source, or binary only software into the distribution itself, that's what keeps our distro fully GPL'd.

As for the decision behind not shipping mp3 players, that has more to do with the nature of mp3 patent licensing and royalty scemes. There used to be very clear terms allowing us to ship such things, but that seems to be changing, at least enough to put it in the gray area.

That said, nothing is stopping an end user from getting any of the software they are used to having on Red Hat Linux, we chose to err on the side of caution and not become someone's test case for litigation down the road.

On the other hand, try using Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3. It's not so encumbered with gray area, it's open and patent/royalty free.

Yes multimedia

[Anonymous Coward]

There is multimedia, just not in the default install. You'll need to add those from the CD. While it is true that MP3 is missing in RedHat (due to patent issues), you can find it here:

http://psyche.freshrpms.net/

Over all, RedHat appears to be trying to slim down their base distribution to be something that people can actually use and making it easy to expand it to whatever you want.

Another write-up...

[decesare]

... here. Don't be misled by the title of the article ("Mac poses as much of challenge to Linux and Windows"). Most of the article discusses the new RedHat release, with comparisons to M$ and MacOS X.

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the upgrade is smooth. Did 2 machines this weekend. The only thing that i saw that went weird was my DHCPD config.

Something in the new version requires you to put in a single like about DDNS AD-HOC mode.

Other than that... smooth as silk

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[Nailer]

Null coped pretty well with upgrading a 7.3 system with lots of Freshrpms updates to Null, the 8.0 beta. However, if you've got Gnome 2 already set up on your 7.3 box (most likely from the apt respository which stores 7.3 rpms), I'd remove it before you update, simply because your custom updates might seem newer than the 7.3 ones. You should probably do this before your install, but you can do it later if you wish.

The installer will however tell you about any conflicts as a result of your custom packages, and if worst comes to worst, you still won't loose any data - the Linux packaging system will use your existing configs (and create [config].rpmnew for any config files from new packages) or back yoru existing configs up as [config].rpmsave if the config file format has changed.

In other news...

[Truckle]

In other news SuSE Linux 8.1 is expected on the October 7th

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[MrLinuxHead]

Ahemm. Watch out, Apache 2.0 will bite you in the ass if you're not careful.

Null used Apache 2.0 as apposed to 1.3.26 in RH 7.3. So yer default config files are now somewhere else, and all of your carefully massaged virtual things are now nowhere to be found. It can be fixed pretty easy, just RTFM.

There are probably a few more "gotchas" but that one stuck out like a sore thumb.

Missed Points in the review

[A-Tech]

While there is a lot of complaints in the review about the UI - I have 8.0 running and it is really quite an advance compared to many other distros I have tried.

RH 7.x users will love this distro.

Myths: KDE/Qt is broken. My favorite KDE /QT apps compiled perfectly with 3.2. The new Xft patches are already in Qt 3.1 beta. This is the fastest most bug free KDE I have ever seen RH ship.

The new scheduler is not mentioned, but this really improves the snappines of the desktop. Windows and dialogs move, open and close really quick.

KDE has a really good printer setup mechanism with CUPS. (IMHO should be the default for RH - LPrng is a PIA)

Bluecurve in the shipping version is really quite smooth and easy on the eyes. You can see a lot of work was put into making fonts readable everywhere.
Most importantly, this has a great many of the tools needed to slip Linux into the corporate enviroment. I would not suggest any Linux distro to Windows clients until seeing this.. This is the most important part of RH 8.0

Re:i386 Optimized

[Anonymous Coward]

Most applications won't benefit from i686 vs i386 optimization. Since modern Pentium processors reorder instructions so efficiently, the whole notion of compiling for a specific platform would provide only a small performance improvement in the average case.

For the important libraries, like zlib, that _do_ benefit from Pentium-specific instructions, there are i686 packages provided in the default distribution.

-kris

RedHat is 686 optimized Re:i386 Optimized

[Anonymous Coward]

Î would like people doing some research before posting. Build a package from SRPM or look under /usr/lib/rpm and you will see which flags have been used by RedHat. Redhat uses mcpu=i686. That means that the compiler will only use 386 instyructions (so it will run everywhere) but it will base its decisions on the PII/PIII/Celeron timetable not on the 386 timetable.

And anyone having run a few benchmarks knows

1) Compiling for Pentium sucks on anything who is not a true Pentium. On a PII/PIII and on the K6 (I don't have access to an Athlon or PIV) they are markedly slower than code optimized for the 386 and much slower than code compiled with -mcpu=i686

2) Using the -march=i686 allows gcc to use PII/PIII specific instructions but benefits are small (about 2%) respective to -mcpu=i686 so you throw away universality for little benefit. Mandrake uses -mcpu=i686 -march=i586 but gcc is not smart enough to use 586 instructions when optimizing for 686 so it silently reverts to plain -mcpu=i686.

3) For those packages where 386-only instructions don't make sense since they have perfoarmnce-critical parts written in assembler (kernel, glibc, sasl) RedHat ships packages specific to the PII/PIII family who are compiled with -march=i686 (full optimizations) and another set specific to the Athlon compiled with -march=athlon.

Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you looking for this?

Good points. Here's a few more.

[0x0d0a]

Insightful.

I'd also like to point out that I've done a bit of benchmarking gcc, and optimizing for a particular processor makes almost no difference on the vast majority of software.

The biggest win comes from flipping on -O3. Then if you can get away with it, -fomit-frame-pointer, which helps the register-starved x86, but keeps you from looking at stack traces and debugging crashed programs (or sending in useful bug reports). -fexpensive-optimizations have also helped a bit too, and for certain packages, -ffast-math can be big. -march=pentium2 makes next to no difference on anything I've tried benchmarking. -DNDEBUG is potentially good...seems like most production software is compiled with assertions enabled, when they're really intended for debugging.

The Pentium 1 sucked at running code compiled for the 386/486. This is why you got compilers like pgcc, a Pentium-optimized Mandrake distro, and lots of talk about architecture optimizations. With the Pentium 2, Intel realized that all software was not going to be recompiled for each processor (at least in Windows land), and did a really solid job of running 386 code.

So, as far as architectures go, the Pentium 1 is the odd man out. If you have a Pentium 1, it sucks to run any code other than stuff compiled for your chip. If you have anything else, you'll generally get very minimal gains from compiling specifically for your processor instead of for the 386.

Finally, most people don't actually care about the maybe 10% speedup they can get by recompiling software using optimization flags other than just -O2. They care about interactive latency. Look at Mac OS X. OS X is *hideously* slow, but it *feels* pretty fast because it has good UI latency -- it jacks UI priority and puts a lot of emphasis on slapping something on the screen that's updated as soon as the user does anything.

On Linux, here are the big culprits.

Jack the nice value of X from 0 to -10, if your distro doesn't already do so (take a look in top and see what it's running at). The nice value doesn't make it much "faster", but it does significantly improve latency, so you can get crisp edge-flipping and updating.

Turn *on* DMA and umasked interrupts (insert usual warnings about potential problems with *really* old computers having these on). hdparm -u1 -d1 /dev/yourharddrivenamehere. Significantly reduces "jerkiness" in X when doing disk access, including paging. For a long time, a lot of distros left this off by default.

If you're doing something that doesn't need low latency in the background, *nice* it. I run all compiles niced to 20. I can be compiling six or seven packages with no user-perceptable slowdown at all. Software that's always sucking down a little CPU in the background but still should be interactive (like lopster or gtk-gnutella) should be niced to 5 or so.

Make all your cron jobs run at nice 20 (crontab -e, edit command line to contain nice -n20). They have no reason to demand interactive latency, and you *do* need said latency for your UI.

If you run any servers on your workstation, they should run around nice 10. They need to get back to the user, but they shouldn't make your UI get unpleasant when they get hit.

Renice esd/artsd to -15. If these don't get CPU *right away* when they need it, your sound will break up. Frankly, I dumped esd/artsd, and got a sound card with hardware mixing (ALSA .9 + Sound Blaster Live! with the emu10k1). It's not worth it. 99.99% of Linux users will never, ever need network transparency or any other features that you get with a sound server. They *do* want sound that doesn't break up, and having hardware mixing does that for them. Ye gods, it'd be nice to see Linux have some architecture that does "opportunistic" mixing (hardware mixing if any channels are left, software if not).

Use a decent window manager. Sawfish is incredible if you're an edge-flipping maniac like me and like zero edge resistance. Why? Sawfish is actually not that *fast*, but they've compensated for that fact, which makes them beat any other window manager I've seen at edge flipping latency. Sawfish doesn't block other app redraws when edge flipping until it's redrawn its titlebars, as other WMs do, so you get much faster redisplay of app windows. Beautifl design.

Finally, I've had good experiences with redefining HZ in the kernel. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of using the X11 architecture is that anything going to the screen has to wait for a context switch -- first, the app tells X to display something, then we wait until X is active and actually display it. This isn't a huge deal unless you have a bunch of processes that all want CPU time, and you have an app or X that's blocking on I/O (say you've paged out an app). Then your ten compiles, and the lowly default 100 HZ in the x86 kernel mean that it takes a full tenth of a second just to move from the user app to X. If the app is displaying a big pixmap that has to be paged it, it has to draw a little bit, start paging the thing back in, draw a little more...it's I/O bound and yet it isn't gettting a chance to keep the ATA bus saturated. Jack HZ to 1000 or 1024 and recompile your kernel, and you should notice slightly better UI latencies (NOTE: at one point, this caused oddities in some libc call lke usleep or something, and made a couple games run too fast...I don't think this is an issue any more).

Other wins: Use mozilla 1.1 (much faster redraw than 1.0), use an up-to-date version of gtk2 (wow, the version RH is packaging is much faster at rendering aa text than the old snapshot I had from Ximian), use the blisteringly fast rxvt instead of the slow gnome-terminal or konsole. Use gnuserv mode in emacs/emacs -- that way, you open a *single* copy of emacs and then just open new windows in it. Opening files is about 50 times faster.

After following all these tips, you can play with Linux the way it was meant to be seen.

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[FooBarWidget]

> One word: Photoshop

Yeah, home users like to brag about how "professional" or "better" Photoshop is while the real professionals use Gimp.

Face it, Gimp is good *enough* for most people.

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[Bakaneko]

That "something" is the move to the 3.x versions of DHCPD...

Fortunately, I did that a few months ago (with rawhide RPMS) on my 7.3 box, so things should be pretty smooth there.

I DO like having all my systems register their names in DNS when they get an IP. Its great fun to be able to ping ps2.gaastra.net.

Re:RH8 for business - question then...dismissive.

[Anonymous Coward]

"# Professional 3-D graphics modeller and renderer (Maya, Lightwave clone)"

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/u nl imited.shtml

So eager to dismiss, that they can't see what's in front of them.

http://www.softimage.com/corporate/press/pressre le ases/010914_ibc_xsi_linux.htm

Doesn't run on his *favorite* OS so Linux must not be ready.

Final Cut Pro is from Apple. Port over to a competing Unix clone. You must be daft.

Her comment on MP3s shows a lack of understanding

[hayden]

Red Hat decided to not include mp3 libraries on their OS.

Be paid that $50-60,000 USD needed to include mp3s on its BeOS back in year 2000,

These two comments shows she has no idea what she is talking about when it comes to the mp3 issue. The company that licences the mp3 patent (which I have no hope of even a reasonable spelling of) have recently changed the wording of the licence. They may claim that the intent of the licence hasn't changed but that is completely irrelevant. It's the wording that matters and as it stands RedHat is in a very murky area of the licence which the totally free as in beer distros don't have to worry about. One of these days the open source community is going to realise that good intentions aren't worth shit (as has been proven again and again). If it's not explicitly written down then you may as well start wearing your pants around your ankles and practice bending over.

The second point about Be doesn't apply to RedHat either. The licencing on BeOS was such that if you paid for it then you couldn't redistribute it but if you didn't pay for it then you could. This is allowed by the mp3 licence in that they are only interested if money changes hands and at that point they want some. This allowed Be to buy the unlimited mp3 licence and be done with it.

RedHat can't do this because they can't restrict the redistribution of the software without being in violation of licence and so can't distribute it at all. Also they can't buy the unlimited licence because that is not transferable and only applies to them (so others can't redistribute their distribution, back to square one).

The author seems to think RedHat is in a pretty good financial position and if they are to stay that way then they can't trust the good intentions of PR people and walk into legal minefields and get their arses sued off when it turns out the PR people are full of shit (a rarity but it does happen).

Partitioning to make upgrades easy

[knorthern knight]

> excuse me? you are obviousally some kind of wacked newbie...
> a clean fdisk/format/install is ALWAYS better than any upgrade.
> anyone saying differently is an idiot.

hda1 (primary) / (4 gigs)
hda5 (logical) swap (256 megs)
hda6 (logical) /var (256 megs)
hda7 (logical) /misc (the rest of the bleeping harddrive)

Virgin install
==============
Immediately after install
- log on as root
- mv /home /misc/home
- ln -s /misc/home /home
- mv /usr/local /misc/local
- ln -s /misc/local /usr/local

Upgrade
=======
- cp -R /etc /misc/etc
- blow away hda5
- install new version

Immediately after install
- log on as root
- rm /home
- ln -s /misc/home /home
- rm /usr/local
- ln -s /misc/local /usr/local

And you're back to your old user setup. Look at /misc/etc for config settings. There; isn't it easy ?