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.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

Too bad it's factually inaccurate in 100s of places

I've only had my own experiences and information from other people I've researched the topic with. If there's errors there (and there undoubtedly are) then I suppose you'll send me some email explaining exactly what's wrong, and providing supporting evidence. You do believe these opinions are correct, right?

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

PS. I'm checking out Havoc's posts now.

There's plenty of stuff for (real) KDE users to be upset about.

Is there anything specific that's not covered in my article? I'd be happy to add it if you wish. As you can tell I don't think everything Red Hat changed has been beneficial, so if you have real criticisms and evidence to prove their case, post here or send me an email.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

And where do you see that these drafts have been approved ?

That's a true point, one I'm about to add to the page, but not what we were talking about. You said Red Hat was freedesktop.org, I provided soem evidence that it wasn't.

About point 2, considering how bad were the RH's KDE packages in the past, i'm almost sure it wasn't tested enough.

As someone who used those packages, I disagree.

About point 3 and 4, i just advise you to use as correct and accurate language as possible in your article, if you want credibility.

Fair enough, I can see your point and will add it to the page.

About OpenOffice you seem to ignore that it includes some GNOME interaction (not a lot for now though, granted)

Interesting. Could you be more specific?

However KOffice is very light and coherent when used within KDE, and i'm sure that for a lot of people such qualities are very important. This raising the question: on what basis did RedHat determine what is "best" Linux software ? KWord imports very well Word document as far as i know and have used it.

Does it export it? For most users, the ability to save to the file format that `everyone else' uses outweighs some sense of desktop interoperability. Likewise, being able to view web pages. Not everyone has the power to change other people's desktop habits or HTML coding skills.

That said, i know i'll be able to reconfigure everything, but most users will simply not do it.

I did. I don't know about other people, but I think if desktop users are unsatisfied most be aware they can chaneg and might do so. The best idea though is to keep them satisfied from the start.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

Too bad you chose to be rude than to inform me of this politely. Regardless, someone with more tact already has and I'm adding it to the page.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

I'm correcting the document now to reflect the vfolder and system tray specs status as draft specifications.

Cheers for the correction, but you could be a bit more civil about it. As the document states, I'm approaching this from a users point of view, oddly enough, where Red Hat are aiming.

PS: The second URL you posted doesn't seem to work.

Further, you claim that every contributor is listed in "About App" boxes. I invite you to look over commit logs of any KDE application, and you'll see that there are dozens of contributors who aren't listed in the about box - bugfixers, proofreaders, people who fix up UI improvements. Heck, a casual look at kde-cvs archives will show that.


If this is the case (I doubt anybody would assume it was off the bat) then have you reported it to bugzilla?


And, BTW, I consider opinions based on inaccurate information meaningless.
That's nice dear. Meanwhile, in the real world, peole can and do make mistakes. My article certainly debunks more myths than it propogates, and unlike many of the critics, my page will be corrected when I find better information.

Mike

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

Huh? It's not a bug to Redhat - they did this unnecessary crap _intentionally_. With a HUGE patch. The RH GNOMErs (Havoc & Owen) defended what they did on kde lists.

I agree that it seems unnecessary (I can't udnerstand why they'd do it either) but I think you're missing the difference between the problem and a side effect. The side effect was unintentional - otherwise Red hat wouldn't have a highly priority bug concerning it, and wouldn't be working on a patch to fix it.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

If I want to read the Redhat party line responding to what they've done, I'll go find Owen's paper. Your bias for Redhat is pretty clear: covering for them by calling their intentional breakages a bug. LOL.

You don't seem to understand the difference between Red Hat's changes and the resulting side effects. Red Hat didn't rename the .desktop files for the purposes of breaking that system call. If they didn, they couldn't be reversing their behavior by filing a high priority bug report - that makes no sense.

Stop trying to include me in the Myterious Anti KDE Sinister Organization. I always acknowledged the file renaming has no benefit I can see for end users, and I've criticised other Red Hat desktop decisions in the article too, such as the poor menu setup. Just because I agree with Red Hat on a few points doesn't mean I don't think independently: clearly I do, or I wouldn't be disagreeing with them on other points.

Oh well, your loss. The article's getting a few hits and I think you look bad by not providing evidence to support your claims of other breakages that you say aren't mentioned.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

Thanks for the info re: QT. I haven't been able to get as much in depth information on the content of the patch as I'd like, and I've had to reply on heresay (much as I'm doing now unfortunely - do you have a link with mroe info?). I've heard this from a couple of people and I'll update the document accordingly,

People can and have have hinted that Red Hat broke Konqueror plugins (and caused every other bug that has or will appear in their KDE) on purpose to discredit KDE. Yes, these people are idiots, but others still believe them.

Konqueror plugins and Bluecurve are both fixed. I think they have have been for a fair while.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Dehumanizer]

You are an Anonymous Coward. Nothing you say matters.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

So, we have a massive Redhat patch
to KDE written by GNOME developers
that serves no purpose except to
break things in KDE, but in your
mind this is somehow a "side effect".

No, the patch is not a side effect. I never said it was. The services breakage is a side effect. if it was the intended purpose of the patch, they wouldn't be trying to fix it.

But I think you know this and you're trolling me.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

Only RHKDE had this problem. Note that RH never fixed this bug.

That seems odd when according to your link "The problem is khtml doesn't correctly interpret the tag and thus, flash animations which are not inside a pair work ok. Like
the one above." Doesn't look as if it was Red Hat's bug to fix...

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE

[Nailer]

I can't see a purpose for that patch - I've read Red Hat's point of view and I still don't see how a naming conflict would realistically occur Yes
see a problem here, I've repeatedly said I see a problem. However I've also corrected you when you said the side effect was intentional. It clearly isn't, or they wouldn't be fixing it.

gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell redhat sucks cuase it's easy to install.

That's why i use gentoo.

It's so eleet it doens't even have an installer!

you just copy the stuff over by hand!

that just proves you have to be eleet to use it!

my mom got mad when i installed it on our dell in the family room but it's just cuase she's not leet!

you posers in the data centers running redhat on the huge server farms are pussies compared to my leet mp3 server!

uh my mom needs to get a recipe off marthastweart.com, gotta go!

keep it leet!

w3rd em up!

Eugenia Linux!

[xyrw]

> Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money.

Wow, Eugenia sounds like a cool new distribution!

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??

[Jacco de Leeuw]

Fair enough, but are you still allowed to call it KDE then?

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.

Re:No multimedia??

[N3WBI3]

Umm I thought KDE was open Source (I could be wrong) so how does hacking it suck..

Re:No multimedia??

[HiThere]

Personally, the only change that they made that I *know* of that I object to is the replacement of the KDE logo for the desktop menu with the Red Hat logo.

This is definitely legal, but quite impolite.

OTOH, they sat still when Mandrake took their (was it 5.2?) distribution and started a new company. Perhaps they deserve some slack. (Yes, they had to allow it, but they were polite about it.)

Still, they *are* being impolite now. And I suspect that they will continue to be so. This is coloring my perceptions of them ... up till now they were the certified Good Guys, now, they're another company, and they usually act in a friendly way, but aren't really trustworthy friends. It's a small matter, but I find it significant. (Also, lamentably, to be expected. Corporations always seem to evolve in that direction. Even companies have tendencies to do that as management changes, but it's more pronounced with corporations.)

Re:No multimedia??

[N3WBI3]

So how does changing the KDE theme make it not KDE?? If its still KDE they should use the logo. Frankly I consider changing the Gnome foot print with a red hat as more rude than leaving the KDE logo..

Re:No multimedia??

[FooBarWidget]

Yet for some reason the GNOME community have been very mature about this and don't think that their GNOME hacks are impolite, while the KDE community have been constantly flaming at modding down RedHat.

It's not impolite. All apps are still there, they just changed the defaults. Even the About KDE box is still there, it's just removed from all apps except KDevelop and Kicker (which are the *only* right places for a KDE ad). People only *think* it's impolite because they have been hating RedHat for years just because RedHat's primary desktop is GNOME. In my view that's immature behavior. You don't hear the GNOME guys say "oh god I hate SuSE" just because their primary desktop is KDE, do you?

Re:No multimedia??

[Isldeur]

Can you tell me if reiserfs is supported out of the box? I've been trying to find this info everywhere but can't seem to find it much - and all of our labs run reiserfs exclusively.

Re:Very interesting quote

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're really a Physics Genius, why don't you tell us the total displacement of that spork you've got shoved up your ass?

Re:The 2 best distros

[gazbo]

I can't believe that Slashdot, who have been a staunch supporter of GNU/Linux for so long, would link to such an ill-informed and negative review.

Firstly the review advocates Windows users not bothering to switch unless they absolutely have to, but also the FUD about Linux + Apache being insecure due to the (now patched) OpenSSL vulnerability was ridiculous. Sounds like a MS shill to me...

Then, to cap it all, advocating choosing RH7.2 over RH8.0 was ludicrous. The reasoning goes along the lines that 7.2 has been in development longer than 8.0. WTF? That doesn't even make sense.

I've downloaded 8.0 for my home network and installed most services, and it all works fine for me. Whoever wrote that article doesn't know what they are talking about.

Bluecurve kicks ass. .

[MrLinuxHead]

I just tried Mandrake's latest release on a dual Celeron 533 and a Tecra Laptop, both dual boot systems. I had the latest Redhat beta ((null)) and installed it right after installing Mandrake. No comparison. The Redhat interface looks much better, and the intergration of the menus is a much needed improvment. All of the program defaults make logical sense to me, as I use OpenOffice, Moz, and Evolution by choice.

I am waiting for the mirrors to update RH 8.0 like a Lion waiting for fresh meat.

Re:Bluecurve kicks ass. .

[warpSpeed]

I am waiting for the mirrors to update RH 8.0 like a Lion waiting for fresh meat.

I'm not waiting, I'm pulling 8.0 from RedHat directly. Rather then buying a CD copy, I bought support a while ago. I am able to log in directly and download the ISOs. I'm getting 90kB/sec at the moment. Should take about 2.5 hours for each CD. I pull all of my ISOs down from them, and I know that some money goes back to them directly. Best $50 I spent all year.

Re:Bluecurve kicks ass. .

[mickwd]

".....the intergration of the menus is a much needed improvment."

Errr.....hasn't Mandrake had this menu integration since at least Mandrake 8.2 (probably earlier, but I can't remember now) ?

Or is that what you meant by "No comparison" ?

You may have a point about the default interface looking better - I don't know, I've not used the new Red Hat distribution. But I don't know a single Linux user who doesn't tweak his/her environment to get it just the way they like it.

Upgading from 7.3

[mgkimsal2]

Will it be a smooth upgrade from 7.3? Or will I (once again) simply be reinstalling everything from scratch?

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[mgkimsal2]

Not been able to ever get the apt-rpm stuff to work. Just keeps complaining about not being able to find package info or something stupid. Yes, I followed all the (mostly not there) documnentation to no avail.

More to the point, though, is that the GCC and underlying libraries may be radically different enough so as to make upgrading like that not work - what were the jumps in gcc from 7.0 -> 7.3? I can't remember.

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.

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.

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[s20451]

My experience is that the RedHat X.0 releases suck ass, the X.1 releases are a little better, and X.2+ are best. RedHat 6.0 was one of the most unstable OSes I have ever seen (most of the fault for that was probably the beta-release of Gnome that they included). RedHat 7.0 was a little better, but I remember a lot of unpleasant issues. I'm happy with 7.3, which is a nice, stable release, and I don't think I'll move to upgrade until at least 8.1 is out.

Re:Upgading from 7.3

[guacamole]

Huh?

I have done the following upgrades and all of them went mostly smoothly:

5.1 -> 6.0
6.0 -> 7.3
6.0 -> 6.2
7.1 -> 7.2
7.2 -> 7.3

and probably other cases that I don't remember right now. What's your definition of an update that's not smooth?

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.

RH8 for business - question then...

[Mantrid]

Red Hat 8 is meant for the business desktop. I've got a question then - is there a distro that is meant for games and multimedia?

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[larien]

There's a couple of audio specific based distros; one based on Debian and another on something else. I don't think there's a games specific distro, but anything with decent sound support and 3D drivers will do the trick.

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[0x0d0a]

Instructions for "media distro":

Step 1: Install Red Hat
Step 2: Install mplayer and xmms

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:RH8 for business - question then...

[zerocool^]

Yes, and no.

It's hard to argue that something sucks when it's free and being compared to something that's not free.

However, I'd use photoshop anyday over gimp, based on the interface alone, without even going into the capabilities.
The photoshop palette windows (or whatever they're called) are fantastic, easy to use, useful. The menu system isn't convoluted. It looks like the rest of the operating system. It looks like one app, with a common workspace.
Gimp - it looks like a bad port of a worse linux interface. Come on, use windows menus and styles. It doesn't seem like one application, with all of the different windows, most of which are useless. Don't tell me it's a Linux app, if you want it to be better than photoshop, we have to go with the app that uses the same OS as photoshop.

Then there's the text editing capabilities. You can do so much more in PS 6 with text than in Gimp - balloon, scrunch, drop shadow with a click, outline, gradient overlay, pattern overlay, inner shadow, etc. In gimp, well, you can resize text.

And don't display articles about professionals using gimp over photoshop that are from sourceforge and gnomedesktop. That's equivilant to a link to a slashdot editorial proclaiming how popular linux is. Go out and buy a graphics art design magazine at borders. They talk about photoshop and nothing else, because it is the industry standard. There is nothing in the graphics art world that needs doing that photoshop does not do that gimp does. Gimp has a selection of the features that make photoshop great, implemented poorly.

Here are some links to professionals that use photoshop (and I trust these people more than some dude on gnomedesktop): popular photography imaging insider Mac World Mag Fortune Magazine Fotophile.

Gimp is not, and never was intended to be a photoshop replacement. I'm not saying it's a bad program. Actually, for being free, it's very nice. But don't compare it to photoshop. If you think gimp is better than photoshop, you've never done any graphics art design.

~Will

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[0x0d0a]

You can do so much more in PS 6 than in Gimp - balloon, scrunch, drop shadow with a click, outline, gradient overlay, pattern overlay, inner shadow, etc.

So? You could do this for years with plugins for earlier version of Photoshop, or by hand. Same goes for the Gimp.

The Gimp does nothing but RGB and has basically no for-press features, just stuff designed to make nice online output. It sucks for making things intended for print output. That pretty much sums up its failings. In terms of features for making output designed for online use, the Gimp is just as good as Photoshop.

Also, if you like *Photoshop* palettes, take a look at the development branch of the Gimp...mmm, tasty.

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[FooBarWidget]

> However, I'd use photoshop anyday over gimp,
> based on the interface alone, without even going
> into the capabilities.

Yes, you would. But I wouldn't. I've been using Gimp for years, and I'm completely used to it's interface. Thanks to rightclicking (I don't have to move my mouse all the way up) and things like tearoff menus I can access operations faster than, say, Paint Shop Pro.

Everything you know and think is "normal" is learned. Gimp's interface is not worse, it's different. I prefer Gimp's interface over Paint Shop Pro.

> Then there's the text editing capabilities. You
> can do so much more in PS 6 with text than in
> Gimp - balloon, scrunch,

Well that's nice, but Joe Average doesn't need or almost never use those functions.

> drop shadow with a click

Gimp has a drop shadow script-fu.

> outline,

Bonus point for you.

> inner shadow, etc.

I don't know what you mean by that.

> gradient overlay, pattern overlay,

What's this?

> And don't display articles about professionals
> using gimp over photoshop that are from
> sourceforge and gnomedesktop. That's equivilant
> to a link to a slashdot editorial proclaiming
> how popular linux is. Go out and buy a graphics
> art design magazine at borders.

Have you read those pages at all? They're not trying to convince you why Gimp is so good, they informing you that Hollywood is using Gimp for actual production use!

> There is nothing in the graphics art world that
> needs doing that photoshop does not do that
> gimp does.

Yes yes Photoshop is better, but that's not my point. But what really matters is that Gimp is good enough for most people. Linux is better than Windows as a server but that doesn't stop people from using Win2k webservers.

> If you think gimp is better than photoshop,
> you've never done any graphics art design

Re-read my post. I never said it is better. I said it is good enough, even for professional usage (Hollywood).

Re:RH8 for business - question then...

[FooBarWidget]

> and plugins that failed to load even basic file
> formats that PS could load. (yes older versions)

Which "basic formats are those"? GIF, BMP, PNG, JPG, TIFF, and even PostScript, they all load fine in Gimp.

> I truly hate 12 little windows, a proper
> graphics app should be one big window with
> attached tool-windows.

You know, one big window and attached tool-windows are exactly why I hate Paint Shop Pro's interface.
And 12 little windows are acceptable when utilizing the power of virtual desktops.

> Another gripe i had was with the crapp submenus
> that were hard to select because they were 50%
> aligned off the -> arrow. (yes GTKs fault).

Fixed in Ximian's GTK+ 1.2.10 and vanially GTK+ 2.0.

> Face it, GIMP needs 'themes' or 'visual
> emulation' modes to make it look like Photoshop
> or PaintShopPro for it to be taken seriously as
> an alternative,

Interfaces are learned. What you think is a normal interface depends on what kind of apps you've been using.
I've used Gimp long enough to be very productive in Gimp. Gimp's UI has no secrets for me anymore.
I have PSP installed on my Windows partition too, but I always end up using Gimp for Windows or Gimp for Linux.

> Oh and scanning...

There's a Sane plugin for Gimp.

Re:Check your mirrors...

[Squareball]

Bluecurve is the new theme that RH created and added and made the default theme/look for Gnome and KDE

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:Another write-up...

[GauteL]

There are a couple of misleading bits in this article.

"This much software from Microsoft would cost about $400"

This is just plain wrong. This much software from Microsoft would cost a lot more than $400.

The office suite and the Operating system alone would cost more than $400.

The other thing is the statement about Microsoft Internet Explorer still being the best browser out there, without any argument to back it up. Why is it better than anything else out there? For me it certainly isn't, since I'm way too bothered by all the pop-ups..

Otherwise a decent piece.

Re:Another write-up...

[Anonymous DWord]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-07 -22&res=l

The next Debian unstable

[Pac]

Buzz -> Rex -> Bo -> Hamm -> Slink -> Potato -> Woody -> Sarge -> Eugenia

Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[jvmatthe]

One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated "Start" Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don't. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place? You have a "mouse" entry on your Preferences, and you got a "mouse" entry on your System Settings. Granted, the panels loading from each menu are doing different things, but it is just not clear enough just by looking at the menu items what is what and which one does what. You have to click both to see if it is the one you needed. A UI should be intuitive enough to clear up such misconceptions right away.

Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license (GPL, LGPL, BSD), sharing code but with appropriate attribution, using open standards and tools (autoconf, etc), and so on. The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world. Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits? When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license, then perhaps free software can really evolve past its geek-oriented roots to something that the masses can embrace.

Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[stubear]

Open software, closed minds. I've hit this brick wall a number of times. I'm currently working with the OBOS group developing the GUI and hopefully working towards pushing the group into desiging the UI with typical users in mind. Part of this has been developing functionality but my achilles heel is my lackof programming ability so I'm left only contributing ideas and graphics. Granted this is an important contribution, IMHO, but I'm limited as to how far I can demonstrate the ideas and why they are usefuland/or needed. Hopefully this OSS group will have an open mind and listen. So far so good but far too many OSS groups have closed minds.

Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[gosand]

The author wrote:
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated "Start" Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don't. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place?

Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license?

I think your point is a little off, by targeting "developers in the free software community". This is RedHat's distribution of GNU/Linux, and it sounds like the author's gripes would need to be addressed by RedHat. It doesn't really sounds like a programmers view of the UI, but the distributor's. I am not disagreeing with the author's point, just that the comments should be directed appropriately. If RedHat wants to put the same menu in 15 times in 15 different places, you can' fault the person who coded the menu.

Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[pubjames]

I absolutely agree. I would really like to see a good single set of guidelines (like the Apple guidelines) that all open source programmers could reference. I think this would really help with the 'peer pressure'. If you could point to respected guidelines and say, hey your interface breaks rule X, then I think a lot more programmers would listen.

Problem is of course such guidlines do not exisit, but it would be great if, for instance, the KDE, Mozilla, Gnome and OpenOffice people could each appoint a team member for a group to put something like this together. This would also be much preferable to having changes forced upon them by RedHat.

Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution

[pubjames]

Are you looking for this [gnome.org]?

Not exactly, but close. I would like to see guidlines that are meant for all projects. I believe currently, for instance, Gnome and KDE both have their own guidelines. I would like to see a set of guidelines which has the universiality and authority of the LSB, written by people from KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice and Mozilla, etc., not just the Gnome people.

xine is in (null)

[xiox]

Xine was shipped with the (null) beta. I'm surprised if it itsn't in 8.0. Perhaps it isn't installed by default? Perhaps it isn't on the menus. I can't check as I don't have access to 8.0.

Re:xine is in (null)

[N3WBI3]

Actually I prefer it without xine installed by default. I think RPM's make it easy enough for a n00b like me to install off of a download..

In other news...

[Truckle]

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

A dilemma

[ACK!!]

Ok, I am a UI whore. I fully admit it. I liked SuSE because they seemed to care about the UI. I put my wife on KDE and she is happy and I compile and manually muck with my my Gnome 2.0.2 environment and I am happy. So what is the problem?

Redhat has some nice advancements in terms of integration of the UI and consistency for the look and feel of administration tools. So I should make the switch right?

Well, then I hear that the multimedia, plugins side of Redhat sucks hard. I started gathering some of the packages needed to make this better but my god there is a lot of missing things.

So I am at an impasse. Should I stay with a distro that is not aimed at my primary desktop or move to a distro that is but will take a lot more work to get functional?

Any ideas?

________________________________________________ _

i386 Optimized

[Bios_Hakr]

I have a soft place in my heart for RH. Way back in the day (late 1996), I was struggling through yet another Debian install (broken kernel update), when my buddy gave me a RH cd. I was amazed with basicly everything on there. I went out and bought RH4.2 the next day. By tine a year had passed, I was in love with RH.

Then another buddy introduced me to Mandrake. Everything good about RH, but compiled for CPUs that were actually fabbed in the last 5 years. Ever since 1998, I have had a love/hate relationship with Mandrake. Not very stable (compared to RH), but at least I have the comfort of knowing that it is somewhat optimized for my system.

I still try RH releases. I love to see the work the guys have done. If I ever convert my office to Linux, I will reccomend RH. But why, oh why, can't the guys over there just update the compiler options. Would it really take that long to compile for i586? I know there are some people still running 80486 chips (esp in the embedded world), but why do they insist on keeping 80386 as a baseline?

Actually, I guess people like me are never really happy. I bitch at Mandrake for not moving to i686 as a base. In any event, my home box runs Gentoo now. Gcc 3.2, -O3, march=athlon, and whatever else I want to throw in there. I'm happy with my system, but I still look at RH 8.0 and their snazzy desktop/installer/awesome support, and wish they would take a few days to pump out an i686 ISO.

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:Why 386 instead of 586?

[ajs]

This has been asked and answered in various places, but basically, Red Hat compiles key packages (glibc, kernel, openssl) for particular processors, and uses options that allow backward compatibility for all of the rest. This way, they have a minimum of duplication on the CDs. They also take advantage of some flags that let you optimize for later processors while allowing older ones to run the code. I forget if it's -march, but they do something funky there.

Take a look at the /usr/lib/rpm/rpmrc

Now, you may ask why they would want to support ancient hardware? Well, the sad truth is that rich kids (that is to say, people who can afford a good machine) who buy computers to dual boot Linux for real work and Windows for games aren't the only people who use computers. There are many in the wealthy countries (US, Europe, Japan, etc) who need to be able to re-use old hardware and even more in the developing world. Red Hat is a great OS choice for many of these people, and as it becomes entrenched in places like South America, it becomes the choice of schools and small businesses too, which will eventually become Red Hat customers for support.

Re:Slashdot grammer!

[Xpilot]

It wouldn't be slashdot if I spelt it correctly now would it? I do know how too spell grammar... duh :)

Re:Why 386 instead of 586?

[Sabalon]

Sadly I was trying to install RH on a 386 and a 486 notebook. None of them had the resources to let me install (no cd drive, not enough ram for a network install). Nice little conundrum.

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.

Well, ...

[Codifex Maximus]

I didn't get to read the whole article... seems now after page 2 it's slashdotted.

Anyway, I get the impression she is a graphical designer. She nitpicked the Gnome UI apart. Everything is visual for her. Form is more important than function - at least that is my impression of her opinion.

Most of the proposed changes she mentioned seem to make the interface look more like Windows and less like Gnome. While I agree some changes are warranted, does it have to look exactly like windows to please her? Puleez!

Also, a unified desktop where everything is the same old boring thing is just... well... boring. I get mental images of that tennis shoe commercial where everyone is exactly the same... then some offcenter person appears wearing tennis shoes of a different color and is immediately chastised. Oh well. A consistent way of doing things is great but to have everything EXACTLY the same EVERY TIME with no variation at all. Bleah.

After that I got too many users error... prolly for the better.

Re:Well, ...

[Dog and Pony]

I disagree. Seemed to me she wanted usability and consistency. DWIW and "least surprise", in other words.

And this is very important if Linux ever is going outside the geek block.

Since she seems to be a mainly Mac and BeOS user, it is also unlikely she wants stuff to work like windows, but OTOH, if you want to get into businesses, what are the odds that the machine you are replacing is a Windows machine? What would the *USERS* want, you think?

Consistency is great for productivity. I only need to look at the fact that I am switching back and forth between Emacs on Linux and TextPad on Windows to see that it costs time and productivity doing things differently. Even if it is measured in seconds, tops, it adds up. And that is just two text editors.

I really like both, and don't expect any of them to change, but on the same OS I want stuff to follow certain principles, so I can at least learn a few OS's instead of thousands of apps. It is fun when you are playing, but not when you try to get job done.

And no, no really good way ATM to do all editing in one of them. Emacs on Windows you say? Well, then it doesn't behave like the rest of the OS, which is worse.

Re:Well, ...

[Codifex Maximus]

>I disagree. Seemed to me she wanted usability and
>consistency. DWIW and "least surprise", in other
>words.
How does changing the shading on a non-selected tab on a tab control, while a nice cosmetic addition, add to the consistency or usability of the control?

>Since she seems to be a mainly Mac and BeOS user,
>it is also unlikely she wants stuff to work like
>windows, but OTOH, if you want to get into
>businesses, what are the odds that the machine
>you are replacing is a Windows machine?
The changes made to the default controls and apps seem to me to reflect a windowsish look

>What would the *USERS* want, you think?
I think the users want an easy to use computer that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and that doesn't crash on them all the time. One that they can get good software for and doesn't lock them into an expensive solution.

>Consistency is great for productivity. I only
>need to look at the fact that I am switching back
>and forth between Emacs on Linux and TextPad on
>Windows to see that it costs time and
>productivity doing things differently. Even if it
>is measured in seconds, tops, it adds up. And
>that is just two text editors.
How can you compare Emacs and TextPad???

Many Windows apps have a minimum of consistency in the naming of the menu selections and buttons... not a whole lot more than that. Anyway, take any killer app or tool and compare it with any other app or tool - Photoshop and Dreamweaver for instance - they don't have consistent interfaces do they? Didn't think so. I figure I save alot of those seconds, you say I lose with allegedly inconsistent interfaces, by not having to reboot multiple times a day and setup my whole development environment every freakin time.

>I really like both, and don't expect any of them
>to change, but on the same OS I want stuff to
>follow certain principles, so I can at least
>learn a few OS's instead of thousands of apps. It
>is fun when you are playing, but not when you try
>to get job done.
What you, and she, seem to really mean is that you want applications to look and act more alike - it's not the OS you have problems with. The windowmanagers could use more polish also - true. But to say they are inefficient at getting a job done because they need a more subtle shading and to round a few pixels on the edges... then I say you need to take off yer windows colored glasses and get an eye-exam as well as an electroencephalogram to check for brainwave activity.

>And no, no really good way ATM to do all editing
>in one of them. Emacs on Windows you say? Well,
>then it doesn't behave like the rest of the OS,
>which is worse.
Emacs is an OS.

Re:Well, ...

[Dog and Pony]

How does changing the shading on a non-selected tab on a tab control, while a nice cosmetic addition, add to the consistency or usability of the control?

Nice try. Read the review. That wasn't what it was about. At all.

I think the users want an easy to use computer that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and that doesn't crash on them all the time. One that they can get good software for and doesn't lock them into an expensive solution.

I think so too. But when faced with the choice between "easy to use and can get good software" or "doesn't crash or lock them into an expensive solution" they choose number two.

Just what the author of the review wants to cure. (And yes, some choose the "arm and leg" option too. I call them "Mac users").

Joe Sixpack, or my mom, or my boss, or pick anyone that isn't a geek aren't interetsed in how stable and secure it is way down below. They want usability and not have to learn all kinds of arcane commands - especially not new ones for each app. Why can't we both have what we want?

How can you compare Emacs and TextPad???

They are my editors of choice. What else would I compare? And I only use the editor part of emacs. Which means all the shortcuts are different, the menu is ordered differently and even the mouse works differently. That takes some getting used to. That is all.

Many Windows apps have a minimum of consistency in the naming of the menu selections and buttons... not a whole lot more than that. Anyway, take any killer app or tool and compare it with any other app or tool - Photoshop and Dreamweaver for instance - they don't have consistent interfaces do they? Didn't think so.

Yes they have. If you compare with Linux. All the standard shortcuts are there too. CTRL-V works the same in virtually every windows app. The File menu and the Edit menu contains about the same commands. That is going a long way, only that.

I figure I save alot of those seconds, you say I lose with allegedly inconsistent interfaces, by not having to reboot multiple times a day and setup my whole development environment every freakin time.

Blatant propaganda, or you are using 98. Anyone ever told you that isn't a server *or* a development machine? It is a home OS for people who can take a few reboots as long as they can blast away monsters in the last game. Still wouldn't set up a Windows server if I can avoid it, but that is plain FUD.

Just like with warning kids of the dangers with drugs, don't lie. They will find out and then they will never beleive the stuff that is actually bad either.

What you, and she, seem to really mean is that you want applications to look and act more alike - it's not the OS you have problems with. The windowmanagers could use more polish also - true. But to say they are inefficient at getting a job done because they need a more subtle shading and to round a few pixels on the edges... then I say you need to take off yer windows colored glasses and get an eye-exam as well as an electroencephalogram to check for brainwave activity.

Read again. Flaming stuff that was never said gets you nowhere.

Emacs is an OS.

Not the way I use it. I use it as an editor, because an editor is what I need.

Now go re-read.

Re:Well, ...

[Codifex Maximus]

>Now go re-read.
Ok, I reread.

Here is an outline of the article by page:
Page 1: Fonts, graphical sharpness, Antialiasing and Gnome's confusing menus and interface consistence. Note: Gnome is not an OS - it is a kind of launcher/feedback/windowmanager helper.
Page 2: Package managers, KDE has been made to look like Gnome (is this a good thing?), lack of installed Java and multimedia applications.
Page 3: Lack of mp3 player (or inability to find it), complaints about XMMS, some kudos on GCC and the kernel, complaints about mouse setup, XServer not getting high enough resolutions, and lack of drivers for video cards such as NVidia.
Page 4: More NVidia problems, Window focus wierdness, GTK+ 2 Combobox bug, and finally about 9 sentences about keyboard shortcuts.

That about sums it up.
Now, the *whole* article wasn't about graphical sharpness or keyboard shortcuts either.

I have to confess, I think I see where you are going now and where you are coming from. You want consistency in the keyboard shortcuts as well as the menuing interface. There are some consistencies but not quite enough, at this point, in the applications and windowmanagers (an app) used in the RedHat 8.0 distribution as well as most other Linux distributions. KDE shows alot more interface consistency than many windowmanagers I've used but more work still has to be done.

That granted, I must contend that the windowmanagers ARE very efficient. They are not Windows or Mac interfaces.

Our previous posts:
>>What you, and she, seem to really mean is that
>>you want applications to look and act more alike
>>- it's not the OS you have problems with. The
>>windowmanagers could use more polish also - true.
>>But to say they are inefficient at getting a job
>>done because they need a more subtle shading and
>>to round a few pixels on the edges... then I say
>>you need to take off yer windows colored glasses
>>and get an eye-exam as well as an
>>electroencephalogram to check for brainwave
>>activity.

>Read again. Flaming stuff that was never said
>gets you nowhere.

From earlier in your post:
>They are my editors of choice. What else would I
>compare? And I only use the editor part of emacs.
>Which means all the shortcuts are different, the
>menu is ordered differently and even the mouse
>works differently. That takes some getting used
>to. That is all.

and:
>Yes they have. If you compare with Linux. All the
>standard shortcuts are there too. CTRL-V works
>the same in virtually every windows app. The File
>menu and the Edit menu contains about the same
>commands. That is going a long way, only that.

Do we see a pattern developing here? You are concerned largely with SHORTCUTS and MENU ARRANGEMENT. Shortcuts and menus are part of applications which are under the control of the folks who write the apps.

My posts were mainly about my not agreeing with nitpicking graphical details.

Now, as for efficiency, it is an ever improving thing. We need to keep piling on the polish and make the apps ever better. It's happening and fast. At this point, I can get alot more done in Linux's windowmanagers and bash than I can in Windows' interface. YMMV

Anyway, I'll agree with you about the shortcuts and menus because I think you are right. They could be easier - the shortcuts are just so configurable that it may confuse the average user. But, are you an average user? I think not and neither am I. As for agreeing with her about dissing RH8.0 due to some graphical design issues - I can't. The graphical details can always be sharpened but they don't adversely effect productivity.

What was it that was once said?
You can please all the people some of the time; some of the people all the time; but you can't please all the people all the time. :|

Anyway, Peace.

Greenrd's Law

[wiredog]

Here

Evey post disparaging someone else's spelling or grammar, or lauding one's own spelling or grammar, will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error.

Btw, it's "grammar".

Re:Slashdot grammer!

[gosand]

Looks like she is on par with CmdrTaco as far as grammer and spelling is concerned. Yup, that's a quality review alright.

I thought that too, at first. I thought that some of the mistakes she made sounded like English wasn't her native language. So instead of choosing to be a smart ass and make some "clever" comment about it, I chose to educate myself. I looked up the info on the author (by simply clicking on her name at the top of the article). She is Greek, so English isn't her first language. While it isn't perfect English by far, it got the point across. In the author's own words:
I am Greek and english is not my native language. We do OSNews for fun (however, OSNews takes most of my time every day), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too) b) send me a proofread version of the article in question. Whining about something I can't radically improve overnight, is not an option.

Re:Resolution..

[jmu1]

Not to sound like a troll but if you don't like *n[iu]x, then stop using it. If you don't like the names, make a link or something. If you don't like a distrobution, make one, or hell go work for a company that makes a distro... be a consultant... just don't whine about it and expect things to change. It's sort of like the weather. It's going to do things you don't like, period. It can't be all things for all people. A good menuing system is just that, a good menuing system. I learned what the programs are... I'm not exactly a genius. You don't want the history lesson, fine. But guess what; it's where we came from, you can't change that. You can only change the future(but not by sitting on your duff complaining).
Cheers.

RedHat Linux 6.2 and 7.2 support status

[guacamole]

I have read before somewhere on redhat.com that RedHat promisses to support all the minor revisions of the current major release and the last minor release of the previous major release of RedHat Linux. Up untit yesterday, it meant that RedHat 6.2 through 7.3 was supported. Will things now change after 8.0 release?

It will be a shame if RedHat 6.2 and 7.2 are desupported. Both are fine, stable dists. We have standardized on 7.2 (by the way, believing that 7.2 is the last minor release in 7.x series) only eight months ago and it would really suck having to upgrade all of our 7.2 machines ..

Re:Slashdot grammer!

[Xpilot]

Then why does everyone keep bashing slashdot about it then? BTW, you missed the "too".

Mr. Pedantic

[dmaxwell]

Actually those are the testing distros which in time became stables except for Sarge that is. unstable is ALWAY sid, the kid who breaks things.

Too bad it's factually inaccurate in 100s of plac

[tomhudson]

Too bad it's factually inaccurate in 100s of places

Doesn't really matter, they're slashdotted. Their php script reports back a mysql error - too many connections - guess someone should tell them to set "FATALS_TO_BROWSER" to false.

Besides, people will d/l it and make their own decisions.

Regards, Tom

The best line from the entire review...

[knewman_1971]

"And please don't tell me to dive in to the code and fix it, I am not a device driver programmer, neither I want to be one. I am a user when it comes to Linux and I expect things to work as nicely as they do on Windows XP and MacOSX"

Mod me down as flamebait, call me a troll, do your worst. But...

I've been saying this for a long time. If you want to keep Linux small, and only accessible to the enlightened (read that as "Lucky enough to know how to code, or content to run no exotic new hardware) few, then ignore that statement.

Wanna play in the business world? Read this article, and understand why she's dead-on with her complaints.

XP, for all that it's produced by Microsoft and has security holes, DRM issues, and privacy problems, works out of the box. It has been rock solid in EVERY implementation I've done. I can give my Mom a copy of XP, and she can install it and run it. She won't have to worry about having java support, or plugins. I will not have a call from her in the middle of the day complaining that she can't install an application because she hasn't met her dependencies. This is the "Mom-Test (tm)", and XP passes.

Just because I don't run it, doesn't mean that I don't respect it.

Re:The best line from the entire review...

[fatboy]

I can give my Mom a copy of XP, and she can install it and run it.

That's BullShit (TM) and you know it. Yea, she might get it to boot, but she can forget about having a network connection and more than 256 colors.

Re:The best line from the entire review...

[FooBarWidget]

> I can give my Mom a copy of XP, and she can
> install it and run it

Look, I will believe that she can run XP. But she can install XP? Oh please, NO OS is easy enough for newbies to install, and that includes any version of Windows!

Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hope!

[GauteL]

Check out Freshrpms. There are already lots of packages available for Psyche (Red Hat 8.0), and most of them are for multimedia. They are even apt-getable through apt-rpm.

This should fix most if not all problems with Red Hat and multimedia.

Re:Check your mirrors...

[FyRE666]

Ssh! When you find a nice fast mirror, for god's sake don't tell everyone about it on Slashdot!!!

I'm still waiting for my favourite little known one to open its doors. It always maxes out my adsl line no matter when I go there! No, I'm not telling ;-)

Never had mplayer, anyway

[0x0d0a]

Has RH ever shipped with a built in media player?

Anyway, point is that mplayer wins hands down as the best media player, and RH doesn't package it (and the mplayer guys strongly discourage binary packages, anyway)...so I always just download and install the thing. Not exactly that much pain.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE-Galeon

[Telex4]

I'd assume because Galeon is developed more slowly than Mozilla... you have to wait for them to update things, after a new version of Mozilla is out. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but they wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:install 8.0 for a new server installation?

[abdulwahid]

is there a compelling reason to install 8.0 instead of 7.3?

For a server install I wouldn't bother. Usually what happens when any new distro comes out there are a flurry of bugs/security issues noticed in the first few weeks and loads of patches released. This is a natural process due to suddenly having a much wider test base that the Redhat 8 beta had. Also, since this is a new major version the are likely to be even more problems. Redhat 7.3 is stable and as long as you have applied all the updates it is adequately secure. I can't see that there is anything in 8.0 that is desperately needed for a server install. I would wait for the storm to calm and then take a look at it. Just my two pence worth.

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:Usability

[Hobophile]

It's not all about what kde / gnome has done wrong to make life a living hell for new users

Come on people, try and have a little freakin perspective here. "Life a living hell for new users"? Yeah, sure. Somehow I don't think this Red Hat build would've made it out of Quality Assurance if this were the case. I can picture it now:

Project Lead: So, what do our testers in QA think of Red Hat 8.0?

QA Manager: Oh, it's great! They love the ease of installation, the sexy new themes, the way it's easy to find the program they are looking for, whether it be a web browser or a word processor.

Project Lead: Any complaints?

QA Manager: Well, ordinarily I wouldn't bring this up, but since you asked, 99 out of 100 testers say the minor alterations to KDE, such as making the slipshod KOffice suite harder to launch so they can marvel over what a terrible job of opening Word documents it does, and changing a couple About boxes they have never opened, have made their life a living hell. Never mind that this is just a day job, no sir -- it's hell for them 24/7 and no getting past that. Most say they can no longer sleep at night, as their dreams are haunted by emaciated KDE developers crying out in anguish. One claimed his dog bolted from his house, never to be seen again, after Mozilla came up instead of Konqueror. Another got into a terrible accident because he was so preoccupied with guilt over his part in butchering KDE.

Project Lead: Oh that's terrible! We must not release this distro into the world! Quick, let's start over. I hear Slackware and Gentoo are doing great things on the ease of use front.

QA Manager: Yes sir! Our focus groups have reported that secretaries and housewives everywhere wish their computing experience included more compiling software for a 0.00001% increase in speed and less out-of-the-box functionality. Not that we could really go so far as to call Red Hat 8.0 "functional" with so many life-is-a-living-hell bugs plaguing it.

... get real.

Re:Business desktop?

[Rick_T]

> Linux would be making serious headway onto the
> desktops of corporate machines (and greater
> penetration into the consumer market) if the Wine
> project would mature to the point that you could
> run any Windows app flawlessly on your Linux
> machine.

That won't happen - EVER. You can't even do that with different versions of *WINDOWS*, after all. Now it's true that most Windows apps (depending on what niche you use your machine for) will usually still run when you upgrade windows, not all will. And Microsoft has all the documentation and source code for ALL versions of Windows!

> Barring that, if there were even a collection of
> native Linux apps that could read and write
> perfectly to the MS Office document formats
> (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ACCESS, VISIO,
> PUBLISHER, etc), Linux would see a major boom.

Again, that's another impossible task - for exactly the same reasons as above. Even different versions of Microsoft Office don't get everything right when opening documents created in an older version. How do you expect Star/Open Office (for example) to read and write "perfectly" to Microsoft Office format when Office itself can't. (Heck, we sometimes have trouble here sharing documents created by the same office version, but that's another story ... :) )

> Ready for the "business desktop"? I don't think
> so.

By your definition, only Microsoft has a chance to be "ready for the business desktop", and its chances aren't so good. :)

But back to Red Hat 8. If the screenshots are any indication, it looks like I'm putting this one on my laptop. The font stuff looks particularly nice. Has Open Office in RH 8 been linked with the system's font libraries (so antialiasing looks nice)?

Audio distributions

[Chazmati]

Have you seen Agnula, the GNU/Linux audio distribution that's in development?

Or Planet CCRMA?

Possible reason why KDE unhappy

[ChrisWong]

Here's a comment I made on another list:

I doubt if the changing of the themes and such was the problem. I would not lose any sleep over single vs double-click or a few icons and bitmaps. This would not justify Bero quitting and claiming that KDE was "crippled". Part of the real problem, ironically, is that the changes Red Hat made ARE merely skin-deep. This is exactly what the KDE project is not.

A perceptive Slashdotter earlier saw that the problem was not in the superficial reskinning, but in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.

Red Hat has in effect substituted other apps for every major KDE app. The KDE apps are not gone, but they are less visible. This means that a typical Red Hat user will install "KDE" and never run a single significant KDE application. What you get is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps stitched together by superficial skinning, but not quite fitting together. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?

For pros, the best-of-breed approach is the status quo. IMHO, a beginner need not start this way. The default KDE apps may simply be good enough, with the common UI and infrastructure compensating for the individual weakness. Sure, a deliberate decision can be made to pick a better app, now or later. But this should be done with the concious knowledge that this goes "off the KDE ranch", that the various integration, uniformity and usability improvements of KDE will not apply. Starting off a beginner with a best-of-breed approach leaves him with the usual Frankenstein collection of disintegrated apps, all unalike. I.e., this is the status quo that KDE was supposed to fix. Trouble is, Red Hat will not let KDE be KDE.

Re:Possible reason why KDE unhappy

[JoeBuck]

But Red Hat has made the correct decision in picking and choosing the best apps, even if this harms integration. It says it is attacking the "business desktop" market. It can offer its customers Koffice, or the usual Gnome/Gtk apps Abiword and Gnumeric, or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is neither KDE nor Gnome, but it's the only free suite that does a reasonably reliable job of importing and exporting MS Office apps, meaning that it is the only suite suitable for the business user.

Similarly, while Konqueror does a great job of rendering documents that were correctly written according to the specs from W3C, it does a much poorer job than Mozilla of dealing with the real Web. Since business users frequently need to access web sites with broken HTML to get their work done, Konqueror does not yet cut it, and the inconsistencies in the Mozilla GUI vs the KDE desktop will only be a mild annoyance compared to the annoyance of not being able to work at all.

Using a pure KDE suite would work fine if it is mandated that everyone in your organization must use it and no one is allowed to send or receive a document from or to the outside world.

Re:Possible reason why KDE unhappy

[steveha]

A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior.

That's cool. The problem is that KDE isn't done, and Red Hat needs something to ship right now.

The KOffice stuff doesn't work as well as OpenOffice yet. Mozilla views more web pages than Konqueror. Evolution is a lot better for a business user (especially one already used to Outlook) than anything else.

Maybe in two years KDE will have all the pieces in place, and a 100% KDE solution will work for business users. Meanwhile, Red Hat did what they had to do right now.

steveha

XP easy to install?

[0x0d0a]

Your mother is comfortable *installing* XP, or is this just hyperbole?

Linux really isn't hard to install any more, at least to the point of getting it up and running. I'd call the installation process on at least RH simpler than the Windows procedure.

That being said, configuring stuff not-out-of-box is where things get ugly. It's damn easy for an end user to just get a new video card, download their InstallShield program, and use it. And to *uninstall*, simple as that may seem.

Software packaged by your distro "just works" and at least with RPM is really easy to install and uninstall. However, a lot of drivers are not packaged in said manner. Sometimes you can't get a driver to compile, or instructions are written for another distro. Got a laptop with a wireless card, or an Nvidia card, or a weird USB device? If it works in Linux, the install procedure is not necessarily trivial.

A few other things that are nasty include:

* Networking. i swear to God that there's either a bug in the Linux kernel or in RH's networking scripts since time immemorable, since *every* system I've ever used will sometimes, despite the fact that the routing tables are correct, refuse to properly route information. I can pretty consistently get this on a wide variety of RH's distros by running /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart and changing settings periodically. Of course, everything works beautifully after a cold boot...just not after restarting the network. I've seen this since at least the early 6.0 days, and up through 7.3.

* Windows has ZoneAlarm. Linux has the amazingly powerful iptables, with *no* really good, really solid front ends (though lots of half-finished freshmeat projects). If you want a personal firewall, Linux can give you an incredible amount of power...*if* you're willing to fight with iptables for a few days.

* Linux has *no* fully working, reliable ICQ program. This is an embarrassment. It isn't really Linux authors' fault -- trying to reverse engineer ICQ is not trivial -- but if I try to send a Windows user a file and can't, the only thing they learn is "Linux can't do IM properly". Yes, I know about Jabber -- which no one uses.

* Linux has, AFAIK, *no* finished, fully featured 3d modelling programs. Someone who likes to dabble with 3d work can run out grab lots of low end 3d modelers on Windows. There are *tons* of Pov front ends, none of which begin to compare to fully blown Windows modelling programs. Oh, and I'm not talking about multi-thousand dollar movie studio packages -- I mean stuff that a home user could use.

* Linux has *no* finished, fully featured vector graphics programs. Yes, lots of projects underway like sodipodi, sketch, kontour...and none of them are remotely usable for a real life production artist.

Re:XP easy to install?

[0x0d0a]

I should clarify: I see this with users on an Ethernet a few feet away. It's not a firewall issue. :-)

Re:XP easy to install?

[0x0d0a]

I've done that already.

Licq can message fairly reliably...just not transfer files.

Aside from that, trying to get everyone to flip a setting in their preferences so that they can "talk to Linux computers" still doesn't look that great.

Re:XP easy to install?

[0x0d0a]

I've tried with 1.2.0a and CVS over a period of time. It seems to work with older clients, just not new ones.

I'm not saying that it's the fault of the licq coders, or that Mirabilis is innocent. I'm just saying that when I have to resort to workarounds (like FTP) to get files to a Windows user, it gives them a pretty negative impression of Linux.

And AIM doing it doesn't help either...

Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop

[DJ_Goldfingerz]

I'm kind of surprise no one has mentionned this before, especially with the number of sys admins reading this site.

For awhile now, I've seen lots of people saying they think this distro will make it to the desktop seen, and now RedHat 8.0 is aiming the "Business Desktop". I find it hard to believe that RedHat will accomplish that anytime soon.

I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.

For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.

But I don't see how that's going to happen. I've done lots of research on my part to try and find an ERP solution for my company that can run on linux. But I haven't found anything. Whether it be an OSS or proprietary solution, client-base or web base soltuion, I wasn't able to find anything with the power of SAP or any of these ERPs to run my company's Information System.

If you do know of an application, let me know!

Re:Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop

[tjwhaynes]

I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.

For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.

I'm inclined to agree with you - in order for the linux desktop to really make it in the business workplace, there need to be Linux clients for the major ERP applications. Now if you have total control over your own workplace machine and Lotus Notes is your only sticking point against moving to Linux, then format that harddrive now. Lotus Notes runs really very well on Wine these days, and while the performance isn't quite as snappy as I would like, it's certainly good enough even on an old cranky PII400.

I live in hope that we might see a Lotus Notes client make it out into the wild in some shape or form. I think Lotus might be surprised at how many development shops would welcome the flexibility to run Lotus Notes on a Unix-like platform rather than being limited to Windows platforms only.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop

[Micah]

Have you seen GNU Enterprise? It is aiming to fill that market segment. Granted, it's probably a couple years away from being a serious competitor, but it IS being used in some businesses TODAY.

I also believe the big ERP/CRM people will put out Linux clients at some point. A lot of businesses are dying to dump Microsoft. Oracle would certainly like to help them do that. SAP also has some Linux support on the server, so they're probably open to the idea. We'll just have to wait and see.

Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE-Galeon

[n3bulous]

How scary is that, something developed more slowly than Mozilla.

A fair review

[bogie]

First off let me say 1) don't usually like Eugina or her opinions and 2) I'm a big RedHat backer.

That said the review seemed pretty fair to me. She's write in saying multiple menus or counterproductive. I mean either include an app under the main area or don't include it. There should NOT be duplicate subcategories on the menu. Can you imagine if Windows XP shipped with the Acessories menu listed twice?

Second, regarding multimedia. If its multimedia abilities are as castrated as she's says, that's a big negative against RedHat 8.0. I still can't believe and MP3 player isn't included. As if that lets them off the hook for years of including an MP3 in every RedHat release?! Now Out of the Box multimedia is broken, which won't stop me, but will stop the average user who has never used linux before. There should dam well be a single button you click that restores MP3 ability. Making a user try to figure out how to get MP3 back into XMMS is NOT user friendly.

Lastly while obvisouly most people are not running at the resolutions mentioned in the article, having something as basic as being able to change your refresh rate ala Corel linux should be standard by now. It actually quite pathetic that its not.

Anyway, I'm downloading it now so we'll see how it goes. The one thing I am looking forward to is decent fonts for once. If they get that right I can probably forgive the other things.

Re:Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hop

[Jagasian]

I am new to Red Hat and apt-rpm. I used to run Debian, and "dist-upgrade"ing always worked with Debian. Can I assume the same thing with apt-rpm? I am running RH7.3 and want to dist-upgrade to RH8.0. Anything I should know before I try to do so?

Great fonts!

[abischof]

I'm pleased that the fonts have been tweaked:

Fixes to QT to improve font rendering and have apparently already been included in the upcoming QT 3.1

They look so nice that I may be tempted to switch to Red Hat for that reason alone. Or, do any other (upcoming) distributions support such font improvements?

Re:Why 386 instead of 586?

[ajs]

You should be able to do floppy bootstrap install, still. You will have to go looking at the "images" directory on the CD. Of course, you'll still need a) a system with both CD and floppy in order to write the floppies to boot from and b) an IDE-CD controler to get the OS from once the floppy has booted. In theory, you can still do an NFS install off of floppy, but I'm out of my depth there, since it's been 5 years since I did that, and it was Slackware.

two points

[MSG]

I sent Eugenia a letter that contained (among a few less significant others) these two points, which are probably worth pointing out here, too:

For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn't cut it

This is a problem in A driver for A video card. It is not an issue with
X, or really even XFree86. NVidia's own drivers were also unable to
probe the correct DAC from the card. NVidia is responsible for
addressing this issue.

After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate
I wanted, X would crash.

Again, this is NVidia's responsibility to fix. They distribute a driver
which is, in part, binary-only. The binary portion of this driver was
compiled with an earlier compiler, and is not compatible with the kernel
compiled by gcc 3.2. NVidia was informed of this situation by Red Hat,
and their response was to release a driver that had the information
identifying the compiler stripped out, so that the Red Hat tools could
not warn users that the binary wasn't compatible.

This behavior is extremely irresponsible, and NVidia needs to address it
properly.

Re:two points

[The Bungi]

This behavior is extremely irresponsible, and NVidia needs to address it properly.

And your attitude is precisely the reason they're not about to be bothered to "address" the problem.

Re:Business desktop?

[Rick_T]

> I remember Mandrake 7.2 bragging about having 11
> different GUIs. I don't think the typical desktop
> user wants 11 different GUIs.

Nor do I. Luckily, most of the desktop work is down to two majority desktops these days. As long as I can run stuff from both and have things like the clipboard work, I won't complain much. But neither desktop environment is perfect, and I'm glad that people still see the need to work on both.

> I think it would make more sense to improve
> Linux's ability to run MS-Windows applications,
> or access windows documents. Rather than
> forever tinkering with dozens of different
> GUIs.

While I agree to an extent (I'd like a Wine that runs Quicken a little better), I'd much rather deal with native Linux apps than bastardized Windows ones. The Linux apps - when they exist - just work better. I'd love a version of Quicken that ran on Linux with no futzing around with wine! (Hear that, Intuit? You want me to ever upgrade past Quicken 98, you port Quicken to Linux. Otherwise, no $oup for you. :) )

As far as accessing Office documents, Open Office at least has halfway decent filters. They aren't perfect, mind you, but they're better than some give them credit for. (Some of the errors in opening Word docs, for example, can be reproduced in Word simply by changing your printer driver. This caused me no end of grief with my thesis, which had to be done in Word.)

The other side of the coin is this - these KDE and Gnome developers probably like to work on what they're working on. If you want better filters, you might consider making it worth their while to write better filters. ;)

Re:The 2 best distros

[eno2001]

Hmmm... Before you misread me as another MS shill, I will state up front that I am a big Linux supporter/user. All my systems at home run Linux only. And all of them are pretty much built by me from the ground up with custom compiled kernels and apps. But, I've been using XP at work and on my laptop for the past month. I have to say, regretfully, that MS got a LOT of things right in this version of Windows.

My laptop is a Compaq Armada D500 (PIII 600/w 128Megs of RAM). The system seems to run a lot faster under XP than it did under RedHat 7.2 or SuSE 8.0. Even compared to when I had a custom compiled kernel and apps on it. The wireless PCMCIA worked with no need to grab drivers (my Windows 2000 experience on this laptop) or recompile anything. All apps load quickly. The suspend feature works exactly as expected. The environment is much more organized and task oriented. Etc... The bottom line is that Linux distro makers can't rest on the old laurels (Linux is more stable, secure, you can tweak the code, etc...) and ignore the MS camp. Take a look at what Windows is today. I mean a REAL look. Most of today's Linux distro's are great alternatives to Windows 2k, but they leave something to be desired when compared with Win XP.

I have been forcing myself to use XP here at work for the past month and it really does blow most Linux distros away in terms of a basic work environment. The only problem I've had so far is that I can't get under the hood and tweak as much, but I haven't found that there is a need to either...

As far as your experience goes, what make/model of laptop were you trying to install Windows XP on? That could be the key to understanding why it didn't work.

I still won't use it at home, not because it isn't as good as Linux, but because I can't afford it and the licensing sucks. Joe User doesn't think that way though...

MP3 support... why?

[FooBarWidget]

I don't know why she's complaining about lack of MP3 support. Do corporate desktop users actually use MP3 for other reasons than download illegal music from P2P networks? Is there any reason why they can't use Ogg Vorbis instead?

Why Free Software UI tends to suck

[Ilan Volow]

Matthew Thomas (who does a lot of UI stuff for Mozilla) has written two really good articles that largely answer your question)

Why free software usability tends to suck
Why free software usability tends to suck even more

To address a few things mentioned in your post:

Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license

Because Free Software is currently Freedom As A Programmer Envisions It. As the Free Software concept was nutured by Richard M. Stallman, a programmer, this is not surprising. Freedom As An End User Envisions In (also known as The Freedom To Get Stuff Done) has never really been considered by the Free Software community to be a Valid Freedom.

Funny you should mention, I'm currently drawing up a public license that enforces usability and goes after the people who've kept linux so very unusable.

The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world.

I commonly hear this phrase "We've gotten so far on the server, it's only a matter of time before get to the desktop." Unfortunately, this statement makes the assumption that the same abilities, values, and methodologies that lead to success on the server do the same for the desktop. Linux has been doing so well on the server because people in the linux community were really good at doing server stuff. Unfortunately these people were the most absolute worst people you could have ever sent to do desktop stuff. 30 years of anti-newbie RTFM baggage, command-line junkihood, and having a userbase that entirely consists of programmers and sysadmins does not behoove the creation of high quality user interfaces. In contrast, the mac developer community has for 17 years put very strong values on consistancy and non-geeks being able to use the software. That's why they've been able to succeed on the unix desktop in 3 years where linux has failed for the last 7-8.

Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits?

It's already been tried, and has been tried by people with very strong usability/HCI backgrounds. The response they generally get from programmers is "stop whining. If you want to fix something, you should learn how to code". Or sometimes you'll hear "Don't complain about what you get for free". Or "That's what you want, that's not what I want. That's just your opinion."

Or if a usability person criticizes a UI in front of a kernel hacker, the kernel hacker might say "I can't believe that people actually get paid to criticize the work of others" (true story).

When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license

First of all, you have to be pro-active about creating good user interfaces. Users generally do not actively complain about specific application interfaces unless the interfaces are truly, truly, horrible. They will usually passively complain, trying to find execuses to use the program less, or unconsciously creating some workaround, or saying "I hate computers" around the watercooler. You won't get active feedback very often from users, so you need to actively watch them using your UI. So often what makes a UI unbearable is a bunch of little, annoying things that add up to one cumulative bad user experience. To catch those little things, you really have to watch the person using the interfaces. You should also do research ahead of time to learn (before you design the UI) to learn what the most common annoyances are. Unfortunately, most Free Software UI's are cranked out and *then* people try to do active damage control. Much like the world of commercial software, actually.

Another problem with your suggestion is that most of the current userbase for Free Software/OSS are the geeks who've been so clueless about good UI (and some of whom who think that HCI is a load of bull). These people adapt very, very well to badly designed UI's, often priding themselves on doing just that. They often don't take notice of the little, annoying things and are often not confused by ambiguous widget layouts or jargon-laden wording. When you consider these facts, it's not surpising why StarOffice gets such glowing reviews from the geek community. Assuming you manage to find a geek who gives you feedback about the UI, chances are he's not going to a suggestion that jives with all of what we've learned about HCI in the last 20 years. Just because you get feedback doesn't necessarily mean its usable feedback.

Hope I've answered a few of your questions.

Re:What about the other bits?

[rhavyn]

The OOo package is really nice, and both GNU and X emacs are included although they still default to installing only GNU emacs (see the text editors section of the package list to get Xemacs instead).

Linux just gets better - just as Windows had to

[aksansai]

The Linux-based distributions have been under constant development ever since Linux became a popular operating system to actually run and support (hardware and software). To completely discredit the offerings of Linux as an everyday operating system is only fair if you exclude the fact that all other operating systems have all been in a state of flux to develop an easy to install and use approach for the common user.

Windows has had many years to garner the market share and see trends in development to adequately support their users. With this comes innovations such as the driver management system, streamlined interface, overall stability, self-maintaining (semi), and a united Win32 SDK. Through these innovations comes revenue - with revenue comes research and development.

These features are taken for granted considering they are relatively "recent" or modern innovations, even in the Windows world. The rock solid reputation Windows has is as a result of many releases - much feedback (largely from the corporate space). The driver model used in the NT-based Windows releases was pretty good in Windows 2000, but is considered even better in Windows XP because it comes with so many drivers pre-installed. No one would have ventured to make the claim with regards to stability and flexibility with Windows NT 4 and, God forbid, Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.x. Apple touted its MacOS as a vastly superior model to Windows - Microsoft simply learned to put the "good stuff" ("lessons learned" from other operating system offerings) in with its own product and, voila!, we have stable (for the most part), easy to install and use, and widely support Windows releases. Microsoft may not be saintly in its operations - but in a business sense, it is extremely smart to give people something to suckle on - easy to take and get used to. Believe it or not, it is what the majority of bipeds want.

Software innovations come about from much trial and error. Linux is breaking out of the stages of its infancy - catering only to those willing to take the dare and challenge of migrating from a Windows world to a UNIX world. But times are changing, and Linux is changing with it. People who can describe the average Linux distribution in 1995 will tell you that hardware support was hit or miss - and if it was a hit, it often only was a partial (never a bulls-eye).

Personally, I feel that Linux has made HUGE strides towards that perfect operating system for any niche. If you consider how long it took Microsoft's Windows line to fully mature - Linux is ahead of the game. Businesses will just need more time to listen to feedback and implement those features that people can suckle on - and using Microsoft and Apple as references with regards to their own products is a great start - they obviously figured something out to appease the masses.

Members of the open source community (users, developers, and companies) need to pay close attention to the desires of the community as a whole. Many of the projects that make up Linux (and other open source operating system offerings) have the ability to receive feedback to make the project better. Griping is one thing - channelling the gripe to the write email address is better for the whole. The applications that make up Linux thrive on contributions (ideas, source code, and comments [good/bad]). The more feedback - the better the product.

The capabilities in Linux are there - the opportunities for Linux just need to be taken advantage of - users, developers, and companies alike.

One from the Boston Globe

[hondo77]

Hiawatha Bray, writing for The Boston Globe, has posted his review. It starts off as a comparison to OS X and touches a bit on Linux's problems in the desktop market.

SIR

[Gendou]

Are you Trollaxor??

Re:SIR

[Gendou]

He's not really in prison. YHBT. He's currently in Ohio being a fuckslave to a certain closet-dominatrix knows as Esther Sassaman.

Re:Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hop

[GauteL]

I have upgraded from Red Hat 7.2 to 7.3 with apt-rpm. This worked flawlessly. I have no idea wether or not RH7.3 to RH 8.0 will work as flawlessly.

Besides, dist-upgrading hasn't always worked that fine with Debian if you count unstable ;-).

Re:Resolution..

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Linux naming convention is crap, inherited from unix. "vi" is a text editor. Perhaps it could have been called -duh- "edit"... no, I don't need the history lesson, it's just an example.

I don't give a damn if you don't need the history lesson. At the time vi was made, there was ALREADY an editor named -duh- "edit". So Bill Joy needed something else. Since it was a "Visual editor", he named it "vi". It's been kept at vi for obvious reasons.

Re:odd review

[Amazing Quantum Man]

I also have little sympathy for someone that wants to run 1920x1200 24bit resolution at 90hz. I'm sure we'll ALL have that problem =P

Maybe not, but I'd sure like to get my GeForce2MX to run at 1024x726x24x85Hz

Fast upgrade for 7.3 and NULL Users on DSL

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I've been running NULL for a couple of weeks. Remembered this morning the 8.0 release was today, and did a quick peek online, before deciding that trying to FTP new .iso images would be a time-wasting exercise in frustration - especially in the midst of studies.

I made a jump over to rpmfind.net, to look for an apt-get package, and try my luck this way.

BINGO!

The first hit is a new package, dated yesterday, from FreshRPMs.net.

apt-0.5.4cnc7-fr1

RPM for i386 This includes an /etc/apt/sources.list file for RedHat 8.0.

I ran:
su -c 'rpm -ivh apt-0.5.4cnc7-fr1.rpm'
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

I'm about 40% done now. I guess I'll run apt-get dist_upgrade after this, but I'm not sure if this does anything special with "held-back" packages, as it does on Debian.

Here's an output listing:

Get :107 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os libgnomeui-devel 2.0.3-3 [399kB]
Get:108 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os eel2-devel 2.0.6-1 [45.2kB]
Get:109 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os eel2 2.0.6-1 [335kB]
Get:110 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os emacs 21.2-18 [11.4MB]
Get:111 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os scrollkeeper 0.3.10-7 [220kB]
Get:112 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla-nspr 35:1.0.1-24 [114kB]
Get:113 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla 35:1.0.1-24 [10.7MB]
Get:114 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla-mail 35:1.0.1-24 [2118kB]
Get:115 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla-chat 35:1.0.1-24 [108kB]
Get:116 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla-nss 35:1.0.1-24 [725kB]
Get:117 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os mozilla-psm 35:1.0.1-24 [369kB]
Get:118 http://apt.freshrpms.net redhat/8.0/en/i386/os openoffice 1.0.1-8 [30.1MB] 39% [118 openoffice 29424534/30.1MB 97%]

Re:Fast upgrade for 7.3 and NULL Users on DSL

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Oh, yeah....

Make sure you have enough space on your /var partition!

:-)This'll need to be about 700 MB free, typically. You'll want even more there, if your still spooling print, mail, etc...

You can reclaim this space if you don't want to keep your packages around with

apt-get clean

Re:Fast upgrade for 7.3 and NULL Users on DSL

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

O.K.....

Posting from the upgraded system! A minor caveat, the glibc RPM needs to be replaced, which means a dependancy in apt-get upgrade barfs.

I took my chances, and ran (as root) apt-get -o apt::force-loopbreak=true dist-upgrade.

This will run rpm -e on glibc, before installing the new rpms with -Uvh. Not for the squeamish, or those who don't no how to repair their distro from alternate boot media! Worked for me...;-)

Alternatively, you could run rpm -Uvh /var/cache/apt/packages/ packagename first. This should allow a less-risky upgrade for the rest,via regular ol' apt.

Re:Fast upgrade for 7.3 and NULL Users on DSL

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

...And don't forget to run lilo, before you reboot!

Re:I don't understand - openssl 0.9.6b not upgrade

[Hitokage_Nishino]

Redhat patched their version of 0.9.6b to cover that exploit months ago. It's not the same thing as stock 0.9.6b.

Re:Resolution..

[scrytch]

I don't give a damn

Full stop, that sums it up pretty well. If you really don't give a damn, don't whine when big corps and governments choose Windows.

Re:The 2 best distros

[eno2001]

Here... here's a little troll snack: Don't let your inability to learn newer, streamlined interfaces obscure your judgement of an improved OS. Windows XP Pro is easier to install, use and configure than Windows 2K. It's too bad that it's not fair to consumers and has DRM all over it. Linux distros will have a little catch up to do again. But... this is a constant state in the OS market (the software industry overall). One side is always slightly ahead of the other in some way. Linux still has stability and security, but MS will catch up there too. That's why distro makers should focus on end user things like usability, eye-candy, "geewhiz" stuff, etc... Who can refute that there is a need for something like the stateful sessions that Windows XP has in the Linux world? Go back under your bridge now troll.

Re:Good points. Here's a few more.

[0x0d0a]

Yes, but there's another good reason to use -O3. Trying to optimize C across function boundaries is extremely limiting. If you can inline a function, you can do far better optimization.

Re:two points-OSS drivers

[MSG]

Should I file this under "reason not to use binary drivers?", or "why drivers should be open source?"?

Consider filing it under reasons not to buy NVidia cards.

Re:RedHat Sucks!!

[FooBarWidget]

cat you_message | sed 's/RedHat/Windows/'

Now that looks much better.

What, all of two days behind?

[cduffy]

Seriously -- the time delay between when a release of Mozilla comes out and when Galeon supports it is practically nonexistant, particularly when the Mozilla API embedding API has stabilized (which was what the 1.0 release was all about, remember?). I've been using Galeon for quite some time, and I haven't seen more than a two day lag between when an updated Mozilla package becomes available for Debian and the release and packaging of an appropriately built Galeon. Usually, though, since the Galeon CVS tree tracks the Mozilla CVS, there's no delay at all.

Admittedly it was different back when the Mozilla embedding API was in flux -- but today, waiting for Galeon's development to "catch up" sounds like FUD to me.

Re:What, all of two days behind?

[Telex4]

Hm, maybe not then, my mistake :-)

Re:Resolution..

[jmu1]

The argument isn't exactly all that valid mainly because of the longevity of the Unix platform. Think about it: it's been around for more than thirty years. Systems are being developed that are _based_ on that arcane knowledge. Is there room for improvement? Yes. Is there any way to please everyone? No. There are choices, alternatives available. If you don't like something, don't use it, or do something about it. The 'creative critisisms' that get bounced on the net are generally just moaning of end users or people who don't want to spend the five minutes to look at the documentation. I'm quite sorry if I seem callous. It is also a social skill you learn in about third or fourth grade to make do with the society you live in. I haven't forgotten that either. But, I digress.

The point of the matter is: do something. Anything. Don't expect someone else to do it for you. That's what is considered as lazy where I'm from. As for your arguments about the DIY sense... remember, Steve Wozniac built his computer because he didn't like what was out there.

Re:Check your mirrors...

[Billly Gates]

When your downloading, could you be kind enough to post the link here. That is after your done. Thanks. I tried 30 links so far for the last 2 hours and I only got one that was downloading at 500 bytes a second. Every single other one is slashdotted. I have seen slashdotting before but nothing ever like this. This is crazy!

Unrelated

[autechre]

The ability of your Mom to install XP and not call you about dependency problems is not related to Linux's ability to "play in the business world." This is because your mom is not (as things currently stand) going to be hired as a network administrator.

Businesses don't want it to be easy for their employees to install software or operating systems. Employees should not be doing these things; it will only make the job of the admin more difficult.

Linux may not be ready for the "typical" home user, but it has proven a success in business and educational settings, and can be made easier to use than Windows in those cases. I use it at the college newspaper and radio station.

Just to cite one example, the radio station has a playlist computer running Debian Woody. Most DJs do not even care that it is running Debian woody, because it starts up X and mozilla and keeps them running (using daemontools), and they basically use it as a Web kiosk to a custom PHP/SQL playlist application. If this machine were running Windows, I would have to worry about viruses and people installing all sorts of crap on it. I would also have to worry about it crashing, and couldn't use it for the lo-fi MP3 stream or the webcam.

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).

Re:How about speeding up KDE?

[fault0]

I don't think KDE3 is very good for slow hardware personally, although I did run it on my Apple-clone 200mhz PPC-603e for years, and that's much slower than your pII-133 (604~=pII). You might just want to use GNOME or KDE2 on it. It's weird because KDE3 runs much faster on my Athlon 2200+. Go figure.

You might have better luck with KDE3 if you just put the following in your .xinitrc:

kdesktop&
kicker&
exec kwin

That should load up in about twenty seconds.

Defending The UNIX Way

[jmorris42]

UNIX is not just an Operating System, it is a culture. If I (in the US) went to France I wouldn't be stupid enough to bitch and moan about not being able to understand all of that "confusing French crap." I know enough to realize a) it isn't confusing to THEM, b) it won't be confusing to ME once I pick up some of their language and way of doing things and c) they probably think my most of my ways are just as odd.

Expecting the citizens of UNIXland to toss out thirty YEARS of tradition, lore, culture and undisputed success (why else are all these philistines wanting in?) to satisfy some ignorant savages who can't be bothered to pick up a fscking "Dummies" book isn't a very realistic expectation.

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 ?

Re:Slashdot grammer!

[Xpilot]

Even funnier is that nobody knows how to use the word "too" correctly on the internet.

Re:Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hop

[Odinson]

It's good. It's actually very good. Dist-upgrades are effective with little more tweaking than Debian.

Fear the apt. Love the apt. Thank the Debian.

;)

ERP on linux

[crucini]

SAP client and server both run on Linux. The supported client is the Java one. See google.

Is their Linux support lacking? Or is your SAP reseller slow to recommend and support Linux?

Re:Valid URL?

[GauteL]

I missed a dot. It should be apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org instead of apt-rpm-tuxfamily.org.