Red Hat 8.0 For KDE Users (And Newbies)

pantropik writes "OSNews has been giving quite a bit of bandwidth to Red Hat's newest offering lately. This article, which generated quite a bit of controversy in the comments section, detailed a new user's 'frustrations' with the new release. The latest article, written by yours truly, is rather lengthy, explaining such things as adding 3D drivers, missing MP3 functionality, DVD decoding, using APT with RHL, and customizing Red Hat's modified KDE. At the end, I wrap up with my impression -- as a simple user -- of this 'crippled' KDE implementation. Of course, you can also check out this story, which takes a look at RH 8.0 from 'Joe and Jane User's' perspective."

Comments

Crippled?

[jaavaaguru]

I used it at work yesteday and all the functionality that I would normally use in KDE was there. It's only a desktop environment, and that's all I expect of it. The Window Manager works fine, the UI is clean and easy to use (just as it was before RH played with it) and the file manager/web browsing works just fine. The first difference I noted was that the links on the panel went to Mozilla and Evolution instead of Konqueror and KMail. I have my links on RH 7.3 at home set to do that anyway.

Re:Crippled?

[maloi]

And anyway, they don't actually link directly to the browser, but to a utility called "htmlview," which can easily be configured either system-wide or on a per-user basis to use any browser you choose.

Same here

[rash]

I had the same problem as the author of this article about the slowness.

My computer has a xp 1600+ processor, yet gedit for example took 16 seconds to start (time gedit, then close the window as fast as possible).

Some comments in the article suggested that he should change the hostname. It was possible that X didnt get it correctly, then the apps hadto wait for something to time out.

I saw that the hostname when I typed hostname in the terminal was green.rsn. But in the more standard hostname config files it was localhost.localdomain.

So I changed the hostname from green.rsn to localhost.localdomain

Problem solved. Gnome was now very fast.

So if anyone else has speed problems with Redhat 8.0 this might be worth looking into.

Re:Same here

[GypC]

The best solution is to alias whatever hostname you want to localhost. So if you want the hostname to be Cooter.Graw you would put this is your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 localhost Cooter.Graw Cooter

Cooter.Graw and Cooter will then just be aliases for localhost. (You can get rid of localhost.localdomain, but you need the initial localhost there.) So, in your case you would need to change the localhost line to:

127.0.0.1 localhost green.rsn green

MP3 is GPL issue, not Thompson

[forevermore]

Thompson Multimedia, holders of the patent in question, have not unilaterally stated that Linux distributors are exempt from the licensing fees associated with providing MP3 decoding functionality in a non-free product.

It's my understanding that RH removed mp3 functionality because of GNU GPL issues, not Thompson's licensing. Apparently, the GPL prevents including code from patented, non-open/free protocols (I don't know the exact clause, but I'm pretty sure it's true). This means that all of the mp3 players out there are actually in violation of the GPL.

Re:MP3 is GPL issue, not Thompson

[be-fan]

The relevent clauses are 7 and 8 in the GPL Interestingly, the MP3 situation seems a bit fuzzy. They say that if you cannot redistribute the source freely (because of patents), then you cannot distribute the program at all. This does not necessarily mean that a GPL program cannot implemented patented non-open/free protocols. It just means that it can't implement such protocols if they require a license fee per copy, which until recently MP3 did not. Also, since most MP3 players are distributed mainly as source, it is questionable whether they violate the GPL. After all, FreeType includes the bytecode interpreter in the source, but that doesn't violate Apple's patent unless an actual product (binary) is generated with the bytecode interpreter enabled.

read the release notes if you want dvd playback!

[iamwoodyjones]

Man, I skipped them and ended up getting burned bad! They made it where you can't enable Direct Memory access on your dvd player unless you modify /etc/modules.conf and put a options line in it. I banged my head on my desk for hours wondering why I couldn't get my DVD player to work right until I read a note on Ogle's FAQ. So, just a reminder to all you DVD playing cats out there, read the release notes!

DMA is disabled on CD-ROM drives in this release in a different but more reliable way than previously. If you are sure that your CD-ROM drive is capable of IDE DMA, place the following line in the /etc/modules.conf file:

options ide-cd dma=1

Easy way

[Pros_n_Cons]

touch .htmlrc echo "X11BROWSER=/usr/bin/konqueror" >> .htmlrc thats it! now webbrowser is konqueror instead of mozilla, or opera, etc, etc.

Redhat 8 KDE

[iamacat]

That's really all there is to it :-) Some of the damage can be undone, but it seams a lot of effort to bring in dozens of small things that made KDE look so high-class compared to gnome. You can turn on icon scaling but the ones provided by RedHat will not not scale. Gone are the soft sounds when you do things with windows and menus. You don't even get konsole on the default taskbar and you have to hunt for it in an obscure menu! And no easy way to download mp3 plugins for various KDE media players.

The distribution is also buggy in other ways:

- If you have an NVIDIA card with a DVI cable to the flat panel monitor, you will get nothing but blue static when you run the installer. Since there is no way to run anaconda with VESA or good NVIDIA driver and text based installer is not complete, I ended up undusting my old CRT monitor to get through this stage.

- The provided kernel source is broken and you will not be able to build modules (such as NTFS or the working NVIDIA driver), unless you include rhconfig.h into modsetver.h. You also need to run genksyms by hand because Makefile somehow will not get the compiler name right.

- Redhat can't decide on which encoding to use for a locale. Try to login with russian language if you can. Now half of the programs will come up with a bunch of blank squares where text should be and "man ls" is not a pretty site. That's because they switched to UTF8 encoding but most programs and man-pages-ru still use KOI8 encoding. Basically, logging in with russian language is unusable. Even with English login, man still displays garbage instead of dashes. The only cure is alias man='LANG= man'.

The sad thing is, you will probably swallow those things (if you can use English desktop anyway). Part of it is because of smooth fonts, up-to-date packages (it's no fun to download new versions of gcc etc over dialup) and a subdued look of Bluecurve which is pretty easy on the eyes. Mostly though, it's rpmfind.net, since most of the things just work with RedHat without having to install tons of support packages.

This are the same reasons as to boot into XP though. Any suggestions are welcome :-)

Re:This is what is really needed

[FooBarWidget]

You mean something like this?
It's been around for ages, and supported by GTK+ since 1.2, QT since 3.0, and Mozilla since as long as I can remember.

So upgrade to KDE 3.0!