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.

Just great!

[quantaman]

As if it isn't hard enough trying to download the ISOs as it is now everyone who was about to lay off the mirrors just got another reminder 8.0 is out. Thanks a lot /.!

Re:Just great!

[bassman2k]

Try rsync'ing it from a mirror. Find one that supports rsync on http://freshrpms.net/mirrors/psyche.html, then do:

rsync -Pzrv --size-only rsync://(rsync site you found)/(path to site's iso dir)/ .

to download all 6(?) ISOs under the local directory.

For example, to download from mcs.anl.gov, type:

rsync -Pzrv --size-only rsync://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/redhat/redhat/linux/8.0 /en/iso/ .

If the download is interrupted, just enter the command again from the same directory and rsync will continue where it left off. Another advantage is rsync will compress the download on the fly.

(I hope I didn't just start the first rsync DoS from /.!)

An OS for all occasions...

[Coplan]

It sounds to me that the problems are the same problems held Linux-World wide. These are common, and not necessarily specific to Red Hat 8.0. I'm a firm believer in using the best OS for the task.

As the writer wrote:
I was excited to see all the positive, glowing reviews of the latest version of Red Hat Linux. I thought, "finally, I can get away from Windows 98." "It just works" is the mantra. Unfortunately, this was not the case for me.

If the goal is to simply get away from Windows while still maintaining functionality, and you're just a hack user, I would recommend Mac OS X. If you don't have the money to buy new hardware...then I don't know what to tell you.

At this point, Linux is still not going to replace Windows or Mac OS X. And you can't expect REd Hat to solve all the problems in one release. It's a step in the right direction, but this isn't the miracle that Linux needs to attract joe-user.

Don't be so critical.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[gTsiros]

Macos x doesn't run in i386, and it is very limited as far as hardware is concerned (compared with i386 arch).

The "it just works...NOT" issue exists because the hardware existing for i386 is so vast you just cant take everything into consideration. It's a bloody mess.

Now, on the other hand... if you can tell me why STILL after so many years i have to configure my awe64gold by hand...

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[bricriu]

Does OS X run on the guy's Celeron? What about his Toshiba laptop?

I have an old 233 mHz Dell kicking around. It runs the most blessedly stable Win95 install you could hope for, courtesy of 2 intentional drive-wipes right after purchase. It is my general backup computer. I've played around with Linux, and having put Mandrakes 7.2, 8.2, and 9.0, and Lycoris Amethyst on, I can safely say that none of them 'just worked' (so far, only Mandrake 7.2 worked with my sound card without a hassle). I was thinking about RH as the next test distro, but no longer.

Anyway, the point is that OS X seems like a great system. I would love to run it. But I'm not going to go out and drop $1000 on new hardware from Mr. Jobs. I have hardware. I want to get away from running Windows on it for purposes other than games. Linux made much of its name by supporting older systems. It shouldn't be too much to ask that it 'just works' on these systems.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[Gerry Gleason]

It shouldn't be too much to ask that it 'just works' on these systems.

Unfortunately, it is still too much to ask. You can get lucky if it likes your hardware, but as always YMMV. I've got about 20 years in development and admin, and I still find myself scratching my head sometimes when trying to get the system configured, or do some major maintanance task. Mostly it's because I'm tinkering around with the stuff I already have laying around, or trying to save a step or two or do something a bit odd.

The truth is that things aren't that much better with Windows. A friend just got a new XP box and there was no way to repartition and reload XP with the stuff the vendor supplied. Long story short, it took about a week and to visits from another friend that had more Windows related tools and such to get it up. He ended up with a different (and better) video card and a new sound card and running on Windows 2000.

Admin is hard for any OS unless you run exactly the configuration that some vendor has implemented and verified. We even went back to the store considering returning the PC and getting a Mac, but it was beyond his budget. I can't say from personal experience but Macs are probably better, but the vendor closely controls the configuration, don't they.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[brad-x]

I really can't say MacOS X is a more attractive commercial solution than XP is. I hate to buck the anti-Microsoft trend, but the purchase of a G4 that ships with DDR RAM it can't use just to use a closed UNIX variant because it has throbbing default buttons doesn't strike me as a smart plan.

I don't think MacOS X is the best OS for the task.

I think RedHat and other distributions like SuSE et al who are making an effort at user interface usability and flexibility are on the right track. Get adoption first by office users and non-gamers, and as the userbase grows, the applications will come. It is becoming a better OS for the task.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[Pros_n_Cons]

"Linux made much of its name by supporting older systems. It shouldn't be too much to ask that it 'just works' on these systems."--

Linux still DOES work on older systems im on a 233 with 64 of RAM running RedHat 8.0 right now. But im not triple clicking open office and evolution. Im using Opera, wmaker, sylpheed for e-mail. RedHat cant do everything by default thats what CHOICE is about, they provide the user with choices its up to lazy ppl to configure it themselves if they dont like the "default" c'mon ppl what the hell has happened, we use to understand this, now we want a mac os X to tie our shoes for us!

Re: An OS for all occasions...

[pjrc]

If you don't have the money to buy new hardware...then I don't know what to tell you.

But so many others do. Linux (GNU, Gnome, KDE, whatever) has been touted as costing less not only due to the 'free' price, but because it can run on older hardware.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[Benley]

I don't think MacOS X is the best OS for the task.

WHAT TASK? OS X most certainly has a target market, and it's exactly what the parent poster was describing - people who want to use something other than windows, but who aren't patient or knowledgeable enough to get going with Linux.

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[ajs]

I really can't say MacOS X is a more attractive commercial solution than XP [...] a closed UNIX variant

Wowza! I need to start paying attention. Last I knew, Darwin (the OS part of MacOS/X, not to be confused with the proprietary GUI, Aqua) was an open source project! Man, am I behind the times!

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[bricriu]

"Just works" != "Just works speedily." During my Win95 reinstalls, it detected the ethernet card, the video card, the sound card, and ran them all seamlessly. No distro I tried was able to do this, in KDE, in Gnome, or in IceWM. Apparently RH 8.0 isn't going to, either.

Is Linux going to offer me an alternative to Windows that DOESN'T involve me buying new hardware? Because if I do have to buy new hardware, I'll end up getting a Mac with OS X. That's Linux's crossroads -- the question is not "can a Linux install be a replacement for WindowsXP?" (although that'd be nice too)... it needs to start with "can a Linux install be a replacement for Windows 95?"

Re:An OS for all occasions...

[Macka]

You have obviously never used MacOS X in anger.

As someone who has switched from Linux and Windows to MacOS X, I heartily disagree with you.

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

[Lumpy]

woah, excellent doscovery! I'll give it a try on my R&D pc's here... I recently started to revier RH8 for deployment to start upgrading the RH7.3 machines here.... and I dismissed it as gone-horribly-wrong being well over 50% slower than RH7.3

I'll try that this week! Thanks!

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

Slowness

[Vinum]

The comments on OSNews refer to the RH8.0 and KDE combo to be extreamly slow. I wonder why that is? Maybe Redhat screwed up some things with changing KDE around?

Maybe the guy turned up the specicial effects knob all the way? I dunno, either way the guy did use a slow machine in the review (500mhz celeron). But I am typing on a p233 mmx right now running FreeBSD/KDE3.0 and it is incredibly fast. (Except Mozilla basically refuses to run on this machine, waaaayy slow. Mozilla runs slower than the Java apps I run on this machine (IDEA, TCC, etc)).

This is what is really needed

[carlmenezes]

Sorry to say it, but it's high time the KDE - Gnome squabble stopped and both teams started concentrating on a unified desktop.

Consider this : given the fact that both are so refined already, if both worked together, you'd have a UI that easily bypasses anything MS can come up with and Linux becomes a viable desktop for Joe and Jane user (it already is for Joe and Jane techie).

Again, Linux NEEDS a unified desktop. I can't say it more. It may sound sad, but it has to be done.

Re:This is what is really needed

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

Consider this : given the fact that both are so refined already, if both worked together, you'd have a UI that easily bypasses anything MS can come up

I agree - But it would be essential that the two groups have a unified vision and focus as they progressed. Otherwise, the project could easily become bogged down as each group argued feature X versus feature Y, or how the project was deviating from "the way it should be" ...

After all, it is not possible to just "stick products together" like this and come out with a product equal to the sum of its parts.

Re:This is what is really needed

[grumbel]

I kind of agree, but on the other site you can't just take both KDE and Gnome, throw them together and get something out that is nearly double as good as one of the two alone. It would require quite a huge amount of work to bring both closer together and to unify the code base, it would also mean that large parts of code need to be thrown away, since they are redundant. After all you can't force programmers of Free Software to do what would be good, but instead they will do what is fun.

KDE and Gnome should make sure that they are compatible with each other and that things like Drag&Drop work in both directions and as far as I know, both sites already working on such compability things.

Re:This is what is really needed

[carlmenezes]

Another thing :

If you look at how long it has taken Linux to evolve versus how long it has taken MS to evolve Windows, I think everyone will agree that the pace has been faster on the OSS side.

The moment you can get the average joe to move to a free OS like Linux, and the moment you can do it on a large scale, you're also fighting other MS technologies like DRM and other "customer experience enhancing" technologies because they get lower acceptance.

Now, don't flame me yet. This is looking at the long term and unifying KDE and Gnome is one way to really accelarate it. It'll take some time to do it, but if you really look at it, it just might be for the better good.

Re:This is what is really needed

[Sylver Dragon]

Again, Linux NEEDS a unified desktop. I can't say it more. It may sound sad, but it has to be done.

I don't think that is going to help as much as some other features might.
I recently began tinkering with RH7.0, happend to have a copy kicking around. And ran into a huge mess.
My intention is to get it up and running as both a Web and Mail server, its not going to be the most powerful server in the world, but its mostly going to serve only me. Well enough, this is the type of thing *nix OS's are for right? They make good servers, right? Well, I'm not sure yet, I made the mistake of buying a Linksys NIC.
Alright, install hardware, boot machine on CD, install OS with server packages, and... Hmm, not getting a IP address from the DHCP server. Ok, check network settings in linuxconf, looks Ok. Check cable, try NIC in another machine, works there.
After a bit of web searching I noticed that there seems to be a bit of a problem with this generation of card, and the default driver. No problem, there's a new driver out, all I have to do is install it and I'm off to the races. Better yet, its on the driver disk that came with the card.
Ok, copy the driver over to the HD, and try to compile it. (Some gcc -blah -blah -blah command.) Ok, open the man page and try to figure it out (BTW I am not, nor do I have any wish to be a programmer.) After about 15 min. I close the man page and go back to the web. (10 trying to figure out what the hell I was being told, and 5 searching for the asparin bottle.)
Thank God, there are poeple out there with knowledge, who are willing to share. Ok, run the command as I found it on a message board. Hmm, says something is missing. Go back to message board, and look for more info. Ok, got it, this is a common problem too. Get more files, and try to compile those, damn something more is missing. At this point it was 1 in the morning, and I gave up and went to bed, I've not been back to it yet.
The moral of all this is that driver installation in RH seems to be hell if you are unlucky. This is not the way to attract users. Before Linux has any hope of becomeing the mainstream desktop OS, it needs to handle drivers in a better way. I can see 2 things that would have to be done.

1. If a driver is going to have a dependency that may not be in the OS by default, include it with the driver. Sure, it'll bloat the download a bit, but it will save the user from a headache. People like simple things, that's the draw of Windows, simplicity. Consider the last time you updated a driver in Windows, how many dependancies did you have to pull down off the web, do I hear none? This is one area where MS has done a pretty good job, there isn't the need to go running down dependecies, they are just there, and like most users want, "it just works."

2. Click, Click, oohh pretty pictures, hey cool its installed. Yes, its brainless, yes it puts stuff on which you have no clue about, but its what the end user wants. This is what is needed for both programs and drivers, simplicity. Again, this is somthing that MS has exceled at. Though it is partly why people hate Windows, no control, and no clue what is going on. Probably the best thing to do would be to have a "pretty picture" setting as default, and then let those people that want to, switch over to the full control interface. Again, it goes back to what the author of one of the articles said, "it just works". That is what Linux is going to have to acheive if it wants to be the desktop OS of choice for Joe and Jane user.

In closing, as much as I hear about it on slashdot, I don't think that the OSS community really wants to make a desktop for the average user. They want to have thier own "Uber-Desktop" (what is with the German usage anyhow?). They want to live in thier ivory tower and proclaim the rest of the world idiots for not joining them, but at the same time making it impossible for the average user. It reminds me of a time not long past, and an OS that has come and almost gone, DOS. The DOS aficiandos adopted an elietist attitude, and so the average home user bought a Mac. It wasn't until Windows that the basic home user started buying PC's. This is about where Linux is now, its like DOS with Win 3.1 as compared to Mac. Except, in this case its Linux and KDE/Gnome trying to oust Windows. Its not there yet, and won't be without some serious dumbing-down tools built into it. And, from what I have heard from the OSS community, they just aren't interested in doing that, so it will remain an OS for geeks and programmers, and will remain as nothing more that a footnote in computing history.

P.S. Flame away, though I challenge anyone to post a good couter argument.

Re:This is what is really needed

[Darren Winsper]

It's high time people stopped complaining about what people do in their spare time and give away for free.

The only way you'll stop people from working on either desktop is if they wanted to. Because they want to work on their respective systems, they will not switch, they don't want to.

Should we stop developing FreeBSD, NetBSD and all the other free operating systems? I'd say no, because all you're trying to do is create a dictatorship.

Re:This is what is really needed

[FattMattP]

Again, Linux NEEDS a unified desktop.

Linux needs a unified cut and paste first.

And 'select + middle mouse button' doesn't cut it (no pun intended). When I select something doesn't mean that I want to blow away what's in my copy buffer. I might just want to delete it or replace it with what is in my copy buffer.

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!

Re:This is what is really needed

[FooBarWidget]

That's why new users use the *default* desktop. We don't have to limit choice, we just need good defaults.

Re:This is what is really needed

[Arandir]

it's high time the KDE - Gnome squabble stopped and both teams started concentrating on a unified desktop.

If you mean get rid of one or the other, or even merge the two, it ain't going to happen. No way, no how.

If you mean have them be interoperable, then it is already the case. You can run Evolution in the KDE desktop, and KDevelop on the GNOME desktop. Mix and match to your hearts content.

And if you mean you want identical looks, feels, keystrokes and menu orderings, then don't limit it to KDE and GNOME. Xfce, Blackbox, Windowmaker, GNU Emacs, Vim, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Xmms, ad infinitum, need to get on board as well.

I had to spend a bit of time in Windows this morning. You know, Joe and Jane User's operating system. Surprise! There is no consistent look and feel there either! Realplayer doesn't look like Quicktime which doesn't look like Netscape which doesn't look like Outlook which doesn't look like OpenOffice which doesn't look like MSWord which doesn't look like Winamp. Give me a break! If Joe and Jane user can use the inconsistent Windows platform without going nuts, then they can certainly deal with Evolution running under KDE.

Re:This is what is really needed

[Nailer]

It's high time people stopped complaining about what people do in their spare time and give away for free.

Then its also high time those developers stopped telling new users that they provide usable desktops built for real people.

Re:This is what is really needed

[FattMattP]

You mean something like this?

Nope. Not at all. It needs to support every X application. It needs to be fixed in X itself not in some add on library like GTK or QT. There are apps out there that don't use GTK or QT.

Re:This is what is really needed

[FooBarWidget]

You didn't read the document!

It is part of X! If you have read the document then you'll see it applies to every X application!
And how many apps out there don't use GTK+ or QT? VERY little. The vast majority of GUI apps are either GTK+ or QT.

Read the document!

Re:This is what is really needed

[FattMattP]

You didn't read the document!

No, I read the document. If this applies to every X application then I should just be able to fire up one of the proprietary applications that the scientists at my work use and start using Control-X/C/V to cut, copy, and paste. Nope. Doesn't work. So I stand by my last comment. X needs to be fixed. Not at the toolkit level. Every X application needs to support a unified cut and paste that's not brain damaged like the select / middle mouse button that is destructive to the copy buffer and confusing to use.

From reading the document, X offers too many ways to handle cut and paste so different programs and toolkits handle cut and paste different ways. We should pick one way and stick with it. Then disable the ability to use the other methods. Have a daemon that intercepts control-x/c/v and passes the correct cut/copy/paste signals to older applications that are using the non-supported methods. Windows has this consistency. I know that if I need to cut, copy, or paste, the commands are the same in every program. The same goes for the Mac. If Linux is to succeed on the desktop then this consistency needs to be established for every last X-based application that can be run and it needs to be enforced and dealt with in a consistent manner.

And how many apps out there don't use GTK+ or QT? VERY little. The vast majority of GUI apps are either GTK+ or QT.

You're quite wrong. There are far more applications that don't use QT or GTK than applications that do. Maybe in the free software world most apps use GTK or QT, but there are many proprietary and custom applications that don't use those toolkits, instead opting to use something like Motif or something else altogether.

Re:This is what is really needed

[FooBarWidget]

"No, I read the document. If this applies to every X application then I should just be able to fire up one of the proprietary applications that the scientists at my work use and start using Control-X/C/V to cut, copy, and paste. Nope. Doesn't work."

That's because that application is broken! If you truly read the docs, then you *know* that the reason that some applications don't work is because they implement the wrong behavior.
The X selection mechanism is a *specification*, not a magic spell that automatically fixes all clipboard support. Applications have to support it properly.

Now look the other 99% of the applications. Take Gedit and some random KDE 3.0 editor. In gedit, type in "hello", select it, click Copy, switch to your KDE 3.0 editor, click Paste... and it works! Ditto for Gedit and Mozilla.

From reading the document, X offers too many ways to handle cut and paste so different programs and toolkits handle cut and paste different ways.

No, X handles 2 ways. The first way is the most implicit one. The second one, the CLIPBOARD atom, is specifically designed for explicit actions. The difference between those two makes perfect sense, because if all applications support it properly, the user won't even notice that the PRIMARY atom exists.

"You're quite wrong. There are far more applications that don't use QT or GTK than applications that do. Maybe in the free software world most apps use GTK or QT, but there are many proprietary and custom applications that don't use those toolkits,"

Maybe for some companies, but the majority of the Linux desktop users use mostly free software that are included with their distribution.
Are there thousands of commercial Motif apps? Maybe, but I haven't seen them yet.

"instead opting to use something like Motif or something else altogether."

Motif supports the CLIPBOARD atom properly, so there. Open Netscape 4, type something in the URL bar, select the text, rightclick->Copy, open Gedit, and click on Paste. It works.

The proper behavior has been defined for a long time now. If an application doesn't work then it's because the application has broken support, not because the mechanism is broken.

I feel for the writer

[Lumpy]

Yes, Linux is becoming bloatware. there is not one of us who can deny it. A Celeron 500 with 64 meg of ram is more than enough to run an OS, X server, desktop and browser+office suite. Why it doesnt? the only reason is feature bloat.

I just recently tried RH8.0 (I support RH in a corperate environment) and liked how it looks, but am appalled that in order to deploy it I have to replace all the workstations with new just to keep everything feeling right in speed. (WE have aincent P-III 866's here with a paltry 128 meg of ram... I know... I should be killed and eaten for using such old and outdated hardware.)

Redhat 7.3 is the last stage here.. and if Linux desktops in general keep getting feature bloat and exrta slow-down added... I may have to stand up with egg on my face and reccomend that we switch back to Microsoft in a few years.

KDE and Gnome... they need stop all development and focus on getting a 50% speed increase. If they have to cut and slash to do it, then do it. Mozilla needs to do this as well as Open Office.

everyone is sitting behind the excuse that "processors are ultra fast now and ram is cheap." Linux is not the big fish... we must be faster and sleeker than the big fish to survive and overcome.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Coplan]

That brings a whole new perspective for me to the article. I'm kinda spoiled, as I run my computers personally, and I don't use them in a corporate environment.

I agree with you on the efficiency thing. KDE is nice and all, but do we really need another mail checker to nest in the bar?

KDE, Gnome, X -- whoever, should seriously consider your words and put them into actin. Never Mind the big/small fish concept...it just makes sense to have an efficient system anyhow.

How do other distributions compare? Are they more efficient?

Re:I feel for the writer

[bytor4232]

Linux is not getting bloated, some distros are. I use Debian and can fit my entire os and every app I need on one CD. I put a PGI installer, which was trivial to do, and started handing it out. People have been loving it. Not to mention that you can just download a net installer which is alittle over 150 megs and let the installation process download just the packages you want.

Or you can go the http://www.linuxfromscratch.org route and kiss a social life goodbye.

Re:I feel for the writer

[TomorrowPlusX]

Well I hate to be one of those "it works fine for me" types, but... it works fine for me on my p3 700 thinkpad with 256 meg ram. Not a powerhouse, and I tell you, beOS ran much much faster.

For a little reference, seeing BeOS was a sinking ship, I knew I had to find a new development platform. So I tried several distros, before settling down. Redhat, consistently (version 6.2, 7.0 and I think 7.1 or something) was slow as molassas. I tried SuSE, and it hauled a** relatively speaking. So I moved over to SuSE for about a year, before trying slack 8, which became my favorite. Slack made my "meager" p3 run like BeOS used to, and was so well designed, layed out, and documented that I didn't need YaST just to change my default runlevel.

Then, I found gentoo, but frankly gentoo isn't noticeably faster than slack. The only reason I'm sticking with gentoo is that its init system is the most utterly beautiful system I've ever worked with. And, because my work, which required under slack about 20 minutes to build after a "make distclean" builds now in about 7 to 10 minutes, which is a very nice thing.

So, what I'm getting at is that yes, mainstream linux is bloated. Sure. But I'm sure you can either turn off a lot of the nastiness redhat defaults to, or you can install a lighter system.

That's why we have options and competition people. Stop bitching.

Oh, and one more thing -- I do run kde, and on a well tuned system it hauls like a bat out of hell. You don't need to sacrifice functionality for performance. And yes, BeOS was fast, but BeOS didn't do 10% of what Gnome2 or KDE 3 can do ;)

Re:I feel for the writer

[Ektanoor]

Bloatness on Linux is a question of administration and not a distro problem. Distros are for features and for the laziness of building everything nearly from scratch. On Celeron 500 + 64Mb maybe RH 8 will slow down as you may have installed everything you could... On PIII 866 + 128Mb? Well I've just 2 months ago switched to 256 and I don't get where you could have had problems. For a simple office task the machine was ok. However it was hard to work on a destkop and having 3-4 servers working on background for good. Yes, for good, as one of them was no one else than the video broadcaster from mpeg4ip which loads the machine very well.

On what relates to Windows. Do you wanna tell me that you can find a Windows good enough to hang on the configurations you pointed? Even NT had trouble working on the Celeron you pointed out. With only a browser it managed to eat up all memory and permanently require some 20Mb swap.

Or are you talking about the "new" Windows? This new XP crap needs no less than 256 megs to live relatively well on a PIII 900MHz. On that same machine I'm able to use a full-featured Mandrake 9 and have always some 100Mb free for something else, Quake III for example...

Keep the FUD for yourself while you can't switch from Windows Help to man rtfm

Re:I feel for the writer

[Platinum Dragon]

I'll have to be one of those "works great here" types.

PII-266. 224 MB RAM. 6.4 GB HD.

Runs fine.

Balsa starts up fast. Galeon starts up fast. Mozilla starts up fairly fast. The only thing really slow starting up is OpenOffice. Hell, I have less trouble running DivX videos on this than on my folks' Celery 500 with 256 MB RAM.

Got the httpd running. Got named running. Got sshd running. Nautilus sits in the background doing Kosh-knows-what.

Distro? Red Hat 7.3. May go to 8 or Mandrake 9 if I can get my hands on some CDs.

I couldn't imagine running WinXP on anything less than a 600 MHz box with at least 256 MB ram.

But, that's just an anecdote...

Re:I feel for the writer

[iabervon]

As far as I can tell, none of the bloated Linux applications is worthwhile. (The possible exception being Mozilla, and that's just because Netscape 3.0 doesn't really work these days, leaving you without a web browser if you try to avoid all of the bloated software; Mozilla seems to have worked a bit on performance, according to people who have een following it, so they've probably gotten the message already.)

The real advantage to Linux is that, if you think RedHat is too bloated these days, you can still run 7.3, and you'll probably be able to run it without being unable to get security patches for years to come. There aren't forced upgrades to versios which are worse. We're still using RedHat 6.2 at my work, because we haven't seen a compelling reason to switch to anything newer. Stand up and recommend that you leave the damn computers alone and let people get work done with them.

The real issue with feature bloat is that the interface gets more crowded and harder to use. Even though processors are ultra fast and ram is cheap, that's no excuse for making each version more confusing than the previous one.

Re:I feel for the writer

[fobbman]

Feature bloat starts the minute that they include a feature that you don't use. Everything up until that point is great.

The problem is that not everyone wants the same features.

Re:I feel for the writer

[fault0]

> A Celeron 500 with 64 meg of ram is more than enough to run an OS, X server, desktop and browser+office suite.

Sure, Windows98 runs on this hardware very well. You can also run KDE 1.2/Gnome 1.2 on it very well. WindowsXP and KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x would not run with this little RAM or a Celeron 500. Perhaps a p3 or athlon 550, but not a Celeron 500.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Lumpy]

I have to support several W2K boxes on the same type of hardware for the production department.. (Linux CANNOT do video editing... no way no how.. it ain't there and wont be for years... I wish it would be, but there is no demand for it.) and they all run fine on a 866PIII with 128 meg. and they use Open office + Mozilla on it. RH8.0 should be at least 20% faster than W2K on the same hardware... no if's and's or But's.... there is no excuse. Yes, I can get a Slackware distro and hand roll it to fricking scream like a raped ape on that hardware... but I dont want to custom roll a distro for every machine here... and then how do I get Paid support for that? Redhat sells me paid support.. that is 1/2 of the battle in getting in the door past the suits... they will not support my self rolled version.. so in a corperate setting I HAVE to use default RH setups... no choice in the matter. and EVERY corperation on the planet will demand the same.

so Yes you are right, linux is faster and the distro is fat... but guess what... the world doesnt see what it can do.... the world sees what it does out of the box.

Re:I feel for the writer

[afidel]

hmmm if Redhat 8 doesn't feel snappy on those boxes maybe it truely IS bloated. I have a pair of P2-300's with 192 and 256MB of ram running win2k and I almost never have any speed problems. I also have a couple P3-500's running redhat 7.1 and they too feel plenty fast. Guess I should check out 8.0 and see how it performs on one of the P3's.

Re:I feel for the writer

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"This new XP crap needs no less than 256 megs to live relatively well on a PIII 900MHz."

Not by a long shot.
128MB, Celeron 300A@450

Runs great.

Re:I feel for the writer

[rjamestaylor]

I concur. I love Linux and am using it now to write this post, but saying that MS' serious OS offerings are crap is untrue. I'm the CTO of a small pharmaceutical mfg and recently discovered that previous techies put critical processes on Windows 98 desktop computers. Naturally there were problems with mystery failures and downtime--but then Windows 98 isn't a serious operating system. These machines were new circa 1998 (Dell and Gateway desktops) and are slow running Win98. I took two of these machines and upgraded them to Windows 2000 Pro. It was simple, painless and all the hardware, printers, NICs, etc., work as expected. Also, these machines sit by themselves and perform their critical tasks without any downtime as yet. What was unexpected is that the machines are faster with Win2kPro than Win98.

I also upgraded (though MS says it's not possible) my Toshiba 2805-201s from WinME (Aaaaaiiiiieeeee! Help!) to Win2kPro.It, too, runs faster and much, much, oh my goodness, much more stable than WinME (Windows Masochist Edition).

However, right now I'm using my Toshiba with RH 8.0. . .fantastic. PCMCIA Orinoco Silver recognized and configured on the fly, sound working nicely, one apparent problem with APMD (when I pulled the plug the power shut off even though the battery was full; thank goodness for EXT3; no problem starting the machine in battery mode and I have had the guts to pull the plug yet today (but I will after this post). Oh, one note: I can't find the KAPMD application on the menus. No power management at all on the default Bluecurve menus. . .that's disconcerting but I'll look into it. But overall, RH 8 is fast, faster than Win2kPro and WinME on the same hardware. The fonts are generally beautiful, but suck badly with Mozilla and OpenOffice. Konq's fonts are beautiful as usual. Overall, I'm a happy camper. I'd be even happier with the ability to "Map Network Drives" like Windows -- not for me! -- so that my corporate users could possibly make the switch to Linux, too.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Ektanoor]

Tales... I have exactly such a devil... Either you use it for typing small texts or to hang a little on mine sweeper.

Sorry but I'm pretty sure for it as the crap. It couldn't work out a large >3Gb file on a 900MHz. Linux cried wild but ate the stuff.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Ektanoor]

Video editing? I'm speaking about broadcasting and I've been on it for 2 years. And I don't get what you wanna say. Because I have seen both sides - Windows and Linux.

What it does out of the box? So go for Windows... This place is NOT for lazy sysadmins. Believe me 'cause I'm also a security expert and I'm seek of seeing the HELL in the form of badly configured RH's. At least Windows has a good advantage here, security is so great on M$ that I only need to argument - It's Windows so what do you want from it? And sysadmins can continue to blame BG for their problems.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Ektanoor]

???????????????
I have my VERY OLD home box on a new fresh bloat distro and I ain't upgrade for nearly 1,5 years. And I'm well doing on KDE3 + ALL THE BLOAT OUT THERE.

Keep the flame up to you.

Re:I feel for the writer

[bankman]

Sorry, not to offend, but I don't understand your answer: Why should RH8.0 be at least 20% faster than W2K on the same hardware? Especially out-of-the-box?

Did anyone (Redhat themselves even? Where?) claim that it would be? Isn't the reason why people switch to any kind of Linux because it's more flexible and customisable? I.e. instead of having to accept the OS manufacturer's idea of the OS, you can tune it to fit your needs?

I agree with you on how the world "doesnt see what it can do.... the world sees what it does out of the box", but isn't that the reason why we still have administrators around? To keep the machines running as smoothly and fast as possible? A distro maintainer can't possibly foresee what kind of a system any user might need and tune it to fit everybody's needs. What is good for someone might not be good for someone else. It's really that easy and the reason why OS maintainers (RedHat as well as Microsoft for example) provide the user with an easy to set up package that will do most of the things anyone might possibly need, albeit not as fast as possible. If the administrator can't communicate that to management, we have a problem. I give you that the sales brochures and consulting guys promise you a lot more, but who believes them anyway? You? Your boss?

Anyway, I would also like to have a distro that installs the perfect system out-of-the-box, but I know that this will never happen for me. I too, have to live with the crap they sometimes come up with, but like most other people I am happy about the fact that the distros let me do it.

Re:I feel for the writer

[Lumpy]

Please show me one app that is used for video EDITING by professionals that is on linux. I don't see spielberg using linux for the editing.. I don't see pixar using linux for the editing.. and i don't see anything available anywhere for editing except for two very unstable apps ... one called mainactor which is nearly un-useable as it crashes almost all the time and has only 1/5th the abilities of adobe premiere 5.1 and the other which is a complete joke... although I cant remember it's name but it used to be called Broadcast2000.

There is nothing available because there is no demand for it. you know what I want... I want the equilivant of the free video editing software that came free with my el-cheapo Firewire card. I want mpegtools that doesn't take 6 hours and dependancy HELL to compile. but it wont be here for years... because there is no demand for it.

So please tell me what movie studios are using Linux as their editing stations? not their render farm or their effects but for VIDEO EDITING.

or how about giving me a link to ONE video editing app that is stable and ready to be used for linux? just one.. and it can cost over $1000.00

Re:I feel for the writer

[Wdomburg]

>KDE and Gnome... they need stop all development
>and focus on getting a 50% speed increase. If they
>have to cut and slash to do it, then do it.
>Mozilla needs to do this as well as Open Office.

Have you compared Gnome 2.0 against Gnome 1.4? The memory footprint has dropped, there have been speed increases across the board (Nautilus in particular shows massive improvement), and responsiveness is markedly better with double buffering.

Matt

I'm using KDE w/ redhat 8 right now

[npietraniec]

I'm using KDE w/ redhat 8 right now, changing everything around and getting rid of that ugly bluecurve theme wasn't that bad. I'm even using KDM. The only thing that I had a problem with was removing that pam icon from the kde taskbar. I ended up renaming the binary... It's /usr/bin/pam-panel-icon if anyone is interested.

I think creating a common theme isn't a bad idea... The feel isn't my cup of tea though, since I don't like gnome. Changing everything wasn't that hard as long as you're familiar with the basic inner workings of the system

Re:note to newbies

[Raiford]

hmmm ... might want to stick with windows. Two things inconsistent with Linux hacking (1. No free time and 2. a family). Unless of course you are living in their basement.

Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lilo..

[zerofoo]

Bought RH 8.0 Professional expecting to get support people that could actually speak English...no luck there. Four calls to tech support and I've yet to find any tech support person that could spell my email address correctly or understand English.

So I post to the Bug-Grub bug reporter thing....no answers yet.

Funny how other OSes(and their respective boot loaders) have no issues on this hardware....but Grub throws an "Error 28....cannot fit selected item into memory" and lilo just hangs or gives me a "CRC error".

I understand, nothing in the IT industry is perfect, but when I pay for support, I expect to get my problems resolved. (That's a stab at RedHat, not the Grub maintainers.) Other commercial OS vendors are quite responsive...I've even had MS tech support people on the phone for hours on end on a Saturday fixing an Exchange problem!

These bootloaders and Redhat's support system need a lot of work before corporate America commits time and resources to their products.

-ted

Growing pains

[lpret]

I've been hearing some really mixed messages about Red Hat and this can mean only one thing: Red Hat is growing and is poised to be a major player. I know I'm preaching to the choir a little, but I think these differing reviews help to bring Red Hat to the forefront. As the guide for John and Jane user showed, Red Hat 8.0 is going to allow new users an opportunity to jump on the linux wagon because of it's simple setup and use. And the amazing thing is that us nerdz can still micromanage to our heart's content.

I think as a whole community we need to show more support for Red Hat because once people see the advantages of Red Hat, it's not a big jump to find your favorite distro (SuSe for me :-) ) and isn't this what we're wanting to happen?

USENET

[KelsoLundeen]

Ever heard of usenet?

Last I looked the RH ISOs were on nearly every CD group, just waiting to be snagged.

This is off-topic, but lately I'm finding that more and more people have absolutely no idea what usenet is. I mentioned this to one of our new IT guys here -- a so-called "hot-shot" just out of college -- and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T."

Re:USENET

[KelsoLundeen]

Whoops.

I forgot the word "he" in the sentence above.

"... *he* wondered if usenet 'sells DSL'."

*sigh*

Re:USENET

[bsharitt]

and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T."

Well do they? I can't get it from Bellsouth either.

(Note: I'm only pretending to be someone who doesn't know what usenet is. I'm well aware that it's an operating system, not an ISP)

Re:USENET

[Garfunkel]

USENET is not well advertised by providers because it's a huge bandwidth and storage hog. In fact a lot of people aren't able to get USENET at all except through some pay services and Google News which doesn't carry everything (especially binaries) and takes forever to update sometimes.
It's really not surprising people don't know what it is or how to use it. Anyways, much of the functionality is being replaced by web boards and the binary part is being replaced by the multitude of P2P apps.

I just discovered the other day that my provider does have a full feed available for free to it's subscribers, but I sure couldn't find mention of it anywhere in their literature or on the website.

Re:USENET

[fault0]

> This is off-topic, but lately I'm finding that more and more people have absolutely no idea what usenet is. I mentioned this to one of our new IT guys here -- a so-called "hot-shot" just out of college -- and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T

Because increasingly, Usenet servers are not being provided by ISP's. My last two ISP's didn't provide Usenet servers, and I was unwilling to buy access to one. My ISP right now (my college), has a usenet server, but they don't provide much of the good parts of the alt. tree.

And for regular discussion, first mailing lists, and now web boards/forums have replaced parts of USENET (not established ones). I like web forums because you can access them from anywhere with a web browser, and they usually have much more adminning capabilities and posting capabilities than USENET can.

And finally, p2p networks have replaced USENET/ftp for non-hardcore (and some hardcore) leechers.

Re:USENET

[unicron]

Actually, for roughly $20 a month, Giganews is the equivalent of walking through Compusa's software section with a shopping cart and a shotgun.

Re:USENET

[Kashif Shaikh]

This is off-topic, but lately I'm finding that more and more people have absolutely no idea what usenet is. I mentioned this to one of our new IT guys here -- a so-called "hot-shot" just out of college -- and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T."

For fuck's sake, don't tell people about usenet!! In my local broadband area, it used to be the fastest for downloading "stuff"!! I was downloading at 300K/s about 2 years ago...and 200K/s during peak hours.

But people like you tell everyone how great the usenet is...hell I don't even tell my brothers 'cause they'll start leaching mp3s all day long. But 'tis too late...I now tread along on usenet at 100-120K/s, and 60K/s during peak times.

Repeat after me:
- People don't need to know the treasures in usenet
- People don't need to know the treasures in usenet
- People don't need to know the treasures in usenet

If you live in the Toronto/Mississauga/Brampton Area of Ontario, Canada--don't goto usenet. It's just a boring chat network okay? You're better off with your Yahoo's and MSNs...

Re:USENET

[felipeal]

(Note: I'm only pretending to be someone who doesn't know what usenet is. I'm well aware that it's an operating system, not an ISP)

You're wrong. Usenet is just a kernel. GNU/usenet is the operating system.

Re:USENET

[KelsoLundeen]

That's true.

Usenet remains one of the last nuggets of the pre-corporate internet, and it's also one of the *best* nuggets.

Yeah, it's a waste of space and bandwidth, but there's still enough craziness and wackiness and sheer fucking value in usenet to make it seem like a soon-to-be ghost-town on a rapidly vanishing corporate-free frontier.

Re:USENET

[mbourgon]

Which NGs? I must've missed it. That would be handy as hell - alt.binaries.slashdot, for all the stuff that gets mentioned (free software, distros, etc)

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.

Re:YOUR DAYS ARE LIMITED WINDOWS!

[bbh]

Actually it was the use of pico that I found most appalling...
Doesn't mum know vi?

bbh

Red Hat 8

[j_kenpo]

OSNews had a similar article yesterday with similar complaints.. I thought it was strange that they ran almost the same story today as well. Im running a Cyrix 6x86 at my house and Red Hat 8 with KDE as my desktop runs great. Not as fast as a Windows 95 setup on that box, but much faster than a Windows 98 setup. My KDE response time is pretty decent with this setup. Im running a custom kernel of course, since this box doesnt have half of the stuff that comes pre-compiled or modularized by default. In fact, Im pretty satisfied with Red Hat 8.0, although I wouldnt go so far as to say its noticable faster than 7.3 was, or if there are any noticable improvements other than the included OpenOffice, Evolution, and Synaptic (I use apt-rpm for package management off fresh-rpms). I didnt experience any of the complaints that were described in the article...

Re:note to newbies

[carpe_noctem]

I have a feeling that you'll eventually get modded down for troll/flamebait, but I think you have a very good point here. As I type this, I'm running RedHat 8.0, and downloading ISO's for slackware 8.1. I've used slack in the past, but switched to RH because it was nice to have an OS that just did everything for you (ie, I was too lazy to compile everything I needed myself). However, when I run linux, I find myself using a handful of applications that I compiled on my own (fluxbox, Eterm, phoenix, etc). So when I installed RH8, there was essentially no visible difference.
Actually, I should note that the RH8 kernel seems to be really laggy for some reason. When I do processor-intensive tasks, things lag, keyboard and mouse stop responding, and so forth. It's really quite weird, and I'm not sure wtf RH did to screw this up since 7.3. On the plus side, they finally dumped gcc2.96, which made me happy. However, I think I'm definitely on route to slack8.1.

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

Re:note to newbies

[FooBarWidget]

Having a family is definitely consistent with Linux hacking. Linus Torvalds has a family. He even has a child.

Re:That title is double-redundant!

[Raven42rac]

This is one of the main reasons that GNU/Linux is so slow to grow. The condescending attitudes of people like you. What did you start off using? debian? suse? or did you just write your own flavor. jesus man, thats why people are so scared to try it out, because if they ask a question of SOME people, they get laughed at and made to feel stupid, and get stuck. Maybe these "newbies" just want their system to

• just work

maybe they dont want to compile everything, maybe they are just converts that want to email websurf and do light gaming. Give people a little slack. Just a thought.

My mini RH 8.0 review

[bogie]

Let's see if RedHat 8.0 works as a business desktop, its STATED target.

Easy for admin to deploy. check
Easy to use desktop even for a windows user. check
Comes with a great Office Suite and email client. check
Comes with a fast stable web browser. check
The best fonts and font tool ever for a linux distro. check
Absolutly 100% free to download ISO's. check
A billion times more secure than Outlook/IE. check
Responsive on modern(1GHz 256MB) machines. check
Companies has given/gives back a LOT to the community. check

I've been using Redhat since 5.0 and I've also pretty much every distro under the sun. For desktop linux this is a high wark mark. It still has a few rough edges when it comes to consumer usage, but really for the business desktop this is deployable NOW. If I were starting a company today there is not doubt RH 8 would be my choice regardless of cost. Also remember this is Redhat's FIRST attempt at the desktop. I can only imagine how good Redhat 8.1 or 8.2 is going to be.

Re:My mini RH 8.0 review

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

I'll agree with your points, I've been a RH fan since 5.2 (moved from Slackware).

However, my biggest complaint is that RH lacks the capabilities of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I've been using apt4rpm on all my RH boxes, but trying to move from RH 7.3 to 8.0 failed.

I looked around at what RH had to offer and what was available on the net, as it turns out, the only 'safe' way to upgrade a RH box from 7.x to 8.0 is to reboot with a bootdisk (install, kickstart, whatever) then perform the upgrade, then reboot to the working system.

This is unacceptable if you have a ton of racked boxes. I need to be able to remotely (scripted is even better) be able to upgrade those boxes, reboot and be ready to go. Having to physically install the media (even for an NFS kickstart) upgrade is a major PITA. It's one of the main reasons I'll never convince the deb-heads I work with to move to RH.

I really like RH, I do a lot of business and enterprise app development and deployment, and RH has consistently provided everything I need to do my job sanely. This one issue is really killing me though.

Some thoughts and specific user experience items

[cr@ckwhore]

me me me ... I've been using RH80 for a few days now. I was initially a bit scared of the XP-ish UI, but I found it to be quite pleasant and non-annoying like the real XP.

There are a few things that initially annoy me, but these are relatively minor and I'm sure they'll be addressed in the next point releases ...

1. The lack of MP3 support in XMMS is retarded. Supposedly, they were going to provide an alternate XMMS plugin that would at least inform the user about MP3 support, but somehow that didn't make its way into the final release. So, try to initially play an MP3... doesn't work, no information about *why*. (not a problem for me, because I just went and compiled up my own xmms, but for an average joe, this would be a problem).

2. I'm sick of Mozilla being included in these distros without any plugins! For christs sake, at least throw some java in there by default!!

3. Logged into gnome as a regular user, there should be some way to supply a root password into Nautilus to be able to manage files in restricted folders, such as /root. Most commonly, the end user is root, but probably runs as a normal user most of the time. I don't want to log out, and log back into the GUI as root, just to perform some basic tasks.

4. Some bugs... don't leave any non-gnome apps open when you log out, such as xmms or gkrellm. If you do, when you log back in, your session will be f*cked and for some odd reason, you won't be able to log out. The fix (if this happens to you) is to go to one of the many setup menus and find the "sessions" admin app, and clear the non-gnome apps from the current session and save. Then, you'll be able to log out and return to normal.

5. FIRSTBOOT!! There's a daemon that runs on the first boot, and it uses X. Sometimes, at least in VMWARE, X fails to load for firstboot, and hence, it gets skipped. Without going through the firstboot process, certain parts of the distro get broken, such as the hostname, and thus, gnome runs like crap with hostname problems.

6. Too many setup menus!! There are just too many menus for configuring the system. Seems kinda redundant, and silly to have to search through multiple menus to locate a single app because the user can't remember whether the item is in "preferences" or "system settings".

7. Get rid of the "extras" menu... just move those apps to their appropriate menu items. For example, the x-chat IRC client is located in the "extras menu" beneath "internet"... well, it should be in the real "internet" menu.

--------

Thats it from the complaint dept. Otherwise, even as an experienced linux user (and a CLI oriented programmer at that), I find the RH80 gui environment to be extremely nice to usem, wihtout many annoyances.

Why do they call it slow?

[FooBarWidget]

I've noticed that a lot of Linux distribution reviews from people who have little experience with Linux say it's slow.
I don't get it. Why? An earlier RedHat 8.0 review from Eugenia says that RedHat 8.0 is *faster* than previous versions. GNOME 1 users reported that GNOME 2 is a lot faster (and I agree with them; GNOME 2 IS a lot faster, especially Nautilus).
I have an Athlon 1.4 Ghz with 128 MB RAM, and running on GNOME 2. It's very usable (I use Linux as my primairy OS) and fast. Compared to Windows ME, there's not much difference.
Yet the article says everything is slow as hell, even the one with 128 MB RAM.

Why? Why is it half of all reviews say that the desktop is slow while the other half say it's fast?

Re:Why do they call it slow?

[fault0]

> I've noticed that a lot of Linux distribution reviews from people who have little experience with Linux say it's slow.

IMHO, this is not the fault of the reviewers being newbish, but the fault of distros in not getting things right in the first place.

Re:Why do they call it slow?

[FooBarWidget]

Then how come the other reviewers *do* get it right without touching the configuration?

Re:Why do they call it slow?

[fault0]

A better question to ask is why half of the reviewers get it right and half don't. Obviously it has something to do with the distribution. It's up to the distro to make it "reviewerproof".

Re:Why do they call it slow?

[FooBarWidget]

Funny, the first time I installed Linux (RedHat 6.0), I didn't get any of those slowness problems. I didn't have any experience with Linux at all, yet I got it right.

Re:Why do they call it slow?

[fault0]

Yes, of course there are instances of cases where users/reviewers get it right. But, if 50% of reviewers don't, that shows problems.

It just works: Mac OS X

[burgburgburg]

Have to agree. If you actually just want it to work (and get away from Windows), use your x86 architecture as a server/firewall/router and go out and buy a Mac. Short term investment in long term functionality, ease of use and underlying power.

Wake up to reality.

[Havokmon]

"As a global company Red Hat must be sensitive to political differences that impact the markets it serves. One of those markets is Mainland China, where the inclusion of the Taiwanese flag would have prevented the introduction of Red Hat Linux 8.0."

Yay! More supression of free speech, this time from our favorite crippleware!

Apply thisto your flawed logic:
"The leaf-shaped island, one of the most densely populated places on earth with 21 million people, is only about 245 miles long and 90 miles wide. It is dwarfed by mainland China, with a population of 1.2 billion."

Hmm $40 * potentially 1.2 billion
OR
$40 * potentially 21 million

Red Hat could sell v8.0 in China for 25 cents, to 25% of the population, and STILL make more than retail to 100% of Taiwan.

What company do you work for, and what symbol is it traded under? Because the REST of us know that something as simple as a flag could be re-added by one of the 21 million Taiwaneese, if they so desire.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[be-fan]

Umm, whose logic is flawed? The original poster bashed RedHat for bowing to political pressures and dissing the Taiwanese. All you did was prove that it was in there best interest (economically, if not ethically) to do so.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[Havokmon]

That's not political. China didn't want option X. China wasn't going to buy, or maybe allow Red Hat to resell, with option X installed.

Therefore, Red Hat removed option X.

If I don't recognize that Country Y exists, why should software in my country have a flag for a country that doesn't exist?

Don't you remember the civil war? Sounds like you think the US should just have split in two, and been done with it.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[ukryule]

That's not political. China didn't want option X. China wasn't going to buy, or maybe allow Red Hat to resell, with option X installed.

That's very political. China not recognising Taiwan is nothing but political.

If I don't recognize that Country Y exists, why should software in my country have a flag for a country that doesn't exist?

Telling a company that they have to confirm to your world view is called censorship. In this case, it's a small part of an ongoing strategy by mainland China to delegitimise and hide from view all aspects of Taiwans democracy and (effective) independence.

That RedHat were willing to agree to the PRC request to remove the flag shows that they considered the economic benefits to outweigh any moral issues with the implied censorship.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[afidel]

The UN doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country, no country I know of has signed treaties with Taiwan, so from my perspective Taiwan is NOT a country.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[Ian Wolf]

And...

The United States, the home of Red Hat, doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country. What is more unethical, selling arms to a nation you do not recognize to perpetuate a billion dollar defense industry? Or, removing a flag that for all intents and purposes is NOT a national flag?

While, I think Red Hat's decision sucks, it is the only logical solution. To not do so would open them up to legitimate gripes from their shareholders. China is arguably the largest Linux market in the world, only a fool would turn their back on it for politics. (No matter what choice they made it would be made for politics)

If people really think that this whole situation is unfair, complain to your government. They are the ones who refuse to stand behind a freely elected government, not Red Hat.

Re:Wake up to reality.

[Ian Wolf]

That's very political. China not recognising Taiwan is nothing but political.

Should read...

The entire world not recognizing Taiwan is nothing but political.

Red Hat is in the business of selling software, not in the business of legitimizing governments. To do so is a disservice to themselves and their shareholders. There is no room for ethics or politics in this decision.

In this case, it's a small part of an ongoing strategy by mainland China to delegitimise and hide from view all aspects of Taiwans democracy and (effective) independence.

You are absolutely correct, but it is not Red Hat's place to take on this issue. If no one, including Taiwan, considers themselves an independent nation, why should Red Hat?

That RedHat were willing to agree to the PRC request to remove the flag shows that they considered the economic benefits to outweigh any moral issues with the implied censorship.

There is no moral issue here. If Taiwan is NOT a nation and China is, then Red Hat really has only one choice. Now, if the rest of the world would rally behind Taiwan and support them as an independent nation, rather than reap the rewards of their (effective) independence, then I would stand behind your statements.

mp3 removed ? not really

[tanveer1979]

Well, many ppl would have already discovered this, but for others, this could be useful.

RedHat says there is no mp3 support, but surprisingly there is! ;-) The trick. Mozilla :). They have by default added a plugin(plugger).
Plugger can play Quicktime, mpg and mp3 in the browser window. Well not many of us like to listen to mp3 in mozilla, but this completely refutes Red Hats claim about not including mp3 support coz "We dont want to be the first to be sued". To be frank, wether the support is in mozilla or xmms, if hypothetically there was a case of patent violation, it wouldnt really matter. Well now that the roayalty has been removed it dosent matter, but my guess is that this hindsight was there mostly due to lack of knowledge... or mebbe there is some developer sitting with a sense of humour!

Re:mp3 removed ? not really

[FooBarWidget]

Plugger uses other apps to play content. So if you want to play MP3s using plugger you still need an MP3 decoder which Plugger supports, like mpg123.

Re:note to newbies

[xmutex]

he has lots of children! httpd, atd, smbd, and cron to name a few.

not sad, and not difficult

[Ender Ryan]

All that this effort would need is common theming and common app/config launchers.

Then Gnome and KDE would be very similar, but would also remain separate. KDE would use Konq for file/web, Gnome would use Nautilus/Mozilla respectively, etc.

Then users could mix and match components, developers could choose which development architecture they want, and users would see a consistent desktop with common themes and fonts.

Re:not sad, and not difficult

[Menthos]

All that this effort would need is common theming and common app/config launchers. Then Gnome and KDE would be very similar, but would also remain separate. KDE would use Konq for file/web, Gnome would use Nautilus/Mozilla respectively, etc. Then users could mix and match components, developers could choose which development architecture they want, and users would see a consistent desktop with common themes and fonts.

Common themes and a common look is nice and all, but it doesn't help much as long as the desktops and applications behave differently and have different features. As long as you have different behaviors and different sets of features, you don't have any cross-desktop consistency. It would still be a nightmare to even do a simple task like helping a user to set his home page to something different, only to discover that the way of changing home page seems to be done differently in the browser that the user happens to be running, and of course the user also cannot help with identifying the particular browser he is using so that you can find out how to it in that browser. Or any other support matter. All this in despite of you and the other user both installing and using the same distribution!
That's why it is important not only to have a common look but also to have a set of common, pre-defined and supported applications easily available, and preferrably only one of each kind. Think about it from the support angle. It makes sense.

I can't read rh related post on kde mailling lists

[imr]

nor suze posts because I've setup filters to trash them.
Why ?
Because many of those many posts come from users having difficulties with choices the heavy thinkers of those distros made. And I got fed up of reading the same problems all over again. And the same answers, to the point that some day those lists look like a big huge faq.
"This a suze related problem. The solution to this problem can be found on suze forum "...etc ...etc...
Most of the times, the initiative was good and those people are quite eager to do the right thing, they just seem unable to do it THE RIGHT WAY.
In the KDE case, it would have meant in order to do the right thing (desktop appearence unification): to talk with KDE people to warn them and have feedback from them, to show respect for their work and project (leave the small about kde box in the app they put aside anyway) and to show that they have heard their concerns about a supposed preference toward gnome and that they're not funded (because they are not, right?).
But NO, they had to push it under the hat(!) and suddenly, flamewars everywhere, like we need them.
And in order to do it the right way for end users (because they are target for desktop unification, right? I mean, who ELSE need it?), that would mean a little less twinked systems which will behave a little more like everyone else's. If you don't believe me, go and check last transgaming release and see what systems have kernel related issues with last winex release.
If the real issue behind all this was to do the best desktop for end users, they certainly did it the wrong way.

Test X Configuration in Installer

[back_pages]

Maybe it had something to do with my hardware, but there was no option to test my X setup while in the installer. I absentmindedly picked the wrong monitor (mine is old and wasn't properly probed) and my setup was screwed.

Now, I am the type of guy who doesn't mind editing some config files by hand and has plenty of Big Heavy Books about *nix. However, almost every piece of documentation on configuring X recommends using Xconfigurator. I naively believed what I read and never bothered with manually editing X's config files. Big mistake. Xconfigurator does not come with Psyche. I poked around for a few hours before getting so furious with the thing that I simply repartitioned and started from scratch. This time I picked the right monitor.

I know that people with a higher wisdom stat than I would have been just fine in this scenario, and I never claimed to be an expert, but the simple ability to test my X setup in the installer would have turned this 3 hour hangup into a 10 second goof. But like I said, this option might be present for people with more up to date hardware. (Doh, I use linux partially because my hardware is older.)

Other than that, I love Psyche. Mostly I'm enamored with the latest versions of all the included software, but the sum is composed of the parts.

Re:He has a child?!

[FooBarWidget]

Want to see the photo of his baby?
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/

Thanks

[Frank Sullivan]

I just wanted to say that was a really great, well-written and informative article. Thanks!

Still waiting...

[ACK!!]

I have been thinking and gathering additional packages in anticipation of going to Redhat 8.0.

I have been using SuSE which is really nice but the deal clincher for me has been the fact I use Gnome and the integration of Gnome and the System Tools used by Redhat are much better than the integration of System Tools into Gnome that SuSE provides.

I want a unified look and feel and use almost entirely gtk/gnome apps except for OpenOffice of course.

BTW, when I say this I must mention and no one else ever does that SuSE does an excellent job of integrating its System Tools into KDE. Just go to the control center in KDE and you can get to every System Function provided by Yast2. If you use KDE SuSE is the winner. I just hate the look and feel of KDE. Its just me.

Anyway, I am still waiting though. Why? The main reason I will probably wait until Gnome 2.2 and the release of Redhat in a few years considering Redhat's release schedule than includes that version of Gnome by default. The reason is the fact that until Gnome 2.2 most apps I know and love and will not be ported over by default. I have compiled them one by one on my SuSE box and do not care to repeast that move.

On the whole desktop issue I will say that it is entirely possible to create a good desktop for linux using the currently available tools. However, there are still too many downloads -- ltmodem, Nvidia drivers, i8kutils for the laptop users, core MS fonts and other things (even more for Redhat 8.0, too much preparation needed (checking for hardware compatibility with current hardware for example) and too much after work needed to set the desktop up in a usable state.

BTW, does anyone else hate that extras submenu everything else gets installed under for Redhat 8.0 it sounds nasty. SuSE solution of the all-encompassing distro menu is equally evil though. With linux, the problem is quickly becoming not too few options but too many options for a newbie to sort through.
________________________________________ _________

Re:Some thoughts and specific user experience item

[cr@ckwhore]

One more thing to add to my list...

Regarding browser plugins, the default netscape location for plugins (/usr/lib/netscape/plugins) should be a symlink to the mozilla plugins directory. When some popular "netscape" plugins are installed, such as realplayer, it automatically puts itself in the default netscape location.

For a "joe user", this would probably be a big problem because after installing a plugin, realplayer, flash player, etc... it doesn't work unless the user manually copies the files from the netscape plugin directory into the mozilla plugin directory.

Huge problem, with a simple solution.

Re:Taiwan Ceases to exist, according to RedHat.

[ukryule]

Apparantly, in order to improve sales in China, RedHat removed the Taiwanese flag

The amazing thing about this is that it seems to be on all versions of RH8 that this has happened (not just the ones sold to China) - so the versions sold in Taiwan won't even have their flag ...

The Taiwan Linux UG have an online petition to reinstate the flag.

Linux is not about being nostalgic; it's adaptive!

[aksansai]

This is really an incorrect philosophy - one that is evident in the argument that Linux is not the distribution but the kernel that is common to all Linux-based distributions. Even the modern, stable kernel of Linux runs on a 386 processor, some slow RISC processors, and a handful of other legacy chips that have pretty much long left our desktops. The kernel falls in line with these goals.

When developing for small platform devices (hand helds, tablets, etc.) one does not think "how do I fit Gnome or KDE on this little thing". On the contrary - it poses a problem that the open source community is ready to tackle. FLTK (fast lightweight tool-kit), among many others, was developed to bring graphics to small hand held devices. The spirit of "Linux", or rather the open source community and all of the software which it provides, lives on - on the hardware of old, hardware of new, and hardware of the extremely small.

The distributions which use Linux as the kernel are made up of all kinds of utilities and applications. All of which are considered modern and targetted for modern times. To be nostalgic and develop all software to run "antique" hardware is not intuitive - why not take advantage of what our computers have to offer? Do we not enjoy vehicles with anti-lock brakes, air conditioning, a quiet cabin, engines which start almost flawlessly, and all sorts of other amenities that we take for granted?

Software, as well as the hardware upon which it is run, is constantly changing - adapting to the needs of the people who use the computers and as well as the computers themselves. I find it ironic that over the years that Linux-based distributions have increasingly become more popular, more advanced, and more feature-rich the groaning has switched from "Linux doesn't have enough stuff or it isn't stable like my Windows box" to "Linux is so bloated it doesn't run on my four year old machine." Another old argument was "Linux is too hard to understand and configure" - now the argument has switched to "they hide too much of the specifics". Distributions were developed so that the users of those distributions had a convenient and consistent environment to take advantage of the latest and greatest software offerings. Of course the interfaces change over time but developing utilities to replace legacy applications within a distribution maintains a level of consistency to help, not restrict, the end-user.

Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, et al. are all attempting to take advantage of the modern offerings that our technologically elite provide us in terms of hardware and software concepts. To do so would be living in a era of restriction - preventing Linux-based distributions from forging ahead to utilize the technologies that only Microsoft could provide for (in the past).

Face the facts - most people want an easy to use operating system. Consistency is nice! Fancy features are nice! A good looking interface is nice! A faster, more responsive system is nice! It's frustrating to see people ready to tear down an honest effort of an organized entity to provide features requested by their paying customers and the comments of the open source community as a whole.

It's very confusing when the mob asks for "consistency and features like Windows" and then immediately gripes when the consistency and features are added into the distribution. Nonetheless - you have a choice. Use Red Hat's, Mandrake's, SuSE's, Debian's, or the other's offerings. Build a Linux distribution from scratch and add your home-grown, home-built installation of KDE. When a company attempts to differentiate its product to better suit its customers (paying and the open source community), be constructive in your criticism and inform the developers of your suggestions rather than finding a forum to gripe because a piece of 2002 software will not run on your 1996 hardware platform.

GCC 3.2 and Java

[athakur999]

A problem in Gentoo-land that's coming up is that none of the big Java vendors ship JRE's that are compatible with Mozilla compiled with GCC 3.2.

From the review it sounds like Java is working fine in Mozilla on this new Redhat. Does Redhat use a Mozilla compiled under the older GCC, or did they get a JRE compiled with GCC 3.2. If the latter, anyone tried installing it on Gentoo?

Re:GCC 3.2 and Java

[Papineau]

Examining the mozilla-bin binary, it seems parts of it were built using gcc 3.2-3 and parts using gcc 2.96-110. Why? Dunno.

I didn't have a problem viewing a Rubik applet in Mozilla with the 1.4.1 JDK from Sun. That one (well, at least the java binary) was built using gcc-2.91.66.

Re:note to newbies

[sbrown123]

I have always found, as a rule of thumb, that you are better off recompiling the distro's kernel source after you install the distro. This seems to make the lag issue go away.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[BrookHarty]

Need to check which version of Grub they use, but Grub flaked out 2 times after I installed the RedHat 8.0. I finally used a mandrake install cd to get a good version of Grub working again so I could boot.

Grub complained about my partition table during the install, but did finally install and work.

One can always use Google to look things up...

[Svartalf]

A quick check on Google popped up the following links:

(LILO CRC error...)
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue50/tag/24.html
http://brenner.chemietechnik.uni-dortmund.de/doc/s db/en/html/kfr_50.html

(Grub cannot fit selected item into memory)
http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.92/html_node/Stag e2-errors.html
http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week- of-Mon-20020729/005620.html
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/200 0-March/000346.html

Based on those links, I'd be chasing down something taking some of your low memory away from you so that it doesn't boot right. Keep in mind, it may still be an ailing HD as intimated in the LILO links. As for the bootloaders being ready, they are- you've got a special case that's causing you problems and many, many others don't seem to have your issues with them. I can't speak of Red Hat's support since I've not used their distribution in a while- so you may have a beef there.

Re:One can always use Google to look things up...

[Svartalf]

Depends on your viewpoint. Many of the readers here are in the US. There's a growing problem in the US of companies viewing people as consumers instead of customers and politicians thinking of their constituents as nothing more than just taxpayers. You don't appear to currently have this problem, so the tagline's not relevent to you - in some ways, I envy some of the situation you've got in Sweden, in others I do not. If you're offended by the "US centric" nature of it, I fear you've got something of a chip on your shoulder and you'd be offended by most anything I'd put as a tagline.

But, I only want MYSQL?!?!?!?!?

[WebWiz]

I'm one of those guys that just can't resist installing a fresh new copy of the latest version of RH the day after is is released. With all the hype surrounding 8.0, I was stoked to start running this OS. Truthfully, I was less interested in the GUI and more focused on the integration of Apache 2.0, gcc 3.2..etc. The install was quick, AND painless. BUT, the damn installer would not allow me to "deselect" the base DBMSs and install MYSQL alone unless I "selected all packages individually".

Seems ODD to me....

Other than that...the only problems I had was with my own PHP code being incompatible with the latest version of PHP 4.2.x (which also annoys me). Oh, and P.S. don't try to "dump your data" out of your old phpMyAdmin, and try to import it in to the new version. IT NADA WORK.

But I must say, RH 8.0's interface is perty. Sucks there is no MP3 support..Unless you go HERE

Re:Strip down the distro...make it clean...

[FooBarWidget]

I'm running RedHat 7.2. I installed GNOME 2.0 from source, and it's definitely, without a mistake, faster than both GNOME 1.4 (with or without Nautilus) AND KDE 2.2.

Mod up parent

[Raul654]

He's 100% right. It's fuckups like this on the major distros that will do to linux what apple did to themselves.

Plugger REQUIRES helper apps...

[Svartalf]

Plugger doesn't magically play content by itself.

In order for it to play content for MP3 files, it needs mpg123 or something similar. If mpg123 and it's ilk aren't included on RH, plugger can't play MP3 files. I don't know if RH has omitted mpg123 or not, but I suspect so.

Nonprofit orgs vs. bells and whistles

[yerricde]

most boxes you buy nowadays come with at least 128 or even 256 MB

Most school systems don't have enough money to purchase "boxes you buy nowadays".

One can't seriously expect to run bells-and-whistle software on hardware that was simply not designed to run effectively with it.

Are there any popular Linux or BSD distributions that 1. are easy to install and configure and 2. have an easy-to-find, easy-to-use, non-bells-and-whistles GUI?

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[Dr Caleb]

I've had nothing but support nightmares since RH 7.0. Don't get me wrong, I love RH, always have.

I bought RH 7 to run on an old (Dual P-Pro 200) Compaq machine that used to be running SCO Unix. I couldn't get it installed. I emailed RH support with the specs of the box (Standard Compaq Proliant 2500) and the error the installer gave me (invalid root or something).

They replied back the next day "Try installing in text mode" then the next day, "Use a command line of...". That went on for 2 weeks, till they finnaly read the specs on the machine (Compaq SmartRaid controller) and said "Sorry, we don't support RH installation on servers with raid controllers." To be honest, Compaq wasn't much help ethier. They simply had a pointer to the Compaq array controller driver on sourceforge.

How silly of me to install a server O/S on a server. So I installed Win2K.

RedHat 8.0

[suman28]

I read the OSNews article about "Joe and Jane User" and I have to say, no matter how much you pretend that you are a newbie, unless you really are one, then I feel like you can't understand our frustration. I am just getting my feet wet in Linux and it has been a little hard since I don't know the difference between GNOME and KDE except that they have different background and act a little differently and overall are slightly different. Having been a long time Windows user, I don't really care about the differences. So, I think that RedHat has done a great job of combining the two destops into one to ease confusion for oridinary users like myself. Way to go RedHat.

I had no problems with the HP raid controller...

[Svartalf]

I installed just fine and dandy with RH 7.0. It's all in what SCSI hardware was installed on it. Think of it as something being or not being on the current HCL- you had a config that didn't match up the HCL at the time for Red Hat. Should have checked the HCL ahead of time instead of blaming the distribution, etc.

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.

Problem is vendor lock-in

[Wee]

If the goal is to simply get away from Windows while still maintaining functionality, and you're just a hack user, I would recommend Mac OS X. If you don't have the money to buy new hardware...then I don't know what to tell you.

I buy all the parts for a brand new system every five years. About every 12-18 months during that span, I upgrade the hardware and software piecemeal. What I upgrade and when depends on my needs. Games or a new kind of CPU seem to be the most common reason. Although I grant that gaming probably wouldn't be as much of an issue on a Mac.

The trouble with paying for Apple hardware and software is that you will always have to pay for Apple hardware and software. I buy high-end components and build my own systems. Everything "just works" fine for me. If Apple decides to change a EULA in Mac OS X what happens? If iTunes or the iPod incorporate DRM crap, what does everyone do? If they release a system that can't be sufficiently upgraded, what then? None of the cost-of-ownership stuff I've seen covers having to replace an aging iMac.

I don't want to start a flamefest or a religious war, but for me the right OS is Linux (and Win98 for games). You make a good point, however. Mac OS X passes the "Mom Test" with flying colors.

-B

Re:Bowing down to marketing

[Havokmon]

Say what you want about profit and money, but when marketing conflicts the ideals of free software (freedom), I choose not to use RedHat anymore.

There are lots of other Linux distributors who still supports the ideals of free software and open source. They'll get my business.

Because YOU'VE decided that Taiwan is it's own country, and not a part of China?

Reminds me of a show I once liked
Lois: Did you get the permit from the city.
Peter: No we're not part of the city. In fact we're not even part of the country.
Lois: What are you talking about.
Peter: Thanks to a technicality we have the right to secede from the United States and that makes us our own country. from this point on we shall be known as Petoria. I was going to call it Peterland but that gay club by the airport already took it.

Lois: We are a clean industrious people. Mostly white. My son Chris is in charge of our space program. We expect to get to the moon very soon.
Chris: (in tree) Almost there. (falls) they should really use monkeys for this.
Lois: And little Stewie here is our President of poopies.
Stewie: Oh har har.
Trisha: Where is the president now.
Lois: Oh he's on a goodwill mission to America.

I can't stop!! :P

I thought free software was about freedom?

[marm]

What company do you work for, and what symbol is it traded under? Because the REST of us know that something as simple as a flag could be re-added by one of the 21 million Taiwaneese, if they so desire.

Ok, well let's continue, shall we? I'll submit a patch to KDE removing the US flag, because you're not a sovereign nation, you're simply a renegade province of the UK and as such, you don't need a flag. Right?

Damnit, there are some things that are more important than making money! Like freedom and democracy? Things that Taiwan has, and mainland China doesn't. It's bad enough that governments around the world have kow-towed to this Chinese insanity, but a 'free software' company?

It's not even like it makes a lot of sense economically - although the potential Chinese market is huge, the vast majority are way too poor to even afford a PC, let alone consider paying for software. Whereas Taiwan is an extremely rich, extremely high-tech country that manufactures most of the components in your PC, and doesn't bat an eyelid at the idea of paying for software. Red Hat have also quite possibly blown their chances of getting any kind of cooperation or investment from Taiwanese tech giants like Via.

I just don't get it. What's going on here?

Re:I thought free software was about freedom?

[Ian Wolf]

Damnit, there are some things that are more important than making money! Like freedom and democracy? Things that Taiwan has, and mainland China doesn't. It's bad enough that governments around the world have kow-towed to this Chinese insanity, but a 'free software' company?

You are absolutely correct, there are more important things than making money. There are also more important things than spending all of our time on /. bitching about Red Hat. Why don't you rechannel your anger at Red Hat for merely trying to survive in an imperfect world and write a letter to your government condeming their inaction on Taiwan. Taiwan's situation is NOT right, but what the hell have any of us done for Taiwan lately? (This is rhetorical, I don't want to hear it because this question is like, "How often do you have sex? Everyone claims they do more than they really do.)

The majority of the people on /. are sitting behind computers with half its parts manufactured in Taiwan because of its cheap labor. The world makes billions and billions of dollars off of Taiwan, but fails to rally behind its quest for freedom. Instead of talking about the real issue, we are railing against Red Hat, because it isn't blatantly off-topic. This entire thread is so fucking hypocritical.

Like you said, there are things that are more important than making money. Well, you know what there are things in the world a LOT more important than what Red Hat is doing now. The world is failing to deliver on its promise to help Afghanistan rebuild, but ya know what? Red Hat moved the KDE Credits to a less conspicuous place. A crazed psycopath is roaming Maryland killing random people with a rifle, but Red Hat has just released 8.0 with a unified theme for KDE and GNOME, THOSE BASTARDS! Let's all get a grip people and if we are going to talk about what Red Hat's done to KDE, lets not try and pin the "One China Doctrine" on them for something they are hardly even perpetuating.

Re:I thought free software was about freedom?

[marm]

Instead of talking about the real issue, we are railing against Red Hat, because it isn't blatantly off-topic.

No, we are railing against Red Hat because they are, through their actions, deliberately perpetuating this myth that Taiwan is somehow not a country in its own right, and because I do not feel that this is an appropriate action for a company that supposedly puts the freedoms of its users - including its Taiwanese users - first. Red Hat is the one that stands accused of hypocrisy here.

This entire thread is so fucking hypocritical.

So a matter which is initially noticed and brought to our attention by Taiwanese Linux users, which they complain and bitch about, which they start an online petition for, where they feel that Red Hat is trampling on their toes - am I not allowed to stand by them and stick up for them? Because I know if I was in their position, I would be VERY pissed off, and rightfully so. How does it amount to hypocrisy that I am willing to speak out in their defence?

Don't give me the BS about the fact that I should only care about world events that I have no direct control over. I do care about these things, and I have done what is within my power - how many of you have written to your representative or gone on a political demonstration in the last 6 months? I have. But currently I am sitting in front of my computer, this issue has come to my attention today, so I am using what I feel is an appropriate and effective forum to air my views and try to get the message across. Why do you have a problem with that?

lets not try and pin the "One China Doctrine" on them for something they are hardly even perpetuating.

But this is the whole point! This is exactly the doctrine that Red Hat is perpetuating, whether you deny it or not. I, and over 4000 Taiwanese Linux users, don't think this is right.

Re:I thought free software was about freedom?

[Ian Wolf]

No, we are railing against Red Hat because they are, through their actions, deliberately perpetuating this myth that Taiwan is somehow not a country in its own right,

I would like no better than to see a "recognized" free Taiwan, but it will not happen until the rest of the world unites behind them. It is not fair to ask Red Hat, a software company, to do what nations are not brave enough to do. Red Hat is not the open source movement's Joan of Arc, they are a company, a business. Had they decided to keep the flag, they would have essentially locked themselves out of one of the world's largest markets. I don't expect Bob Young to play the role of statesman and defender of freedom everywhere. I expect the statesmen to play that role and they have done a very poor job when it comes to Taiwan. They are the ones to blame, Red Hat is hardly responsible for the continuation of the lunacy of "One China".

and because I do not feel that this is an appropriate action for a company that supposedly puts the freedoms of its users - including its Taiwanese users - first.

Red Hat can never hope to replace the United Nations and Amnesty International and no one should expect them to. They have set out to free their users from proprietary software not tyranny. Despite some people's impressions of Bill Gates, there is a difference.

Red Hat is the one that stands accused of hypocrisy here.

Why? Because they say, "Who would buy a car with the hood welded shut?" No, Red Hat never promised to protect their users from tyranny, opression, and the "One China Doctrine". Shadowman is not a real superhero.

So a matter which is initially noticed and brought to our attention by Taiwanese Linux users, which they complain and bitch about, which they start an online petition for, where they feel that Red Hat is trampling on their toes - am I not allowed to stand by them and stick up for them? Because I know if I was in their position, I would be VERY pissed off, and rightfully so. How does it amount to hypocrisy that I am willing to speak out in their defence?
I can understand their displeasure, but it is not Red Hat who started this mess, Richard Nixon did. Red Hat was damned if they did and damned if they didn't. No matter what they did someone would be pissed. Red Hat chose the path in their best interest as a company is expected to do within the limits of the law. Do we have to like it? Of course not. Are you a hypocrite for standing up for them? No. The hypocrisy comes in the form of the majority of people in the world benefiting from Taiwan's "effective" independence, but not supporting their drive for "recognized" independence.

Don't give me the BS about the fact that I should only care about world events that I have no direct control over. I do care about these things, and I have done what is within my power - how many of you have written to your representative or gone on a political demonstration in the last 6 months? I have. But currently I am sitting in front of my computer, this issue has come to my attention today, so I am using what I feel is an appropriate and effective forum to air my views and try to get the message across. Why do you have a problem with that?

I have no problem with people expressing their views, but I have just as much right to tell you they are a little misdirected. Red Hat had no choice in this matter. They are a company and they must make decision with THEIR interests in mind. Had Red Hat kept the flag, they WOULD have been open to some serious liability from their shareholders that would have threatened their future. Their responsibility is to the users of their software and their shareholders, not to the people of Taiwan. While a stand on this issue by them would have been admirable, it would have accomplished nothing. Whether or not Red Hat kept the flag would have meant jack to the independence of Taiwan. The fact that the US government can sell billions of dollars of arms to a place they happily recognize as a renegade province of its best trading buddy is insane. How we can blame a small software company for not embarking on a grand quest of liberation is ludicrous. I don't expect any company to make diplomatic policy, I expect my legislators and President to do that.

But this is the whole point! This is exactly the doctrine that Red Hat is perpetuating, whether you deny it or not. I, and over 4000 Taiwanese Linux users, don't think this is right.

What about the Mainland Linux users who feel its wrong to include the flag of a rebel province. No matter what Red Hat chose to do someone on either side of the Strait would have been upset. Now if there were more upset Linux users on the Mainland then on Taiwan, then Red Hat made the right choice. "You can't please all of the people all of the time."

Leave business to businesses and diplomacy to diplomats. Red Hat is simply doing what is in their best interest as a business, as well as to their consumers. The diplomats, on the other hand, need to be leaned on hard for their position on the Taiwan issue. Let us unite in motivating the right people to do the right thing.

Re:I thought free software was about freedom?

[Ian Wolf]

Ok, well let's continue, shall we? I'll submit a patch to KDE removing the US flag, because you're not a sovereign nation, you're simply a renegade province of the UK and as such, you don't need a flag. Right?

There is a big difference here, even our one-time oppressors recognize our independence, Taiwan's certainly does not.

Re:I don't know if you're a newbie, guru, or what

[cr@ckwhore]

Dude, you didn't read what I wrote...

#1 - I took care of the problem by compiling my own copy of xmms with mp3 support included. yes, I'm aware of the additional mp3 rpm.

#3 - yeah, "su".. no shit sherlock. I was specifically referring to GUI based file operations with nautilus.

#4 - Well, you'll need to save your session if you intend on keeping changes you make to your desktop environment. I have my sessions set to always save, because surely I'd forget at least occasionally to save my session, and it would piss me off if I lost anything I had done to my GUI.

#5 - yes, but a "joe user" isn't going to know how to do that.

Thanks for your input

Musings from an admin

[dgenr8]

I built a new flex ATX box this past weekend and, after discovering that the world of Red Hat mirrors goes far beyond those listed on Red Hat's official page, downloaded 8.0 and installed it.

I use Linux on servers heavily at work and also have a web / imap / general purpose Linux (rh 7.2) server at home. However I have not used a Linux desktop very much.

After exploring GNOME, KDE, etc. for a few days, I have come to the conclusion that, for an administrator today, a Linux desktop is a good way to host multiple terminal sessions but the GUI is of little help.

What happened to linuxconf? Am I now supposed to begin the nightmare of configuring sendmail completely by hand? It looks like Red Hat has ripped out linuxconf completely and replaced it with the Helix stuff for SOME of the functions.

Does GNOME/Nautilus have a CD icon at all?

Why is there no applet to that centralizes metacity settings? Yet we have whole applications to manage a single binary switch.

The Mac and Windows do a lot more to let the administrator stay in the GUI for many simple tasks. Linux is definitely not there yet.

Just Booted

[waldoj]

I just now installed and booted Red Hat 8.0 on this Dell Dimension 4300 Win2k machine here at the office, went to Slashdot, and found this story. Red Hat 8.0 flawlessly detected the Rage 128 and SyncMaster 570V flat screen, the sound card, the Ethernet connection, the network structure, the printer -- it just works.

Now, it set up Gnome by default. I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, and I'm a KDE guy on this particular week. I was prepared to be annoyed when it booted into Gnome, but you know what I realized? I don't care. It's a desktop. It looks great. I don't give a damn what desktop environment that it's running, at least while I have my worker-bee hat on.

I'm just happy that I could open up OpenOffice and pick up my work where I left off on the Win2k side of the machine with Word, Excel, Acrobat and G3 fax image files, and everything just works. The rest is all details beyond my current interest.

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:Not just KDE. . .

[robson]

But Gnome, too. I was very frustrated that the new version of Sawfish has the "new feature" of removed functionality. You cannot use viewports, and edge-flipping is therefore impossible by default.

I thought Gnome was using Metacity by default these days...?

Re:Bowing down to marketing

[ihatelisp]

Because YOU'VE decided that Taiwan is it's own country, and not a part of China?

Nope. No where in my post did I claim or imply that (you seem to have a grudge against it because you brought it up). This is simply about the flag -- the simple recognition that there are 2 separate government bodies, one in China and one in Taiwan; one that supresses freedom and one that supports it.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out Chinese government does not govern Taiwanese people, nor vice versa. Yet you failed to realize that.

(OT) Re:USENET

[lordsutch]

Uh, yeah, you can get USENET through BellSouth; try using news1.lig.bellsouth.net as your server.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[MrLinuxHead]

You are correct, Sir. RH 7.0 was not supporting older Compaq 2500 series SmartRAID controller. However Compaq DID support the SmartArray controller in 2000 with the 380(DM?) series and above. The SmartStart CD instructs you to install an Compaq Array as if it were a SCO install, and set up your RAID array normally from there. I have tried RH 6.x and 7.x on some very crusty old Compaq Proliants and it did work, however with the cavats above

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[zerofoo]

OK, OK, OK...

Hardware:

Intel D850EMV2 motherboard (P15 bios)
Adaptec 2110s scsi raid controller
Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
512 MB rambus memory
Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti 500
Dual Seagate 65 GB scsi hard drives (raid 1)

The Intel motherboard does not allow for overclocking, and all the hardware is stuff by major vendors...nothing unusual here.

Before the install, I thought the scsi controller might have been a problem, but the dpti2o.o driver works just fine...it sees the hard drive and allows me to do an install.

Sure, something could be taking up the low memory area on my machine (yes, I tried the relocation option on the scsi card). My point is, that I don't want to run old hardware just to avoid compatibility problems. I want to run really new hardware and I want it to "just work" as the RH tag line goes.

-ted

poop on you

[twitter]

It sounds to me that the problems are the same problems held Linux-World wide. These are common, and not necessarily specific to Red Hat 8.0.

That's first order bullshit. My wife runs Red Hat 7.3 on an AMD K6/2 400 with 128MB of RAM and it's very snappy, thank you. Yes, Gnome and KDE run just fine, faster in fact than w2k runs better hardware where I work. Only Nautulis and Mozilla feel slow on that hardware, Mozilla can be turned off in favor of gmc, and Mozilla, works just fine once started. "Exlorer" is not comperable to Nautulis, but GMC runs much faster than Exlorer ever will. So, even Red Hat's supposedly "bloated" release runs just fine before this version. If you want a really lean distro go for Debian. I've never experienced a full scale break like the reviewer has and so, this problem he had is far from the universal Linux experience.

My wife's red hat fits in 1.4 GB of disk space. My Debian fits in 700 MB. This includes several full browsers, window managers, file viewers, compilers, editors and sofware that tries to sing and dance.

It's sad to hear that 8.0 might be buggy, but then again, the ".0" Red Hats are known for that. Wait for 8.2 if you want stability or just go get the last 7.whatever. It could be that this particular user had a sound card that was flawlessly detected wrong ran away with his processor.

In my house, Lixus has replaced Windows. Sometimes there have been problems, but it's been worlds better. Windows problems were invariably curred by spending $250 on a new OS. Linux problems are solved by changing a text file or two or removing the offending software. It helpst to have more computers than one, and there is where linux really shines. I only have one monitor, with X forwarding, I don't need another. Under Linux, each machine can be specialized to figure things out without disrupting other services. I've got one computer that sings and dances, I don't need another. I've got one computer with KDE on it, so all of my computers have KDE. There is no way Windows can replace the funtionality free sofware has given me.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[Junta]

Though I cannot say anything about the boot loader problem (seems very strange, never saw it), I remember the one time I paid for a box set in order to support RedHat. I had a problem setting up a particular printer that was supported. Since I had paid for it, I figured I would use that support that comes with the box. The immediate response was that they didn't field questions regarding the printing system. This was back in the 5.2 days, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth. They likely have changed this since then, but at the time I had to wonder what part of things *did* they support? I eventually tweaked a ghostscript driver to get it to work based on some web searches and lucky hunches, but I never again paid for RedHat. Then I stopped using RedHat and now use Gentoo.

microsoft support is sooooooo good, baby yeah.

[twitter]

.I've even had MS tech support people on the phone for hours on end on a Saturday fixing an Exchange problem!

At $50 an hour, with broken crap on Saturday morning, you consider this a good thing? That's the kind of thing I don't wish on my enemies. For them, I dial hours of phone sex. Microsoft might stay on the line at $50 an hour too, but that and broken email servers is just too much to bear. I'm sorry.

Window Maker in Red Hat 8 is apparently broken

[yerricde]

according to the package list, windowmaker is included in the distribution.

That's all well and good, but according to one of the articles that the story linked to, the menus included with Red Hat Linux 8's Window Maker package are completely broken:

So, after a failed KDE trial, I decided to try WindowMaker. I had a little bit of an introduction to WindowMaker in my previously mentioned CRUX install. In CRUX, none of the menu items worked, so it was pretty pointless. I figured RedHat would get it right. When WindowMaker started, it looked exactly like the CRUX install. The menus were full of applications that simply didn't work (not found errors). I don't understand why someone would include a bunch of programs in the menus when the programs themselves aren't even installed.

However, I did look around and I did find programs I was sure were installed. For instance, The GIMP. It worked in GNOME so I knew it was installed... Still got the error, though. The only menu item that worked in WindowMaker was VIM, but why do I need WindowMaker to run a text application? Back to GNOME (this time using 'switchdesk gnome' since there was no menu option for it).

Red Hat even points it out sometimes...

[mbourgon]

This was interesting timing... I'm trying to get an 8.0 box up on our network (issues with the autosensing switch), and it just wouldn't come up on the network.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw this box pop up:

Could not look up internet address for mycomp.
This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly.
It may be possible to correct the problem by adding
mycomp to the file /etc/hosts.
(Log in Anyway) (Try Again)

So, they're aware of it. But why does it act this way? Wouldn't that effectively penalize anyone not on an active network? (i.e. dialup, etc)

I am impressed with driver support

[div_2n]

Regardless of crippled this and not included that, I was damn impressed with the driver support. I got tired of my Windows 2000 installation on a Compaq Deskpro and installed 8.0

There were some suprising results and not so surprising results. The most surprising was that my Firewire PCI controller and Iomega Predator Firewire CD-R/W drive was supported. The not so surprising result was that my USB Alcatel DSL modem was not supported out of the box.

Overall, I am impressed. Since my first RedHat installation was 5.2, 8.0 is eons ahead of my original RedHat experience.

Good job the reviewer didn't use a Vaio...

[FyRE666]

I just put RH8.0 on my Vaio GR series laptop. Custom install (basically I needed the Gnome desktop, various utils, named, httpd and mysql). Install finished, rebooted and... nothing. Kernel panic as kudzu searched for new hardware. At this point I'm guessing most newbies would give up. It wasn't a big hurdle if you realise you can switch to interactive mode and stop kudzu loading, but still.

The sound daemon in Gnome also locks up pretty often, so badly that you can't even remove the kernel modules - a reboot is the only fix - so I can't use the sound.

The display driver loaded for the Radion mobility card has no 3D acceleration, so the fix is to manually edit XF86config and modules.conf to get the unsupported 3D working (which does work pretty well, BTW!). Obviously the modem isn't going to work, but I don't need it anyway so that's not a big deal. Firewire cannot be used (I suspect this is what locks up Kudzu).

I still use it as a handy web development platform though - Mozilla + apache + PHP + Perl + MySQL are the web developers friends! If only Macromedia or Adobe would port their graphic apps to Linux I wouldn't need Windows...

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:Are you recommending Root Hat 6?

[Rick_T]

> What Linux desktop operating system will 1. run
> in GUI mode on hardware that a school system owns
> (which may include 5-6 year old PCs), 2. not be
> easily broken into (remember Red Hat Linux's old
> nickname "Root Hat"), and 3. be easy to install
> and configure?

Redhat 7.3? It's still supported, runs fine on "school" hardware (At least my two laptops cope with it well. One's a P233 and the other's a PII/266).

For that matter, I run Redhat 7.3 on the system I use to develop coursework for my students (the PII/266 laptop).

And actually, Red Hat *does* release bug fixes for Redhat 6.2. See http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/ and look under "Supported (Active) Products". However, why you'd run 6.2 on older hardware when you can run 7.x is beyond me. The 7.x series actually ran FASTER on my old hardware than the 6.x series did.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[zerofoo]

Nope, that option does not appear in the bios. I guess we won't be seeing that from Intel until the 3.06 GHz P4 is out.

-ted

Re:Taiwan Ceases to exist, according to RedHat.

[FooBarWidget]

Yeah and people from Guangzho speak Mandarin differently than people from Beijing. Heck, they even have their own dialect. And people from Hong Kong behave differenly than people from Beijing.

Even in this small, small country called The Netherlands, people from Amsterdam speak different than people from Apeldoorn (traveling from Amsterdam to Apeldoorn by train doesn't even take more than 1.5 hours).

Political views and economy has nothing to do with culture because they are decided by those who have the power, not the majority of the people.

What's your point?

It's fun to violate D-M-C-A...

[dcavanaugh]

I heard RIAA was going to sue Usenet, because of all the binary MP3 postings. I'll bet the people at Usenet headquarters are all huddled under a table, trying to hide from the lawyers.

Re:I can't read rh related post on kde mailling li

[FooBarWidget]

That only proofs that the KDE community is immature and a bunch of RedHat haters.
When the KDE change in RedHat was announced, dot.kde.org immediately posted an article and a huge flamewar emerged. A week later, when RedHat posted a document explaining their reasons, dot.kde.org didn't even mention it. And a while later, when somebody posted a review about the UI change, dot.kde.org didn't say anything either. No, they'd rather keep it secret from their community so that people can stay angry and throw out more flames.

RedHat did not only change KDE; they "crippled" GNOME too. It's icons are changed, it's default theme is changed, it's menus are changed, etc. Yet the GNOME community didn't even throw a small fireball, while the KDE community set the pool on fire.

FUD. check

[bogie]

"Requires registration for (security) updates. check"

No they don't require registration. You can freely download updates at will. You can also use apt to get the updates easily and quickly.

"Sends your installed packets list during online update. check"

Gee that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the need to know what packages are installed in order to do updates?

When Redhat attains a 90% market share, starts selling closed source software, starts forcing ISV's and OEM's to support ONLY their product, and then breaks every anti-trust law known to man, then I'll listen to your crap.

Until then do us all a favor and STFU.

Not here

[prockcore]

"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)."

Well then technically gedit took 16 seconds for you to close down.

I just tried it, and on my K6 350, my total time was 2.5 seconds. So you got some serious hand-eye coordination issues.

Notes on Red Hat 8.0

[loncarevic]

I've had fears concerning new RH desktop environment, like the rest, but I can say that they *did* great job on this.

Some small portions that I would like to see in next RH 8.x release:

- abilitity to right click on menu item and change the same menu item, e.g. if I want galeon to be default Internet browser, I dont want to edit ~/.htmlview I want to change it thrue Control Center or directly from Menu

- set postfix as default MTA, Maildir support on

- add proftpd as choice for FTP daemon

- can someone tell me why my pcmcia modul is still loaded after any non-laptom install?

- in instalation process there are few unneeded steps, remove them

- installation process should have some game to play or bigger doc to read while instaling rpms (full installation is around 40minutes, avarage is around 20minutes)

- good collections of free Unicode ttf fonts

- existing gnome applications should dynamicaly pick up new ttf fonts placed in ~/.fonts (gnome-terminal)

- RH should work with OpenOffice to find solutions to incorporate ~/.fonts support to OpenOffice

- We need in next release only gnome2 apps, currently my old sheets are really ugly in Gnumeric

- RH need to make better manu organization (I cannot see licq, x-chat, ... in Internet menu)

- xcdroast included in RH8.0 is still old bogus version; RH upgrade it and add gcombust

- Nautilus needs lan:// or smb:// feature (like konquerer)

- gcalc is removed from distribution, as fas as I can tell, current calculator sux :)

Something to add?

Totally agreed

[Raul654]

Except for the Ipod, can you please show me *one* single thing available for Apple that doesn't have and equal or greater equivalent on the PC? [And even the Ipod has been made to work in Linux/Windows] And as the parent suggested, if Apple has done such a great marketing job, explain why they fail to break 3%? Could it, perhaps, be their failure to interoperate, innovate, or even give people a reason to switch? I mean, seriously, the easy to use thing doesn't even hold water when you remember that 99% of people know how to use windows now, so to them, it *is* easy to use. *That* is what I meant by doing what apple did to themselves.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[Dr Caleb]

Now that was good advise! I'll have to give that a go.

And it illustrated my point. RH never said that, they just said "Sorry, tough titties". Plus the Smartstart CD I had came with the server, so it was like version 80 something, before Linux was very popular.

Re:Didn't even get that far thanks to grub and lil

[Dr Caleb]

Yes, I bought all new 18G drives for the array, so it had to be formatted. If you didn't create an Array Config Disk using the Compaq software before installing W2K you may be out of luck getting the array back.

The Screen-Saver effect

[mbourgon]

This is the strangest thing... I've installed Red Hat 8.0, and it's been sitting there most of the day (I go futz with it for a few, then back to my desk). I've had 3 coworkers come by and comment on how cool the screen saver is (the standard is to cycle through all of them). Not sure how/if you could harness that (only idea: it gets them to sit down in front of it and play with it), but considering how much some emphasis people put on Eye candy, it bears mentioning.

RH is just trying to fix a problem

[g4dget]

I have found that KDE has become less and less interoperable with other desktops: it uses its own audio output, Gnome and other applications that were formerly listed in its menus seem to have disappeared, KDE's drag-and-drop does not interoperate fully with non-KDE apps, and KDE flaunts many X11 conventions. If you try to start up a KDE application under a non-KDE desktop, it starts up big, noisy background processes. Under Debian, installing KDE automatically made kdm the default on my machine.

The KDE attitude seems to be that there is a war to win for the Linux desktop, while other efforts are more geared towards providing interoperable toolsets of which you can reuse as much or as little as you like. Fortunately, KDE code is open source, and it is entirely appropriate for RedHat and other developers to pick apart the KDE distribution and code and reuse whatever parts are useful. That's how open source works: if a project fails to meet the needs of its users, it gets cannibalized and its parts reused. KDE is probably due for a lot more cannibalization in the future.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[twener]

> it uses its own audio output

Pardon what? It's a sound daemon and afaik compatible to esound.

> Gnome and other applications that were formerly listed in its menus seem to have disappeared

Run kappfinder or complain to your distribution.

> KDE's drag-and-drop does not interoperate fully with non-KDE apps

Example? Btw which KDE version are you running?

> KDE flaunts many X11 conventions

I don't understand this, is this bad?

> If you try to start up a KDE application under a non-KDE desktop, it starts up big, noisy background processes.

Noisy? That's the price for an integrated environment.

> Under Debian, installing KDE automatically made kdm the default on my machine.

Blame Debian package maintainers, not KDE.

> KDE is probably due for a lot more cannibalization in the future.

You're a troll.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[g4dget]

"it uses its own audio output" Pardon what? It's a sound daemon and afaik compatible to esound.

I have never seen it be compatible with "esound". xmms, for example, doesn't work when it is set to "arts" output and run under Gnome.

"KDE's drag-and-drop does not interoperate fully with non-KDE apps" Example? Btw which KDE version are you running?

File manager to Gimp, for example. I'm running the latest version in Debian (although I'm not running it very often anymore).

"KDE flaunts many X11 conventions" I don't understand this, is this bad?

Yes, it's bad. It makes KDE applications interoperate less well with the rest of X11 and requires more effort on the parts of users to figure it out (unless, of course, they only run KDE, which is the not-so-secret master plan of the KDE effort).

"KDE is probably due for a lot more cannibalization in the future." You're a troll.

I'm sorry, but how is a simple statement of what I believe is going to happen to KDE "trolling"? I think the mainstream future for KDE applications is that the useful ones will be picked apart, KDE desktop dependencies removed, and reused as part of a unified Linux desktop. RedHat has only begun down that road. You are free to disagree. Insults, however, won't get you anywhere.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[Arandir]

it uses its own audio output

How is that any different than GNOME? Complaining that KDE uses its own audio daemon instead of esound is like complaining it uses it's own toolkit instead of GTK+.

Gnome and other applications that were formerly listed in its menus seem to have disappeared

KDE has always included kappfinder, which searched the system for applications to add to the menu. If you not seeing them there now, then perhaps your distro is no longer running kappfinder during install. So go run it manually.

KDE's drag-and-drop does not interoperate fully with non-KDE apps

To reiterate, how is this different from GNOME? DnD support is much improved, but there will still be the odd application out there that doesn't support the freedesktop.org standard. This isn't the fault of freedesktop.org or KDE, but the fault of that odd application.

KDE flaunts many X11 conventions

To reiterate, how is this any different from GNOME? KDE has at least tried to get it's wm hints standardized, but GNOME hints are still the scourge of wm authors everywhere.

Under Debian, installing KDE automatically made kdm the default on my machine.

Go complain to Debian. It's not KDE's fault that Debian is making kdm the default. I mean, sheesh, get real here!

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[g4dget]

How is that any different than GNOME?

Did I say it was different from Gnome? Both desktops, in fact, commit many of the same interoperability sins. But we are talking about KDE here and what RedHat is doing to fix the problem at the KDE end.

I hope RedHat will get around to doing a Gnome make-over as well. I also hope that RedHat will start hacking Gnome and KDE applications more deeply to remove dependencies on specific desktop environments from all of them.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[Arandir]

Considering Redhat is the home of GNOME, the number one financial contributor, and the only distro that has it as its default desktop, you would think that they would begin fixing the problem by focusing on GNOME rather than on KDE.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[jejones]

KDE has always included kappfinder, which searched the system for applications to add to the menu. If you not seeing them there now, then perhaps your distro is no longer running kappfinder during install. So go run it manually.

Just did which kappfinder on a box running RH 8.0; couldn't find it, and man kappfinder turned up nothing.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[g4dget]

begin fixing the problem by focusing on GNOME rather than on KDE.

They are hacking both Gnome and KDE. But when they hack Gnome, it's simply "Gnome development" for the reasons you observe. When they hack KDE, well, some KDE developers complain.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[Arandir]

Kappfinder comes with KDE by default (kdebase). If it's not on a Redhat system, I can only assume they've replaced it with something else they deem superior. Check your Redhat documentation. If no appropriate application is available, then start logging bugs...

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[Arandir]

The problem is that GNOME==Redhat in a significant number of circumstances. So when Redhat hacks on GNOME, the hacks automatically make it to GNOME. But when Redhat hacks on KDE, the hacks never make it to KDE, Redhat users log bugs to KDE, and KDE developer gets confused.

Re:RH is just trying to fix a problem

[g4dget]

Well, I agree that that's a problem for KDE. But what do you want RedHat to do?

Red Hat Network does exactly that...

[aksansai]

Red Hat has been pushing their Red Hat Network as a conduit to provide upgrades and fixes to their distributions through an easy to use utility. You can access your system profile on the web - anywhere in the world and schedule installations and upgrades to any of the computers that are subscribed to the Red Hat Network.

Red Hat Network was developed with the philosophy in mind to manage a large installation of Red Hat Linux based machines. You can group your machines so that one group gets the KDE packages and the other group gets the Gnome packages. If you have 500 Linux boxes at your site, the Red Hat Network is really a useful tool for network administrators. It is quite a shame that their up2date tool is still "basic" compared to the advanced interface that the web-based front-end to the Red Hat Network provides. If it were more advanced, I would think that more people would be exposed to the many options that are provided by the Red Hat Network.

All editions includes one free subscription to the Red Hat Network, while the packaged editions include timed subscriptions to their basic and enterprise subscription packages. For home use, it's a good method of keeping "up2date" with the latest security fixes and feature upgrades. It would also be nice if Red Hat took the plunge and allowed everyone (including the free edition ISOs) to get their top-notch enterprise subscription for a limited time (perhaps 2 weeks). It's really hard to conceive the features by simply reading a feature list.

Be mindful - often, Red Hat releases packages that are not considered the latest and greatest only by version number of the package. Red Hat incorporates their own internal team of software engineers to patch the source and taylor the package to their distribution. Thus, sometimes, you may be "up2date" as far as the Red Hat Network is concerned, but behind the times as far as the latest and greatest vanilla source release from the original authors/contributors. The packages released by Red Hat are verified and supported (via their technical support and bugzilla) for use with their distribution.

VMWare problems... other musings

[Critical_]

Well I have been running RedHat (null) for quite some time and then grabbed a copy from the campus servers (about 10 min a cd =). Anyway, everything works great. One thing I would suggest everyone do is get Mozilla-xft!!! It is unbelieveably beautiful. URL: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/experime ntal/xft/

VMWare is having some problems under RedHat 8. With a WinXP guest, on reboots and power downs, disk shrinkings the VMWare windows returns: (VMX) AIO:NOT_IMPLEMENTED F(831):654. Some have suggested that is could be a problem with the fact there is a new glibc, but I don't know. Any ideas?

I installed my TV Tuner card and it works great, Crossover Office and Plugin work brilliantly. I have Quicktime, AIM, Office2k, Quicken all installed with Crossover. My PHP-Nuke website is up and running as fast as ever. I built the NTFS modules and can seamlessly read my NTFS disks. SAMBA is sharing hard drives and a printer for the entire network. I installed all the fonts from windows into ~/.fonts. OOPadmin loaded them perfectly for use in OO.o. SHockwave, flash and java work great. I also installed the XMMS-MP3 plugin, Adobe Acrobat Reader, APT-GET RPM, SynAPTic, OGLE and XINE.

My complaints are the VMWARE problem and also the problem of trying to import my entire Outlook .PST folder file. All the methods shown on the web don't really work since my folder file is roughly 370 megs (yes it all text e-mail) so I can't use Evolution as my primary e-mail/calender app. Other problem is that my Microsoft Natural Keyboard pro "internet" and "media" keys don't work regardless of how much I play with Lineak however xev can see the keys being pressed. I can't get my Matrox G400 max to use my second monitor for some odd reason. I'll look into it though. Last issue is my Logitech Clicksmart 310 USB digital cam / webcam doesn't have any drivers written for it. Any help in that area would be appreciated. My APC UPS doesn't seem to like the RPMS for Powerchute so I don't have that running yet.

RedHat needs to work on their menu system since I can never find the right config app on the first try. It takes a bit getting used to it. I also wish there was a quick tool I could use to duplicate desktop setups from one default profile over to every other use on the system.

System specs: Dual Pentium3 500 w/ 512 megs ram, Ultra2 Wide SCSI 10k RPM cheetah drives (total disk space 200+ GB).

Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

it uses its own audio output

artsd is superior by far than the enlightenment sound daemon. gnome considered using it, but then dropped the idea. gstreamer is not yet finished, but arts support is already available.

Gnome and other applications that were formerly listed in its menus seem to have disappeared

Run kappfinder and it will add any applications in it's database for you. Alternative: run "ln -s /opt/gnome2/share/applications/ .kde/share/applnk/GNOME" or the equivalent. Gnome does not add the KDE menues by default.

KDE's drag-and-drop does not interoperate fully with non-KDE apps

Where? Please give an example. Many gnome applications do not encode the URLS as specified in the Rfcs and this can lead to problems...

KDE flaunts many X11 conventions

Which? Give some examples. It works fine here. KDE-3.1b2 works seamlessly with the only gnome application I use (pybliographer) and all other X11 apps I know.

If you try to start up a KDE application under a non-KDE desktop, it starts up big, noisy background processes.

Gnome apps do the same on KDE. nautilus e.g. starts esd, gconfd-2, nautilus-throbber, bonobo-activation-server and medusa-idled. Also these KDE applications are started on demand, are shared by all KDE apps you use and they disappear automatically after you quit the last KDE program, unlike some of the gnome processes.

I think you should provide at least some examples before you accuse KDE of not playing fair with other programs. Are you just fudding?

Re:Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[g4dget]

Where? Please give an example.

Gimp and the KDE file manager, for example. KDE blames it on the Gimp, but it works fine with everything else.

"KDE flaunts many X11 conventions" Which? Give some examples.

Handling of defaults, resources, command line options, event bindings, widget trees, inter-client communication (via a separate server rather than the X server), among others.

Gnome apps do the same on KDE. nautilus e.g. starts esd, gconfd-2, nautilus-throbber, bonobo-activation-server and medusa-idled.

What's this obsession with Gnome? Did I even mention Gnome? Gnome has many of the same problems that KDE has, but Gnome isn't the subject of this discussion.

Re:Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Concerning gimp DnD:
Why does KDE dragging work with xmms? Why can I drag from and to nautilus. Maybe because there IS a bug in gimp?
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22286

If you don't believe me, check mozilla's bug database:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cg i?id=161824

Evidently, gimp is triggering a bug in gtk's xdnd implementation, or it might still use the old obsolete motif dnd specification.

> Handling of defaults, resources, command line
> options, event bindings, widget trees?

You prefer xrdb to modern resource handling? commandline options? Like what? Which X convention exists regarding event binding?

> inter-client communication (via a separate server rather than the X server)

Bullshit. DCOP is a simple IPC/RPC mechanism built to operate over sockets. Either unix domain sockets or tcp/ip sockets are supported. DCOP is built on top of the Inter Client Exchange (ICE) protocol, which comes standard as a part of X11R6 and later.

Re:Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[g4dget]

You prefer xrdb to modern resource handling?

There is nothing "modern" about a mess of configuration files in ~/.kde.

Evidently, gimp is triggering a bug in gtk's xdnd implementation, or it might still use the old obsolete motif dnd specification.

Maybe KDE should then also implement the "obsolete motif dnd specification".

Which X convention exists regarding event binding?

I can rebind events to actions through X resources. The mechanism works pretty well. KDE and Gnome have their own, incompatible, and more limited mechanisms as far as I can tell.

Bullshit. DCOP is a simple IPC/RPC mechanism built to operate over sockets. Either unix domain sockets or tcp/ip sockets are supported

And what makes you think that one application can connect to the sockets of the remote DCOP server? What happens if they can't? And why does DCOP seem to start up for everything if very few applications actually ever need high-bandwidth inter-client communication? If the KDE folks had put their mind to it, they could have figured out how to do high performance communications through an X11 server without opening sockets behind my back--it's not rocket science.

Overall, I'm not saying that KDE is bad, I'm saying it's living on its own continent, slowly drifting away from the X11 mainstream. That's fine--whatever makes people happy. But as far as I'm concerned, it's good that RedHat tries to create a version of KDE that's a little closer to the rest of the world. They won't fix what I would consider the major problems of KDE (or Gnome, for that matter), but maybe they make it at least a bit more usable for people who don't want to sell their soul to a single desktop.

Re:Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

> There is nothing "modern" about a mess of configuration files in ~/.kde.

Don't you think e.g. ksycoca is a cool idea? Isn't automatic updating a good idea?

> Maybe KDE should then also implement the "obsolete motif dnd specification".

Maybe motif should rather adapt to the rest of the world and implement the xdnd STANDARD agreed upon by all other X11 developers?

http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/

>And why does DCOP seem to start up for everything if very few applications actually ever need high-bandwidth inter-client communication?

Most KDE apps are scriptable via dcop. dcop is actually used in the KDE desktop. dcop is also not high bandwidth, that is mcop (of the artsd).

> If the KDE folks had put their mind to it, they could have figured out how to do high performance communications through an X11 server without opening sockets behind my back--it's not rocket science.

I am pretty sure, that they gave a lot of thought to these issues.

See this part of the dcop documentation:

"KDE[1] already has[had!] an extremely simple IPC mechanism called KWMcom, which is (was!) used for communicating between the panel and the window manager for instance. It is about as simple as it gets, passing messages via X Atoms. For this reason it is limited in the size and complexity of the data that can be passed (X atoms must be small to remain efficient) and it also makes it so that X is required."

Look here for references:
http://developer.kde.org/documentatio n/library/kde qt/dcop.html
http://developer.kde.org/documentati on/other/rpc-t echnologies.html

Re:Not true at all, KDE interoperates very well.

[g4dget]

Don't you think e.g. ksycoca is a cool idea? Isn't automatic updating a good idea?

I'm sorry, perhaps I'm missing something. Are you excited about the fact that ksycoca notifies applications about configuration changes while the application is running? That may be impressive if you come from Windows, but the X11 resource system has had that for a long time.

Have you ever even seen how X resources work? Have you seen tools like "editres" in action? With a compliant toolkit, you can click on an application, get its widget tree, change properties or event bindings on the fly, and save your changes. Of course, it doesn't work with Gnome or KDE, and there is nothing equivalent.

dcop is also not high bandwidth

Well, then standard X11 IPC mechanisms should be sufficient and DCOP is not needed, which is kind of my point.

I am pretty sure, that they gave a lot of thought to these issues

Yes, but that doesn't mean that they made the right decisions. KDE and Gnome were really written with a Windows-like frame of mind: a single, local display under full control of a single environment. I think the people who started working on it didn't even appreciate the hard problems that X11 and X11 toolkits were already addressing when those projects started. And while the KDE and Gnome codebases are a lot cleaner than Xaw and Motif, functionally, they have thrown us way back.

In fact, neither Gtk+ nor Qt are really X11 toolkits--they are Windows-like toolkits that happen to run on X11. Someone should probably take a new stab at creating a modern X11 toolkit from the ground up. See here for some related work: XCB, Gettys, Sharp.

Red Hat 8 and KDE - a users perspective

[Nailer]

I have a fairly comprehensive article detailing what's been changed, with possible motivations for doing so, my own impressions, screenshots, and bug reports.

Read it here

Re:I can't read rh related post on kde mailling li

[fault0]

> That only proofs that the KDE community is immature and a bunch of RedHat haters.

Or that proves that the webmasters/editor of dot.kde.org is a RedHat hater (which I agree with, but that's my opinion), not the general KDE community as a whole.

It's on both sides. Some people in RedHat don't like KDE, and some people who work on/are associated with KDE don't like RedHat.

To eject the cdrom...

[crucini]

Type 'eject cdrom'.

On a more abstract level, first try 'man -k KEYWORD', or in this case 'man -k eject'. That leads to 'man eject' - view the man page for eject.

Perl 5.6? Apache 1.3x? cgi support??

[Billly Gates]

What really annoys me more then the gui is the exclusion of apache1.3x and perl 5.6!

Do you have any perl cgi scripts that access a mysql database? Your SOL. Redhat included the older gcc 2.9.5x compiler but not the older perl or apache. And no, perl is not fully source compatible with perl 5.6 like the perl mongers say it is.

I am learning perl programming from a college level book called "How to Program Perl" by Dietel and Dietel. Many cs majors have used their c and c++ books. I tested all the example programs and noticed alot of problems. Particularly with return statements, threading, mysql access, and cgi since mod-perl has not been fully ported to apache2 yet. The return statement problems seems to be caused by some changes in default scoping rules. I can easily changes these but I want to learn how to program and not learn how to deal with perl 5.8. Everything else can not be ported. I do not mind the newer versions of apache and perl being included. I would just like the older ones installed optionally as well as gcc. Apache 2.x is not ready for anything besides static webpages.

In other words avoid this release if your an internet developer.

On the other hand my gripe with suse is that their distro's have always been buggy and not as reliable as redhat or debian.

For my games which require low latency sound(sucks on w2k), and low ping times I will stick with redhat. I have noticed ping times cut in half in some circumstances and my scores are higher due to low latency for sound. I am already dead before I hear the rocket sometimes under w2k. For software development, I will stick with Windows2k.

Genius!!

[grendelkhan]

Between you, freshrpms, and the NVIDIA walkthrough, I am using a robust, do-everything I could want, workstation/server right now!

I dug through Google all day yesterday looking for the answer to this question, after screaming at a hdparam telling me that I couldn't enable DMA. Bless you, for you are a savior and a genius!

Re:I can't read rh related post on kde mailling li

[FooBarWidget]

If you read the comments at dot.kde.org, then you see that a big part of the KDE community ARE RedHat haters.

Re:I can't read rh related post on kde mailling li

[fault0]

Don't confuse kneejerk comments by people on dot.kde.org as a big part of the KDE community. Many other people are simply "dislikers" of RH, including myself. I don't like their distro. Neither do I like SuSE or Mandrake or the "pro"-kde distros.

Of course, I haven't used Redhat (much) since rh5.2, but everytime I've attempted to, I've fallen back on some other distro. I'm finally comfortable with my main box running LFS and my gateway running Debian.

Re:I can't read rh related post on kde mailling li

[FooBarWidget]

They are not saying that they don't like the distro and prefer something else, they are actively flaming down RedHat! "Oh my god I hate those guys!", "they're a bunch of idiots", "redhat is actively trying to kill KDE by crippling it", etc.

Re:That title is double-redundant!

[Raven42rac]

Is it that obvious?? Thank you for being mature in your reply, that is pretty refreshing. I am not quite a noob, but alas I am not quite an expert either. In my limited experience, Mandrake is the absolute best flavor for beginners, it comes with most of the things that they are accustomed to from the win32 world, like word processing, email, and web surfing. and gnome is a little too clunky for most users tastes. Your comment did seem a little anti-noob, and yes a vast majority of linux users are assholes towards noobs, I am glad I know a few who are not, I guess that includes yourself now, it is just that many have an elitist I'm better than you attitude, when it is for the greater good to win more converts. Debian is a more advanced OS than say, Mandrake, or Suse, or even red hat, but from what I hear, once you get apt-get, you never go back. Take care, I may just drop you a line if I have any questions.