Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Follow me
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.
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.
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.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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
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.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
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!
/etc/modules.conf file:
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
options ide-cd dma=1
- 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.I hate sigs.
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)
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
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!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
nor suze posts because I've setup filters to trash them. ...etc...
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
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.
Actually, for roughly $20 a month, Giganews is the equivalent of walking through Compusa's software section with a shopping cart and a shotgun.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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