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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."
Well here's page 2, didn't get page 3.
Seeing Red
7:50 PM: the guys from Red Hat have appeared on the scene, and they're making haste to install projectors, connect cables, and to inform us that we have some serious traffic problems in the SF Bay Area. Hey, tell us something we don't know! Soon, the equipment setup is complete, and it's time to kick back and relax as the boot-up screen of Red Hat 8.0 glows off the front wall of the room.
Jeremy Hogan was the main presenter for the evening. Manager of Community Relations at Red Hat, he has a quick wit and a confidence in his message. That doesn't mean he can't take criticism from the audience, no. In fact, one of the main reasons for this road tour was to obtain feedback from ordinary folks around the country on what Red Hat could do to improve its business, its policies, and its products. Jeremy was joined by James McDermott and Dave Lawrence, both engineers who know the nuts and bolts of the Red Hat Linux system. Dave's main job is to do QA on every version of RHL that ships -- in other words, he has to test every package in the system to make sure it's working and stable. Also present was Jonathan Opp, a marketing writer who came along to ensure all the feedback received on the trip would be properly recorded.
Jeremy started off the show by showing off all the neat nifty new features of, you guessed it, Red Hat Linux 8.0. Namely, the yes-Linux-can-look-sexy-and-still-kick-ass interface of 8.0 called Bluecurve. Bluecurve is either an amazing blending of the two most popular Linux desktop environments, GNOME and KDE, or just a cute theme tacked on pre-existing software -- depending on who you talk to. The reality lies more in the middle of those viewpoints. Basically, Red Hat created a look and feel, a set of icons, an organizational scheme, and a number of configuration tools, and integrated them into GNOME and KDE to create a more unified interface and environment. Bluecurve is about 80/20 GNOME and KDE, respectively. If you want to use pure GNOME or pure KDE, you can, but most users will probably opt to stay with the default setup.
Since most of Jeremy's demonstration covered territory you're no doubt already familiar with from reading news and reviews on the Web, I won't cover it all here. What struck me as the most interesting thing about RH 8.0 was the fact that much of the GUI-based system software has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Most of the configuration tools are brand new. The package manager is brand new. The GUI-based X Windows System configurator is brand new. The roaming network profiles utility is brand new. In other words, much of the Bluecurve desktop environment is actually at what is effectively a 1.0 version status. The Red Hat guys repeated numerous times that they are encouraging as much feedback from users as possible on how these new tools and system utilities can be improved for future releases of Red Hat. Really, one of the most promising things about RH 8.0 isn't that it's good now, but that will it be very good in the near future. Red Hat has gone out on a limb and has taken the all-important step of rearchitecting the default Linux desktop environment so that modern, cutting-edge functionality can be built on top of it in a rapid manner. This is an important milestone for the usability of Linux and its suitability for end user solutions, and I think other distribution vendors will be scrambling to keep up with the pace of Red Hat's development in these areas going forward.
Know Your Market
The Red Hat 8.0 demo lasted only a short while, and much of the rest of the evening was spent doing Q&A. Super geek talk abounded, with topics ranging from iSCSI to the DMCA brought up to keep the presenters on their toes. Most of what was discussed wasn't all the exciting outside the context of the room, but an important point came up which is a good thing to remember.
Red Hat is not trying to compete with Microsoft on the desktop as far as average non-technical home users are concerned. RH 8.0 is a business desktop (and server, of course), and only for home users with enough technical savvy to be interested in and know how to work with Linux. That being said, I personally feel that Red Hat is ultimately building a better system for all users than a lot of other distribution developers are at the moment. This is based on my own perception of the market, not actual product testing. But even if Red Hat Linux is well on its way to becoming the best all-around distribution, Red Hat realized how important it is to know your market. If you target the audiences that will appreciate your product and support it the most, than you will have a much greater chance of success.
Anyway, back to our story. After the Q&A session, the presenters wrapped up the evening's festivities with a jolly good T-shirt throwing fest and an entertaining raffle drawing involving three red fedoras (gee, I wonder why?). I'm afraid your intrepid reporter failed to win anything that evening -- that is, except for a free no-time-limit evaluation version of Red Hat 8.0. Cool.