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CPU Review evaluates Redhat 6.0
fusion94 writes "CPU Review evaluates Redhat 6.0 and gives it
an overall grade of "A". The full article can be
found at CPU Review. "
Check it out, if you like that sort of thing.
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/misc and
Are you sure there are /misc and /net?
They didn't appear on my system.
As for xemacs, don't u think the bloated emacs
is not enough?
StarDivision is the worst software company I have
...
ever seen (yes, much worse than M$). I can't believ that as a startup company trying to compete with the big brothers their customer support is so fucking bad. An e-mail to them would take weeks
to reply (if they ever). Even as the compatilibilty problem with glibc2.1 is well-known
now, they still don't have a fucking word on the issue.
Besides, Star Office is the slowest bloated piece of software I on Linux (M$ is bloated, but reasonbly fast on Windoz).
I wish I have a choice
Applix has a Linux offix suite.
Before we get excited, lets get the whole thing going! Sound isn't all that difficult to get working, but before we write about how easy Redhat is to install, lets do the whole job!
RH 6.0 uses glibc2.1 and Netscape is linked to
glibc2.0....Thus no java or plugin support for an
already unstable browser....I have said before, don't count 100% on Mozilla being a savior -- from what I have seen Linux is a forgotton stepchild when it comes to "working" features. (It's not that the features ar not "planned" for Linux, but you can see that the Windows snapshots are miles ahead in functionality...)
I think Linux is by far and away the best Operating system around, but is it to much to ask
to get a "working" web browser that supports things like...
A. JAVA
B. G2 STREAMS
C. ANY OTHER PLUGINS
D. ANY OTHER FEATURE THAT HAS BEEN WORKING
IN THE WIDOW$ WORLD FOR AGES.
Netscape treats Linux kind of like the kid who shows up late to the birthday party and gets nothing but what was left over on the others plates.....
And to RedHat: I may be wrong, but the browser is an important if not vital application for most users...And could you not know that glibc2.1 was going to break Netscape?
I've got a RH6.0 question that I think is related to glibc2.1. I had Q3 Test working perfectly on my 5.2 system. I upgraded to 6.0, and now q3 crashes so hard I have to physically reboot my machine, and there are always errors when fsck runs. I tried this 3 times, just to make sure I'm not on crack, and it crashes every time.
Is there any information on this? Is ID doing something about it? PLEASE! That was an amazing game, and I want to play it some more!
I also had problems with Netscape bailing when encountering certain Java. I checked for xterm errors and discovered some sort of window regeneration error. On the reccomendation of a friend I plunked down $40 on Metro-X, and all my problems are now gone. guess it's a bug in xfree86.
The runsocks problem is a glibc 2.1 problem.. The seg faults will happen on any distro. Quit blaming and start doing some research...
I decided to buy new hardware this weekend and get a copy of 6.0. So far, no luck. Each time I touch a menu in Gnome, the PC locks up real hard. I'm sticking to my older, slower, 5.2 machine until I can figure it all out.
Hmmm..several suggestions: /etc/rc* directories, over here I /etc/X11/config, but then again
1. Debian offers an FTP-based install that doesn't
need a floppy..its that flexibility that first
attracted me, a former RedHat user to it.
2. Check the
adjust one line in
thats a Debian convienience.
3. Try Eterm; I've had no problems with it and
it does some neat transparency features.
4. Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 several times in sucession to get back to the console, then log in as root and
do a "killall xdm"
Hope this helps
I have not had any problems with Netscape on RHL 6.0. Can anyone point me to a URL to test my config on?
I am sorry. Gnome is extremely easy to setup!
You really need to be a complete brain-dead to have problems with it!
As for workstation installation, it also works as advertised. I don't know how you people get to have problems?
Eh, what a pain, i have a matrox millenium card, works fine, detects fine under 5.2 doesnt work under 6? wtf?
gnome and E looks nice, slow bitch.
tried suse 6.1 aswell, im not oging back to rh for a while.
suse is awsome
One thing about the price hike, i was bitching and complaining about it, but with the inclusion of applix, i can justify it.
This happens when stupid programmers decide to change the applications configuration file format.
Why on earth change morons, two, if you HAVE TO change, for gods sake make yourprogram smart and be able to load old format files. It doesnt take a smart ass to do that, only an ounce of brains, why is it so many unix programmers sometimes after all the high tech stuff they do they still forget the basics of GOOD programming and easy-to-end user relationships.
Bind changing formats, yes might be better, but what would it take to make it auto detect old format and convert on the fly without the user knowing? Duhhhhhhh
Squid: ever changing config file, with items apearing / disapearing and changing names, geeez guys, get a clue, stick to one format. If your gona change a name, dont make the old one not work, your wasting thousands ofpeoples HOURS by having to change their config. go back to school.
Samba: minor config issues with defaults, but what pissed be off most was the smbmount parameters and all those changes... why? its like suddenly releasing a new ls command with all new options, or a new gcc 3.0 with totaly different option values, get a clue, do not change, ok, just add more newones. Its common sense ify ou have programmers a app before.
Imagine if bash suddenly changed its format... whos gona edit all their scripts to make em work?
Does dumb ass programmers just dont think about their users or they dont have a clue that millions of people are using their software.
Sigh...
Lilo just plainly sucks, i like the freebsd bootloader, now that is class and good coding!
True and people might want to make note of the fact that his *hardware was supported* that help make that possible.
;)
In other words:
Hardware supported=Linux is good(good first impression)
Hardware not supported=Linux is bad,run back to safety of former os.
Also note that the price increase netted quite a bit of demo-ware, shades of the windows world it would appear.
Ah the joys of world domination
Yeah, use KPPP and don't worry about scripting or using other tools -- it just works, like it should.
Then stick to your Mac (even I my self think it sucks)
Money doesn't pay demos. People
should start listing them as things you get
for the money. It's misleading, and it forces
you to filter those `feature' lists to compare
distributions properly.
I thought you were supposed to make a nice-sized /, /usr, /var, /home, and whatever.
"/boot" partition (maybe 10-30MB) at the front of the disk, then maybe a max of 96M swap (if you're that deep into swap, then fer crying out loud, spend some money on mo' RAM )and then allocate the rest of the monster-size drive to "/" then you've got your little bootup partition for many iterations of vmlinuz and other keep-lilo-happy stuff and then the rest of the big honkin' disk for the rest of your system so you don't have to bother yourself with such trivia as managing a bunch of separate partitions for
:-)
--Lorky.
I wanted to see what gnome and wordperfect 8 were
like so I wiped out slackware on my personal (vs kids)machine and installed Redhat 6.
I knew that I was asking for some trouble as this is a machine with all sorts of special case hardware on it. So to enlighten folks as to what to look out for and how to work around it here are some tips.
1) As part of the install Redhat asks for a description of your graphics hardware and monitor. If the Xconfigurator can't figure it out the installation ends up being incomplete (if you say to skip the config after failures). The only way to get X installed properly after that is to re-install RedHat. The solution I used was to install for SVGA and a default monitor. After that completed I was able to manually edit XF86Config based on my previous config under Slackware. This works fine. You can also run various XF86Config builders after the fact.
2) Non-Standard interrupts on boards.
a) Modem
RedHat neglected to have the file rc.serial in
Create one if needed. (I was running my modem on ttyS3 (com4) with an interrupt of 5 and without rc.serial the function setserial is never called to configure the port.
b) Sound
The Gnome gui config controls for setting up the modem didn't let me choose the interrupts I wanted.
Solution: Set for the wrong interrupts and then go to the appropriate file(s) in rc.d/* and edit in the proper values.
3) Gnome PPP dialer. I was never able to figure out the default PPP dialer for Gnome but the GUI lets you run KPPP from the KDE platform and that works just fine.
4) Networking: I have two nets. One a local subnet on ethernet and the other dial up. Using the GUI's I was unable to get the whole mess set up properly. I gave up and edited the
5) Makedev.
Scanner: The setup script didn't notice my scanner (scsi) so I had to make the device with an explicit command.
CDR: None of the linux distributions know what to do with a CDR. I just make a
6) Kernel defaults:
The default kernel with SCSI support wasn't compiled to support scanners.
In addition the NT file system wasn't included in the mountable filesystem as kernel or kernel-module. To Support NT and scanners the kernel needs to be recompiled.
7) A question for some RedHat expert. How does one create a new
(I just skipped it for the 2.2.7 kernel but left it in lilo for the 2.2.5 kernel)
Is it possible to upgrade to RH 6.0 from 5.2? I know that it was possible to upgrade from 5.X to 5.2- there was an upgrade option in the RH installer. Is it still there? Would I be better off just upgrading the kernal?
2^5
I was trying to keep it simple for people new to Linux; depending on who I listen to my review was either too Linux oriented or not Linux oriented enough...
/boot, a fairly big /home, a big /usr, a big /usr/spool on a separate spindle, and at least a /opt or /var; but I felt it would be counter-productive to go into that much partitioning detail in what was supposed to be a review.
I personally would prefer a small
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Tweaking httpd.conf fixed the loading problem... I was not expecting quite the load I got from being /.'d so I had logging (and a customized referral log) turned on, not enough spare servers started etc.
:-)
Tuning Apache a bit got the load back under control (0.3-1.9)
Since it was a tuning problem, does that mean I was Mindcrafted?
(that was meant to be a joke, for the humour impaired; they are re-doing the benchmarks in an "open" enviroment I will be quite interested in the outcome)
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Actually the package listing was mostly from their web site; the outside of the packaging does not give nearly that much information.
As for the review being bland/dry, you have to remember that the majority of CPUReview's readers are solidly in the Win95/98/NT camp; I was trying to present the review from their point of view.
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
I did present a simplified view; the article was meant as a review not as a beginner's guide or howto.
You are right, some of my suggestions were a bit advanced for a newbie; I tried to tone down the complexity but apparently I did not tune it down enough.
I did not follow the "Workstation" install because in the past I ran into numerous problems when I did not do a custom/full install.
I agree, the upgrade process could be smoother; I usually re-install from scratch every year or so.
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
does 6.0 support voodoo banshee based cards?
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Most reviewers never get past installation, it seems, and are too lazy to talk about whether Linux and its associated apps are actually a good operating system and environment. Of course, to do that you have to use it for a while after you've installed it.
Lazy journalists...
looks like the 1st part of the review was generated by reading the packaging (what apps are bundled etc). The rest is a pretty bland and dry review...nothing new.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
I had a nicely functioning RedHat 5.2 (updated to kernel 2.2.6) system until I did something stoopid and messed it up. Rather than try to figure out exactly what I'd done in the 40 days since I last rebooted, I figured I'd just save my home directory & install RH 6.0, reformating and starting from scratch. Install went well except for the one time it hung. I was doing an FTP install off of my BeOS machine, so I'm not sure exactly what happened there. I get it all installed and boot, thinking how cool the graphic login screen is (gdm?) I decide to try out Enlightenment (I've been using WindowMaker for about a year.) At first I'm thinking that this is great, but then strange things start to happen. The gtop program, which I love, suddenly stops working for my user account, but not for root. The tray thingy suddenly disappears for no reason. I can't get the Gnome configuration app to come up. Finally, I say to hell with it and switch back to WindowMaker. Now all I have to do is figure out how to set it up so non of the Gnome stuff starts up when I log in. Oh well, I guess that's why we have "kill".
The problem is with glibc 2.1. It's not entirely binary-compatible. Many apps (including StarOffice) need to be recompiled for glibc2.1
:^(
That being said, apparently StarOffice has been recompiled--but it's licensed only for the Applications CD. Aaargh...seems like a very Microslop-ish move.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Gee, seemed pretty easy to me, too...
I always recommend to new users that they shell out the cash for Partition Magic 4.0. That makes the job *much* easier.
Truth be told, I've installed Win95, Win98, and various Linux distributions. I know some otherwise fairly knowledgeable people who have gone through the WinNT ordeal. I would say that Red Hat is the easiest of all, by far. Sure, as long as nothing goes wrong with the install process on a Windoze machine, you're OK, but whoa Nellie, if something does go wrong...
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I think the review was an overly simplified view of a highly atypical Redhat installation. The person obviously doing the review has quite a bit more clue than even the average new Linux user if he's choosing fdisk over Disk Druid. While he continually makes reference to how easy it is to setup Redhat from a new user's standpoint, all of the recommendations and methods he gives are for advanced users, not newbies. I'm surprised that he didn't go more into Redhat's recommendations for setting up swap space and disk partitions. In fact, I'm surprised that he didn't simply follow Redhat's guide for new installations rather than simply doing it his way. I wonder if the installation would've gone as smoothly. A better review would've installed the Workstation setup to see if it worked as advertised since that's what a "typical" installation should be. His "nice" GNOME desktop took a little work to get setup. How easy is that for a newbie? Who knows, but I bet it's more difficult than the phrase that he gave it.
I'm not trying to badmouth Redhat 6.0. In fact, I'm running it now off an upgrade from Redhat 5.2. The upgrade didn't go as smoothly as I would've liked, mainly because I have a bastardized system consisting of weird partitioning, symlinks, and non-RPM installations. I could give a D to their upgrade process in a nice fancy format like CPUReview, but why? My experiences are probably due more to the way I set things up than to Redhat's merits. Their review is the same way. A much more valid review would come from someone who truly was new to Linux, or at least to Redhat. Then you find out how easy it really is to partition space, understand the instructions, and use a Window Manager.
Personally, I give RH6 about a B, B-. I give this review a D+, enough to pass, but not enough to mean anything more than it was done.
NOTE: of course, with the ever-increasing number of test cases of Linux in the computer media community, it's getting tough to find someone green enough to function as a "Linux newbie".
I've had the same problem with Netscape in 6.0. I figured it was just me though.
If you enjoyed this review, I would appreciate it if you told your friends and coworkers about CPUReview... who knows, someday even SlashDot might point to a story here! [Update: Slashdot did point here, and my server load went up to 87... I turned apache logging off, tweaked max servers/spares and now I can take the load.]
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
| 6.4 gigs of /var seems a bit high for me. :-)
/usr partition instead, as that's where most stuff you install wants to live.
Maybe he really meant to suggest creating a relatively large
-- Rick
I had only 1 5.2 system and it seems to be OK.
From 5.1 to 6.0 gets ugly due to bind versions too ... just some little gotchas to watch for. I suppose with patience and time I could have fixed it, but I had little of either that day. :-)
I guess i'll shut up now and go write some more requirements. woohoo.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
I tried 6.0 on a system. runsocks compiles, then segfaults consistenetly. Netscape dies upon meeting up with some complex Java....all this works fine on RH 5.2 and SuSE 6.0. It seems to be a library problem. Until it's straightened out, no RH 6.0 here.
I'm curious to hear if these are known issues/are there workarounds?
xemacs belongs in any linux dostribution, period. Not to mention one that comes on three CD's. Or costs 80!
There are some niceties to it that GNU emacs doesn't have.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Enlightenment is still flaky, and not even close to being complete. You need to write your own themes to change anything, and the default themes have widgets that are too small (to me) for any res above 800x600.
/opt; so KDE won't work with the added "switchdesk" tools unless you install it to the Red Hat locations.
/misc and /net ... weird. Who thought that up?
I wish RH included more window maker stuff, since that is by far the best wm out there (they have window maker, but no dock apps, you still need to go download a ton of crap to get a nice window maker setup).
At least they dropped that awful FVWM95 crap, and windowmaker is at least the default wm for the "Another Level" setup.
The biggest difference with the install is that the package selection is a LOT better.
Still no xemacs. Why?
Still no
They added
Still the rogue file locations as always.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Whoah:
/var seems a bit high for me. :-)
Note that if your drive is greater than 8.4Gb in size, you should create a 2Gb root partition at the beginning of the drive, and assign the rest of the drive to a "/var" or "/opt" partition.
6.4 gigs of
Use the mkinitrd command. For help with its syntax, try man mkinitrd. Enjoy!
--
.-.--
I found the GNOME documentation on this to be sparse, but I figured out. Launch the applet from your favorite terminal.( /usr/bin/dialer_applet ) /etc/ppp to execute /sbin/ifup ppp0 and /sbin/ifdown ppp0 respectively. This seems to work just fine for me. If anoyone has found a better way let us know.
Now click on the buttons and read the error output in your terminal. The applet is calling ppp-on and ppp-off, which on my system do not exist. (Let it be noted that the GNOME documentation said that a properly set up ppp connection is required for the dialer applet. I set mine up with RedHat's netcfg.) Anyway, i created a couple of bash scripts in
I needed to compile my own kernel because:
/etc/lilo.conf with an entry for my new kernel and running lilo I got a message that my kernel was too big. This makes no sense to me since the kernel that came with 6.0 was 1.4MB. I uninstalled lilo and installed the version that came on the RedHat 5.2 CD and it worked fine. Anyone have any ideas what went wrong here?
1) I needed to do some special stuff that wasnt included in RedHat's kernel.
2) I didn't want to run RedHat's 1.4MB kernel.
My kernel was about 40K. After configuring my
I know that Mandrake has a reputation for being a beginner's distro, but I've found that their releases to be better than Red Hat's. It seems like they wait just long enough to catch all the gotchas in Red Hat, plus they set up a little nicer defaults.
I've had nothing but problems with it so far...
First, I have no floppy, so I downloaded just the loadlin/autoboot stuff and tried an NFS install...no such option, so I had to dl everything.
Second, (not an actual problem, yet) I accidently said yes to booting into X, and I thought what the hell, it'll make it easier for my wife...
Third, the gnome terminal has a memory leak when transparency is on...everytime I switched virtual desktops I lost a few K...I didn't realize that until my box slowed to a crawl....so I rebooted, which brings me to
Fourth, upon reboot, xdm just flicks my monitor between video modes, and the only option is to reboot....and since I have no floppy..its back to dos, and loadlin to remove xdm.
maybe its just me
I installed the Star Office from the Applications CD and it works just great. I believe there might be some library problem with the version you just download from the Star Divison web site.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Otherwise, I'm pretty please with it. Of course, everbody's mileage will vary, as has been evidenced by many people already...
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
I don't think that StarOffice is to blame. I Installed both KDE and GNOME and I got the same error messages, right out of the box!.. I then installed only KDE, and everything worked fine.... any comments? what is this ld.so prob!?
Remembering your name in the morning is already a good start...
id:5:initdefault:
Change this to:
id:3:initdefault:
And no more X on startup.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I've had bad experiences with Netscape's Java VM on SuSE 6.0. The problems seemed to start when I went to the 4.5 version of Communicator. I've just downloaded 4.6 and I get the same problems.
I usually get a complete lock-up on pages with applets. A tiny alert dialog appears (you have to look for it). The few times I've been able to resize the dialog and read it's contents, it had "xlib: unexpected async reply" over and over.
Worst of all, Netscape keeps popping up these nearly-invisible dialogs until you're able to close it. I usually end up doing a kill -9 on the process.
I've downloaded Mozilla (M5, I think) and I'll be trying it. I guess I can also install glibc2 and see what the latest XFree version is.
BTW -- I don't think it's J++. I've compiled applets with the Blackdown JDK, and they run fine in every browser except Netscape for Linux.
Thanks for chiming in on this. If anyone finds a fix, please e-mail me (donkpunch@maiermedia.com). I would like to post the fix on my company's site.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
The Netscape problem has been discussed on RH's Bugzilla and seems to be trivial. just do /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
chkfontpath --add
then
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart
and the problem should go away (works4me)
see bug 2386 on http://developer.redhat.com/bugzilla/
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Hi
Try turning off acceleration features of your
video card and see if that fixes it.
I had the same sort of problem with an
S3 Virge GX/2 under XFree86 (machine locked solid
when moving windows etc. Not just X.) No
problem under the Accelerated X demo, though, so
it looks like a bug in the accel code for S3
Virge GX/2 in XFree86.
If you don't have an S3 Virge GX/2 it could still
be a similar problem. Try turning off
acceleration and see what happens.
If that sorts out the problem, maybe you could
persuade the people you got the machine from to
swap the card for something else with better
XFree86 support.
Hope that helps.
-- Wodin
Interesting to see that the Manual increased in size. MacOS 8.5 came with electronic installation manual only. :)
(I actually like manuals. But I think RH is going in the wrong direction.)
I just installed RedHat Linux 6.0 on my System at home. It runs by first time install.. but...
/etc/ld.so.conf and hereafter run ldconfig.... Please StarDivision, make us an update.....
Don't even try to install any libraries for use with StarOffice 5.0, that makes your Linux crash if you update
I just recently installed Redhat 6 and I will agree, it is very "idiot proof". I'm still having problems getting online with it. I'm hoping that someday Redhat will come up with a OS that is as easy to use as *GASP* windows.
It seemed like the update and installation program was a lot more robust. RedHat Linux is becoming more idiot proof.