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.

Comments

Re:upgrade from 5.2

[Russ Steffen]

Yeah, it's still possible to upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0. It's actually pretty smooth, with just 2 small issues that I've found in upgrading 4 machines

• The upgrade leaves your XF86Config file as is. That makes sure that you still have a working X11 config, but you have to hand edit the file to take advantage of the TrueType-aware font server they install by default.
• The upgrade will blindly install sendmail. This causes havok with a machine running qmail or any other MTA.

Re:Redhat 6.0 gets an A? Bah!

[Bill Henning]

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.

Redhat 6.0 gets an A? Bah!

[Hrunting]

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".

Re:Redhat 6.0 gets an A? Bah!

[cale]

I'd rather have a non-newbie review something for once. I am getting kind of sick of reading reviews of distros and having them all soley aimed at the newbies. I have installed linux a bunch of times and been using it for a while, I want a review of the distro that might actually tell me something about it instead of the normal newbie crap.

Just my $.02

Re:upgrade from 5.2

[Breakdown]

Yeah, there's still an upgrade option during the installation. I didn't use it so I don't know how reliable it is but the option is still there.

6.0 is better, but ...

[cthonious]

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.

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 /opt; so KDE won't work with the added "switchdesk" tools unless you install it to the Red Hat locations.

They added /misc and /net ... weird. Who thought that up?

Still the rogue file locations as always.

Re:6.0 is better, but ...

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

I've been "playtesting" GNOME+Enlightenment under RH 5.2 for a few weeks, and I found that it wasn't too terribly hard to hack an e.theme to suit my tastes better. I moved some buttons around, hid some dangerous ones away in the slideout, and for stylistic match I replaced the title bar pixmaps with some that came with the gorgeous "Cyrus" theme for GTK.

I agree about the buttons being too small (I'm using a variant of ShinyMetal), but a quick test in The GIMP indicates that the buttons still look nice if you scale them from the 16x16 up to 20x20 or so, so maybe I'll kludge up a BigShinyMetal++ or something next time I have a free evening.

My biggest gripe is that there isn't a common theme file shared by GNOME and Enlightenment, so that I could make any desired changes in one place and using a common syntax.

But a big question for me is: what is all this eye candy doing for me? Not that I don't like eye candy; it's just that I also like having my limited resources available for more important matters.

Also -- no flamewar intended -- my G&E combination only has a stability similar to Windows 95. Windows 95 often suffers from "Winsanity", and sometimes comes up all screwed up (or merely in a configuration you didn't request) whenever you boot, and parts of it tend to die unexplained deaths while you're using it. Similarly, G&E often comes up other than the way I configured it, and parts of it sometimes die while I'm working.

These problems may be in part because I installed over several beta versions. When people told me that that was causing problems, I did a major cleanup and got a substantial improvement in reliability. So I'll probably do a clean install of RH6, and maybe get yet more improvements when I do. And unlike Windows 95, I can expect improving patches over the next few months. So maybe I'll end up keeping it.

BTW, people on the GNOME list are talking about throwing a GTK-based lightweight window manager for use under GNOME. It doesn't sound like too big a project (they're talking about cannibalizing existing window managers' code), so it wouldn't surprize me to see something along this line within a few months.


> At least they dropped that awful FVWM95 crap

I can add a resounding "Hey man!" to that.

6.0 works fine for me

[Raul Acevedo]

I've been using 6.0 for about a week now, and it works rather well. GNOME has been very stable, and so has Enlightenment. The only problems I've found so far are as follows:

1. If using the X login screen to login, XTerms don't die when you logout, even though the X server is restarted when it provides the login screen again.
2. Bash doesn't recognize the Meta key in XTerm.
3. GNOME linuxconf still has several bugs in it which make it hard to use. Darn shame it's not more stable, it has a lot of promise.

Otherwise, I'm pretty please with it. Of course, everbody's mileage will vary, as has been evidenced by many people already...
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Netscape and Java on Linux

[DonkPunch]

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.