While there is a lot of complaints in the review about the UI - I have 8.0 running and it is really quite an advance compared to many other distros I have tried.
RH 7.x users will love this distro.
Myths: KDE/Qt is broken. My favorite KDE/QT apps compiled perfectly with 3.2. The new Xft patches are already in Qt 3.1 beta. This is the fastest most bug free KDE I have ever seen RH ship.
The new scheduler is not mentioned, but this really improves the snappines of the desktop. Windows and dialogs move, open and close really quick.
KDE has a really good printer setup mechanism with CUPS. (IMHO should be the default for RH - LPrng is a PIA)
Bluecurve in the shipping version is really quite smooth and easy on the eyes. You can see a lot of work was put into making fonts readable everywhere.
Most importantly, this has a great many of the tools needed to slip Linux into the corporate enviroment. I would not suggest any Linux distro to Windows clients until seeing this.. This is the most important part of RH 8.0
Sorry, there aren't thousands of free "quality fonts" on the web:
1) Most of them are decorative or banner fonts which are not suitable for longer documents or any kind of high end postscript.
Try it - take a doc with some of these fonts and then try to output either clean postscript or send it to a RIP. Do not be surprised when it pukes..
2) Many of them are made by well meaning designers, who sometimes lack important technical skills in font making. They rely on the abilities of fontographer to compile everything correctly. So, quality is a mixed bag.
3) Many of these fonts have incomplete glyph sets and can be difficult to use in non iso-88591-1 encodings.
Making good fonts is really really hard and time consuming. (The guy who created Verdana for Microsoft spent more than a year just on that one font.) The new Luxi TTfonts which come with the more recent XFree86 packages is the right direction - well constructed, professionsally designed fonts. Luxi Sans is a good screen font if freetype is setup correctly.
The "problem" with the latest ghostscript fonts is they are not really great screen fonts, but most of them are excellent printer fonts.
Anti-aliasing is not the long term solution either. It just covers for the lack of hinting in a font. Freetype is getting much better though..
A font is in a sense a mini program and they have bugs. Just like other code - debugging them is not for kids.
This really great news. Linux and X have badly needed a unfied way to handle fonts for a long time.
fontconfig adds:
1) Excellent Unicode handling for developers.
2) This resolves the need for developer hacks and workarounds for accessing and displaying available fonts. For programs like Scribus - a Linux Desktop Publisher this will make life much easier in the future.
3) Makes adding and fonts much easier. Now we need a good GUI front end so installing fonts is as easy as Win/Mac.
For desktop linux this is as important as having TCP/IP for networking. (You need good plumbing underneath.)
Slashdot Mirror
GPL Color Management for Linux/BSD: Littlecms for Linux/BSD/Windows
GPL Desktop Publishing which is uses lttlecms: http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid
While there is a lot of complaints in the review about the UI - I have 8.0 running and it is really quite an advance compared to many other distros I have tried.
/QT apps compiled perfectly with 3.2. The new Xft patches are already in Qt 3.1 beta. This is the fastest most bug free KDE I have ever seen RH ship.
RH 7.x users will love this distro.
Myths: KDE/Qt is broken. My favorite KDE
The new scheduler is not mentioned, but this really improves the snappines of the desktop. Windows and dialogs move, open and close really quick.
KDE has a really good printer setup mechanism with CUPS. (IMHO should be the default for RH - LPrng is a PIA)
Bluecurve in the shipping version is really quite smooth and easy on the eyes. You can see a lot of work was put into making fonts readable everywhere.
Most importantly, this has a great many of the tools needed to slip Linux into the corporate enviroment. I would not suggest any Linux distro to Windows clients until seeing this.. This is the most important part of RH 8.0
Sorry, there aren't thousands of free "quality fonts" on the web:
1) Most of them are decorative or banner fonts which are not suitable for longer documents or any kind of high end postscript.
Try it - take a doc with some of these fonts and then try to output either clean postscript or send it to a RIP. Do not be surprised when it pukes..
2) Many of them are made by well meaning designers, who sometimes lack important technical skills in font making. They rely on the abilities of fontographer to compile everything correctly. So, quality is a mixed bag.
3) Many of these fonts have incomplete glyph sets and can be difficult to use in non iso-88591-1 encodings.
Making good fonts is really really hard and time consuming. (The guy who created Verdana for Microsoft spent more than a year just on that one font.) The new Luxi TTfonts which come with the more recent XFree86 packages is the right direction - well constructed, professionsally designed fonts. Luxi Sans is a good screen font if freetype is setup correctly.
The "problem" with the latest ghostscript fonts is they are not really great screen fonts, but most of them are excellent printer fonts.
Anti-aliasing is not the long term solution either. It just covers for the lack of hinting in a font. Freetype is getting much better though..
A font is in a sense a mini program and they have bugs. Just like other code - debugging them is not for kids.
This really great news. Linux and X have badly needed a unfied way to handle fonts for a long time.
fontconfig adds:
1) Excellent Unicode handling for developers.
2) This resolves the need for developer hacks and workarounds for accessing and displaying available fonts. For programs like Scribus - a Linux Desktop Publisher this will make life much easier in the future.
3) Makes adding and fonts much easier. Now we need a good GUI front end so installing fonts is as easy as Win/Mac.
For desktop linux this is as important as having TCP/IP for networking. (You need good plumbing underneath.)