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KDE 3.1 is again completely trumping Gnome in the Looks department!!! Even bluecurve isn't nearly as the default kde look, although people with very conservative tastes might find GNOME appealing. Moving from KDE to Gnome feels like moving from a bright summer day to a cloudy winter night. Gnome is coming along better than expected, but I think they need to find a good artist!

gnome needs a good artist? can't get any better than tigert and jimmac.

Hrm.. Don't see 9.0 on redhat's ftp. Must be a beta he's testing.

Where have you been? Red Hat 9-final is available for all users via BitTorrent.

Red Hat 9.0 is available to the general public on April 7 from the Red Hat website, the Red Hat network members can get it now though.

You can get Red Hat 9 final through BitTorrent ... I've even put it in my KaZaA shared folder :-)

[DOH]

Where can I find the superb sony-skin for XMMS? ;-)

"In this review, a [DOH] line represents something that I didn't like - or felt the desire to complain about..."

IMHO, that kind of remark is slightly out of place. And who is this "I"?

on the redhat page it says the minimum specs required for x and text are a pentium. Does anyone know if redhat linux 9 is finally compiled for i586 minimum i think this may speed up x and a small handful of apps up a small amount. Finally this was one fair difference between mandrake and redhat in my opinion. Arguably to some theres maybe not too much noticeable difference but to me its the warm fuzzy feeling.

>Not really a Red Hat complaint - more of a Gnome one

Actually, it is a Red Hat complaint, and a complaint for ANY company that ships something problematic, even if they were not the original developers. We are talking about a product here, so it does not matter who did what, the whole point is how the product is performing for the retail/end user.

It is like saying, "oh, my SONY TV does not support more than 32 channels and I need 128, but that's ok, the chip that controls that part was not made by SONY". Sorry pal, but this is a product. It either works as you want, or it doesn't. It doesn't matter who did what, the overall product and the label is under matters, because at the end of the day, the company that shipped that product could change it or use another vendor. And it is Red Hat we are talking about here, who are doing REAL engineering on the OSS software (not just packaging), even more than Suse and especially Mandrake do these days.

http://www.1001winampskins.com/skin_details.html?skin_id=2728

That is so a matter of taste. I prefer an environment that gets out of the way. I prefer less buttons and menu's. I prefer simplicity. I prefer to keep most aspects of my desktop constant, the way I found them. I think if I have to go around changing the look and position of everything on my desktop, then whoever put together that distro did not do thir job too well. Some of us just want a usable desktop. I think you can tell that I prefer Gnome.

A year ago I preferred KDE, but it got to me finally. I hate complexity disguised as choice. KDE doesn't have to provide all the choice in Linuxland. Gnome can provide some, and so can XFCE, and so can ROX. I think KDE should start making some choices.

I actually prefer the GNOME desktop, but I can't use it because KDE has more of the types of applications I need. Additionally, these applications are, IMHO more polished than their GNOME counterparts. The only GNOME-centric application I use daily is Evolution. If the rest of the GNOME applications could get to the polished level of Evolution, I'd switch back.

Here we go again. Now that RH has released another distro we will get to see 7 billion reviews from every know journalist who tries it out here on OSNews. Save everyone a trip.....RH9 = RH8+ Thats all anyone really needs to know. Did they add anything new and innovative? No. Did address any complaints since 8.0? No.

Enjoy

A linux distribution should always be stable. Actually Slackware, Debian, Mandrake and Red Hat have been rock-solid for me. Also FreeBSD and other not so popular operating systems I've tryed. Mostly it depends on the hardware you run them and on the configuration. Each one of them has bugs, errors, problems, but by most of them you can get by. To be honest I don't know why you are so impressed by RHs stability... Maybe you had bad experiences with other distros so far, I don't know. If you want stability and security get Debian or Slackware, if you want ease of use and to focues on productivity instead of configuration, get Mandrake. IMHO Red Hat Linux is for the developer, it always brings new technologies in every release, like NPTL implementation. That is why there are bugs ("errata") in the Red Hat distributions. Just my humble oppeinion.
Marc.

I personally prefer the default Gnome looks the the default KDE looks. I like the Gnome artwork better than KDE's and even RedHat's (RedHat's icons are not the default Gnome icons). But, this is just personal preference and can be fixed quickly with themeing.

Gnome's applications are indeed running behind their KDE counterparts, but this is the nature of Gnome's philosophy of releasing the underlying infrastructure and letting the apps come later. I personally like Galeon a lot (and am looking forward to trying out Epiphany). I definitely prefer Galeon to Konqueror for web browsing. Evolution could really benefit from the Gnome 2.0 move (will be much prettier). GEdit is a sensible, simple text editor. Even Nautilus seems to work well for me (I have a fast machine). OpenOffice.org still feels kinda klunky, but it has better support for MS Office file formats (unfortunately still important to me). OpenOffice.org is neither KDE nor Gnome, so KDE and Gnome are on equal ground in that category (for me).

I think GNOME would benefit greatly from an API freeze. I think GNOME will race ahead with Ximian Desktop 2. All the important apps will be GTK+2 and GNOME2. I am personally not too worried about that right now.

Hey how come they still dont automount your disks like other distros do? I dont get it.....

huh? RH has used automount for quite some time. I stick a CD in, and it's mounted automatically and in GNOME, an icon magically appears.

I actually prefer the GNOME desktop, but I can't use it because KDE has more of the types of applications I need.

That's odd. Last time I checked, KDE apps can be run under any X window manager or desktop environment.

The reason why GNOME lacks _some_ options is because Metacity is newer than KDE's window manager. Like it or not, sometimes you need to just start over because things have gotten out of hand - Sawfish was a good WM, but was rapidly hitting massive complexity level. It was time to start over, and it was a good decision. IMHO, this is not a big deal anyways, as the default configuration is pretty good.

I'm looking forward to Ximian Desktop 2 (XD2), which should be a real boost to the quality of GNOME apps. In particular, Evolution2 , RedCarpet2, and Ximian OpenOffice will do a _lot_ to help GNOME on the desktop.

-Erwos

The advantage of Bluecurve is that you can choose which DE you're most comfortable with (in my case GNOME) and you can use either GNOME or KDE apps to suit your needs. Obviously you could do this before, but at least now you have some consistency in your desktop. (Which is important for getting your work done and not being distracted by clashing UIs)

"The advantage of Bluecurve is that you can choose which DE you're most comfortable with (in my case GNOME) and you can use either GNOME or KDE apps to suit your needs. Obviously you could do this before, but at least now you have some consistency in your desktop. (Which is important for getting your work done and not being distracted by clashing UIs)"


Keramik (KDE)with Geramik (Gnome) does the same thing, without mucking up KDE like RedHat did. It looks better, too.

>> I think GNOME would benefit greatly from an API freeze. I think >>GNOME will race ahead with Ximian Desktop 2. A


And when on earth might we expect that to happen? Methinks Ximian is already way behind. They did have momentum initially, but the product is too late to make any difference.

have a look if you want

http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/linux/rh9/index.html

that includes information to help you install Fluxbox in Red Hat 9. If you need help installing Java for Mozilla 1.2.1 then click here http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/linux/java.html

I think it's good that people are reviewing Red Hat 9, it's a very very nice release from Red Hat. Rather than knocking them, encourage them, or write your own.

cheers

niall

Keramik (KDE)with Geramik (Gnome) does the same thing, without mucking up KDE like RedHat did. It looks better, too.<br/><br/>

How does Bluecurve muck up KDE? And wouldn't using a Keramik theme for GNOME be mucking up GNOME?

<p>
Anyway, we all know that Keramik isn't as nice looking as Bluecurve
</p>

"Here we go again. Now that RH has released another distro we will get to see 7 billion reviews from every know journalist who tries it out here on OSNews. Save everyone a trip.....RH9 = RH8+ Thats all anyone really needs to know. Did they add anything new and innovative? No. Did address any complaints since 8.0? No."

Obviously you need to read a review or two cause you're not aware of what you're talking about. Some things are innovative redhat sponsored the NPTL patch OSnews (and every other site) made a big stink about that speeds up X significantly merged into 2.5.63 kernel? well Redhat 9 has it as far as I know nobody else has put it in 2.4.x It's an NPTL patch
http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=603

As for complaints the two big ones were Nvidia (fixed) and ugly menu's (fixed) n/m this has been addressed.. read http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html

Well, I don't know exactly when Ximian Desktop 2 will go gold, but I believe last timeline I saw had Ximian Desktop 2 coming out in the summer. I know for a fact they have already released a beta of Red Carpet2 in anticipation of their GNOME2 desktop. You should also check out the cool work they are doing to OpenOffice.org.

http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1021&mode=thread&order=...

Clearly, OpenOffice.org is going to play a major role in GNOME development -- it'll be the GNOME2 office suite.

Sorry, but keramik makes me want to barf. Those buttons are absolutely hideous. My eighteen month old son could draw better buttons. I'd rather use a Windows style decoration before using keramik.

I hate KDE. Too complex. Too slow. Too much junk to try and figure out. Plus, I couldn't get konqurer to list files the way I like em.

Gnome, simple, elegant, does what I need and how I want it to without me having to think about how to do it. Bravo.




The interface is the computer - it's dark inside the box.

I haven't installed RH 9 right now, but I've the latest beta installed. I was thinking that RH9 will have a lot of things more, but isn't true. I was expecting Mozilla 1.3, GNOME 2.2.1, MySQL 4.0 but it doesn't have it (the GNOME version had several weeks before the introduction of RH 9)

But I must say that RH 9 is a stronger linux. I don't like RH 8 too much because I have some installation problems, and I think that i s not complete. RH 9beta (8.0.93) looks slightly better, is faster (mostly because NPTL), the GUI configuration files are improved, and the CUPS printer is awesome.

I think that RH could do a lot of work more, because in look is pretty the same, but if you use it you will see that it have some advantages. I could prefer to call 8.0+ or 8.1, but I like more this RH version than anyone after 7.2

I find all these reviews really boring, because they just do the install, make a few cursory observations about the appearance, and that's it.

I used to look forward to reading reviews, downloading new versions, etc., but the whole Linux thing has gotten pretty stale for me. Some distros are better than others, but all are really slow compared to Win or Beos on the same hardware. All lack any real GUI tools. (I can't understand way RH stopped distributing linuxconf & xconfig (the kernel tool)). Sure there'es a GUI, and a supposedly great kernel running underneath, but there's no connection between them.

Can't wait for yellowtab to come out...or at least the next syllable release, instead of this same OSS crap over and over again.

ll took about 45-50 mins total, with 30 mins for the packages installation. My ATI Radeon 8500 was detected as a radeon 8500LE but who cares when I just selected the 8500 driver from the list and it was configured perfectly. (probably same driver anyway!)

The Radeon LE is just a slightly lower-clocked Radeon 8500 with hyper-z disabled. I believe they can only be purchased OEM.

very subjective
By follerec (IP: ---.mydestiny.net) - Posted on 2003-04-02 18:12:11
gnome needs a good artist? can't get any better than tigert and jimmac.
well Redhat is using garrett, from linuxart.com

I too like the using gedit, but I would prefer it having syntax highlighing.

Although I use Gnome, I keep on launching kwrite for simple programs.

Anyway as another poster said where did you get that XMMS skin!!!

Gedit will have syntax highlighting in the next (2.4) version.

Valkadesh writes...
Gedit will have syntax highlighting in the next (2.4) version

Cool. Can you confirm this with a link. IMHO it is a long time coming.

Guys, please don't use bold and capitals when the same could be done with a > symbol and italics.

Also, please retain the synopsis of the message you are replying, by adding an RE: in front of it. This will help everyone... thanks.

Hmm. I have to say RedHat 9 is a lot better thatn 8.0 with respects to KDE.

a) It's faster
b) It isn't all screwed up by the RedHat Folks
c) Looks better.

Some other things:

- Seems to be less daemon bloat, much quicker boot.
- Overall seems quite polished.

Summary: 8.0 will no be forgotten - I think it was worse than 7.0.

Ohh an here's a mirror of the 3 RedHat 9 ISO's.

http://www2.unleadedonline.net/~grant/rh9/

Enjoy.

The window manager of BlueCurve under KDE has bugs. Check the two outmost right pixels of a KDE Bluecurve window, and you will see them being white instead of being transparent. It is VERY amateurish to release a version of the OS that has such visual problem. Apple or Microsoft would never release something like that.
I emailed Havoc and reported the problem to him and sent him a shot as well when RH9 was still in beta. He didn't reply about this in specific though and this doesn't seem fixed on the final either.

I think OS reviews posted in this site should have something interesting to say, a simple description of the install proccess is rather useless.
Also, while us, visitor of the site should be (and we are) encouraged to submit our reviews, OSnews' editor/content-managers should apply their right to accept or decline reviews based on their quality.
What I think we should ask ourselves before submitting a review is:
- Does it give any new knowledge or perspective to those who might read it?
- Does it raise a question or issue from which flow of interesting opinion could emerge?

Very subjective opinions and personal estetic preferences are a waste of everyone's time, and I'm sure there are other places where to share that topics.
I don't post this because of this specific review, so I hope nobody gets offended.

Regards, siko.

PD: I'll post my review in a couple of days ;p

"Apple or Microsoft would never release something like that."

Take a look at the scrollbars in the XP silver theme, and you'll gladly take that comment back! ;-)

>Obviously you need to read a review or two cause you're not >aware of what you're talking about. Some things are >innovative redhat sponsored the NPTL patch OSnews (and every >other site) made a big stink about that speeds up X >significantly merged into 2.5.63 kernel? well Redhat 9 has it >as far as I know nobody else has put it in 2.4.x It's an NPTL >patch
>http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=603

Although I agree that Red Hat is responsible for a lot of innovation... I think that you are mixing up things (hopefully someone can confirm this for me). That link (the whole stink about X speed up) doesn't really have anything to do with Red Hat's NPTL.
In fact, Red Hat people consistently claim that NPTL will not really have any benefit for the desktop.
I can't wait for the X-starvation fix to find its way into my red hat installation...

I like the Red Hat look, well I like the icons and the titlebar
Red Hat is starting to make some inroads to the desktop with Sams Club and if they would offer a setup assistant like YaST, I think Red Hat would be so much better.

You're right. The link in the previous post is not the right one.

Here is a better link re: NPTL

http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=422

Why? why freeze the API? GTK/GLIB/ 2.2.x is compatible with 2.0. It is GTK we're talking about not QT applications which require recompiling with each version of qt that is released.

I am currently downloading from the link posted by Grant. I wonder how it's possible to download from unofficial site when Red Hat hasn't made it available from their official site?

If people would pay attention, the anual $60 sub scription converts, get to download it a week early. If you can find some one that has it like Grant, or someone he knows. Or even use BitTorrent to download it.

>>Gedit will have syntax highlighting in the next (2.4) version

>Cool. Can you confirm this with a link. IMHO it is a long time coming.

Paolo Maggi is already working on it. See:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87031

I downloaded the 3 ISO's from BitTorrent last night in just over 2 hours. Granted - I do have a nice big broadband connection, but I had major problems trying to find a mirror that worked fast when 8 was released. BitTorrent used the maximum capacity of my connection.

Unfortunately I couldn't keep my connection open after the download as it was bed time for my daughter.

>i think this may speed up x and a small handful of apps
You think wrong. Redhat optimizes for i686, but only uses the i386 instruction set, except for glibc and ther kernel. The diffrence between optimizing for i686 and use i386 instructions only and also use i686 instructions is very, very, very small. Atleast until gcc learns how to use SSE and mmx. (Yes, gcc supports sse/mmx similar to day, but only as a possibility to the programmer, it doesn't take stock C code and use sse/mmx if appropriate.)

Did they add anything new and innovative?

I don't think so, no, but how about NPTL? Do you think that would qualify?

Did address any complaints since 8.0?

Absolutely! The menus are cleaner, and there's a new graphical Samba configuration tool. Reviewers and users complained about both these problems in 8.0.

That will be a welcome feature, much like the simple editor I use from the 'View Source' menus of my Opera and IE in windows www.winsyntax.com

I'm pleased RH is striving with release 9, and I am definitely looking forward to Ximian Desktop 2 with the improvements to OO.org

Keep up the good work guys n gals

Summary: 8.0 will no be forgotten - I think it was worse than 7.0.

Ohh an here's a mirror of the 3 RedHat 9 ISO's.

http://www2.unleadedonline.net/~grant/rh9/

Enjoy.
-------------------------


Too bad, it's down.
I have CD1, from CD2 440MB and from CD3 200MB :-(

Let be a little more clear on this....Im not trying to minimize RHs innovations to the linux core. Im aiming more towards desktop innovations....since thats what this is, a desktop OS. How about somthing comparable to SuSE YaST or Mandrake Control Center? How about addressing rpm hell and dependency hell......and yes I know that apt is neato, but where is RHs own solution to its own problem?

As for addressing shortfalls of 8.0, I still think they fall WAY flat. Ok, yippie they cleaned up some menus and added a samba config tool. In Gentoo I have full control of my menus and typing a single 'emerge ksambaplugin' command gets me a fully featured samba config tool in the KDE control center. This is small irrelevant stuff. How about giving ppl the choice of whether they want all the RH bluecurve and other tweaks and mods, how about KDE being molested, how about no multimedia support, wine precompiled, java, or flash support. Fine take that stuff out for the free version. But, how about licensing all the goodies for the paid versions.....especially the outrageously priced pro version.

I just get the feeling that RH is turning into the Microsoft of Linux. So they added NTPL....why? Is it that necessary? No it isnt. Furthermore, its broken several other things like wine in the process. I think the whole Linux community couldve waited til July for the 2.6 kernel with NTPL. When I go into KDE, I want it to look, act, and feel like KDE. Same with Gnome. If RH wants to theme em fine....but dont break or handicap either and always give the user the choice. RH shouldve consentrated their efforts around Gnome and left KDE alone. When I ran KDE3.1 in RH9, I couldnt even find some of 3.1s best features and utilities. I dont know whether they were hacked out or removed from all menu existance, but it was definately a sorry experience compared to other distros with an unmolested KDE.

Can some please sent me the Mozilla icon on the screenshots?
I LOVE IT!

holger at schreppenberg dot de

Guys, please don't use bold and capitals when the same could be done with a > symbol and italics.

Why not? To me, italics do not provide enough differentiation between the quoted text and the post text. As for >, I'm sorry, but I'm too spoiled by decent usenet clients to manually wrap my lines.

When/if these forums get a proper quoting mechanism, I'll happily use it. But until then, I fail to see the problem with using bold.

>> Why not?

Because it looks like sh*t. I prefer italics too. Otherwise, it looks like you are shouting instead of just replying.

Yeah, baby.

Because it looks like sh*t. I prefer italics too. Otherwise, it looks like you are shouting instead of just replying.

Yeah, I see your point - it's MUCH less confusing when it just looks like inner monologue.

How about the Gnome Control Centre. It provides most of that functonality.

Besides, they have a wealth of little tools that do the job very well. Take a look into the menus. What I like most is that their tools do not seem rushed. People are in general ungrateful whenever Redhat does something. Its like NPTL, well yes whatever and then you go on about YAST and Mandrake control Centre. Redhat is making Linux more viable for everyone here. Linux would much poorer without Redhat than it owuld be without Mandrake IMHO.

Erm, have you ever *used* YaST or MCC? They're nothing like Gnome Control Centre. That's for configuring, uhhh...GNOME. It doesn't have, for instance, tools for intelligently installing software, tools for configuring all your hardware, tools for configuring a variety of servers, tools for setting up network mount points, and that's just the stuff in MCC I can recall off the top of my head. Yeesh.

I didn't say they had it all. I said Redhat has tools that do most of what you say, and most are included in the system-settings:/// or in preferences:/// in Nautilus, due to the almighty VFS in GNOME. Just utilising good tech there. Plus they are in the menus already. You can configure your server there too, they have a file sahring tool for Samba now, and stuff.

No need to set up Network mount points if you ask me. Just smb:/// to the network location using Nautilus. Software is a problem. But I think that should be standard and LSB might be working towards that IIRC. Might not be a good idea to commit resources to that. Plus, anyway, Redhat is mostly geared towards producing what Businesses want. It business users want it so badly, they will demand it and it will be there in a flash.

They do have good hardware tools, plus probably the best hardware detection too. I have not used YAST, but I do have Mandrake 9.1 here right now alongside RH. So I know MCC very well. I do not configure my hardware daily anyway. That is the stuff I mostly do once, and the only other thing I do is install drivers and so on. I do not partition my HD daily. Most people do not. I hate to see a desktop machine judged on those grounds. I prefer to see the little nuances. Beautiful theme etc..

And go to get the drivers from NVidia. Easy to install. No more compiling here. Damn worth it.

I installed RH 9 yesterday. Really fast compared to RH 8. I am wondering how fast RH 8 will die as a useless release :-)

As for MDK 9.1 which I also tried, its non-professional look is confusing. Maybe RH has more money to pay its designers.

Personally, I liked the fact that you do NOT have seperate Control Centers for both the desktop and the distro in RH8.

In fact I wish there was no control center option in the menus at all. It is confusing.

Start Here icon on the desktop has all this stuff. It is tough to tell in my RH9 because I upgraded but I think that is included by default. It has the server tools, system tools and the desktop tools. It IS the control center so to speak.

I just upgraded last night so I have no played around and looked how the integrated their tools throughout the system.

SuSE kind of has it right for KDE users at least building the yast2 tools into the KDE Control Center. For KDE users to reduce confusion there should be no Yast2 options in the menus. All this multiple control center stuff is an unneeded layer of complexity.

> what can you expect from a pIII-733 with 256 meg of ram?

I expect a fair bit, actually. With the amount of effort put into kernel optimization, memory management and whatnot, I'm surprised to see this comment. I've had RH 7.3 running comfortably with both Gnome and KDE on my PIII-700 with 128MB of RAM for quite some time now. Does RH 9 suck up so many resources as to warrant an upgrade? If so, I may have to switch to another distro.

i could'nt find tha video play aplication, somebody can help me, i have red hat 9.0