Gentoo, Lindows and Lycoris arguably were the big surprises of the year in the Linux land, but everyone is waiting the release of Red Hat 8.0 with, possibly, the biggest anticipation ever for a Linux distribution. Since Red Hat posted the Limbo and Null betas, fans of the most popular distribution on earth were making waves and even called this new version a Windows killer. Does this really hold up though? Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market? Read more to find out and view some of the high resolution screenshots we have for you! UPDATE: Red Hat 8 is out! ZDNews has an article about the new release of Red Hat 8.0.
![Some preferences with the unreleased BlueLightHouse theme]()
The installation of Red Hat 8 is similar to the previous versions. While Anaconda, the RH installer, was updated to support AA and GTK+ 2 resulting in a more spiffy look, little has been changed to the installer itself. One of the changes is that now you have to click “Advanced” to tell LILO or GRUB to only install themselves to the / partition and not on the MBR (I usually use the BeOS “bootman” bootloader), the option is not right up there as it used to be. Other than that, the installation went very smoothly; it only took less than 30 minutes with my 52-max CD-ROM I have here on this AthlonXP 1600+, 768 MB Ram (KM266 VIA Apollo PRO chipset, Asus GeForce2MX-400 AGP card and on board S3 SavagePRO, Yamaha YMF-754 and VIA VT8233 sound cards, RealTek 8139 onboard NIC). The OS rebooted and I loaded it into text mode, and from there I loaded X-Free.
As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven’t seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is “Sans”) are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920×1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. I think it should have been part of the font panel under preferences. Anyway, in no time I was up and running with Verdana as my main font on the Gnome2 desktop. I think Verdana and the rest of the web fonts I installed, render very nicely in this distribution (X Server included is 4.2.0)
The Gnome desktop included on RH8 looks sharp and clean. It has brand new icons, and only important plugins and launcher icons are included in the Gnome taskbar. For example, you will find a workspace switcher, Mozilla 1.0.1 (default browser), Evolution 1.0.8 (default email client) and the OpenOffice.org icons on the left side of the bar, while you will find the Red Hat Network Update Daemon (up2date) on the right, along the Time. On your desktop you will only find your Home icon, the “Start Here” preferences open in Nautilus and the trash, named “Wastebasket.”
Along with the brand new icons, you will find a new GTK+ theme, called BlueCurve, and a new window manager theme. I admit that it looks much better than many other themes from previous versions or from other distributions (the window manager is clean and up to the point – I like it), but there is still quite an lot of stuff to be improved in the UI itself. None of the suggestions we did here and here a month ago made it into this release. I hope the UI at Red Hat developers will consider some of the suggestions for the next version of Red Hat.
A nice surprise is OpenOffice.org’s looks in this desktop. Red Hat made some good work to make sure that OOo looks good, with full AA support on its menus, even when you try to type something on a document. Too bad that OOo does not recognize the TTF fonts I installed on my ~/.fonts dir, though. Other GTK+ application can’t see them either, eg. gedit, while other can (eg. Gnome2 Terminal). This is an incosintency issue and, in my opinion, it should be fixed.
![Mozilla, Evolution, Gimp, XMMS]()
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated “Start” Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don’t. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place? You have a “mouse” entry on your Preferences, and you got a “mouse” entry on your System Settings. Granted, the panels loading from each menu are doing different things, but it is just not clear enough just by looking at the menu items what is what and which one does what. You have to click both to see if it is the one you needed. A UI should be intuitive enough to clear up such misconceptions right away. Same goes for “Keyboard” and Networking panels. And if this is not enough, the Red Hat menu is cluttered with similar –at first glance– menus: “Preferences, Server Settings, System Settings, System Tools”. And if that is not enough, under the Extras menu, you will find submenus (with different apps in them) called… “Preferences, System Settings, System Tools.” Same goes for the Office, Games, Sound and Video. That “Extras” submenu is not needed. It duplicates things in a bad way, even if the apps offered there are different from their counterparts in the root Red Hat menu. The Extras should have been included in the master menus, and to avoid clutter, they should have been included under a submenu. For example, under Preferences, include a submenu called “More Preferences” and put there the not-so-needed prefs. Lycoris does it that way and it works well. The way it works now, after a while, you can’t remember under which “Preferences” menu you saw a specific item. Was it under the root’s Preferences menu, or under the Extras? Messy.
The Red Hat Network (up2date) is a pretty nice service and, via it, you are able to update your Red Hat installation automatically, via a GUI application. Only registered users are able to use the service. For the package management, Red Hat has created a nice to use “Package Management” application that will let you install/remove software from the RH8 CDs. I couldn’t find a way to actually make this manager to see other “sources”, for example rpmfind.net, but it is nice when you right-click on an RPM file it will load the “Install Package” application and take care of the installation. I installed a number of RPMs created for Null (there were no dependancy issues), so I don’t know how this installer behaves in the case there are dependancy issues. I downloaded an RPM (the “Downloader for X” application) created for RH 7.3, and it also installed and worked perfectly.
![System Settings]()
Red Hat still includes the Desktop Switcher application, so I momentarily switched to KDE 3.0.3. I think Red Hat has done a good job modifying a Qt theme to look similar to GTK+’s BlueCurve. Whoever said that Red Hat modified KDE to look like Gnome is wrong. The BlueCurve theme is not Gnome’s either. Red Hat wrote it pretty much from scratch. So, KDE applications now looks similar to Gnome’s, and Gnome’s applications are looking similar to KDE’s. This is a good thing. As you can see from the KDE screenshots the desktop now has an (almost) unified look (the buttons and some other details are not the same as in Gnome). If you do not count the plethora of GTK+ 1.x important and default applications (Evolution, GIMP, Balsa etc), XUL (Mozilla), God-knows-what-toolkit (OpenOffice.org), Java, some Python GUI apps I installed and some KDE 1.x and 2.x apps, well… the rest of the Red Hat 8 looks unified. Well, as you can see, not entirely. It is a step in the right direction, but until all these applications get ported to either Qt 3 or GTK+ 2 or create a BlueCurve theme for their toolkit and force AA to them, the desktop won’t feel entirely unified yet.
But as I said earlier, this is the most unified look and feel achieved today in the Linux world and it should be embraced by the community of users, instead of bitching at Red Hat for doing the Right Thing (TM) for their business. Yes, the “About KDE” is not there anymore, and very correctly it is not. I give props to Red Hat for taking this intrusive propaganda from the KDE Project to throw in this menu item on each and every Qt/KDE application. It is a completely reduntant, duplicated information for 99.9% of the users and it is there only to consume space. And yes, I am mostly a KDE user, but speaking as a UI designer (and not as a KDE user), RH did the right thing to remove that always-ever-present menu. The KDE About box should be included in a central place, somewhere else. Currently, you CAN view the About KDE box by clicking the KDE menu, then on the Panel menu, then on the Help menu and then you will find it there. It is a bit hidden I have to admit. But it is there, as you can see from the screenshots we feature here.
![Gnumeric, AbiWord, Quanta, ImageMagick, games...]()
Red Hat 8 comes with quite a number of applications, it even includes KOffice 1.2. Suspiciously and funny enough, when you install additional packages from the RH CDs via the Package Management application, all the GUI apps I installed were showing under the Extras menu, but KOffice was never joined the Gnome’s Extras menu as other KDE apps did after installation, while it does join KDE’s Extras submenu (which is identical to Gnome’s otherwise). Anyways, you can find a number of apps, FTP clients, KDevelop, Emacs, File-Roller, Gaim, Galeon, Gnumeric, lots of puzzle games, preferences for the http server, NFS, Services, hardware information, X11 resolution/monitor panel, Internet wizard with support for wireless, modems, nics, ADSL, ISDN etc. However, there are other things missing, equally important. I couldn’t find a samba configuration tool coming from Red Hat, no visual way to change your sound card from a list, and no visual way to change your monitor’s refresh rate or printers.
Also, there is no Java installed. No Macromedia Flash or Real Player either. And that brings me in the multimedia offerings of this distro. Or its lack there of. Red Hat 8 has to be the poorest multimedia-ready distro by default that I ever ran (except Gentoo of course, which comes with virtually nothing by default :). So, there are no movie players on Psyche (except the limited Kaboodle which is not even installed by default). None. No XINE, no VLC, no XMovie, no NoATun, no nothing. I don’t know what Red Hat means by saying that this is a “business desktop”, but I can tell you that when I used to work at Montal.com in UK, which is a business ISP and AIX/WinNT provider, the girls at the marketing and PR department needed the ability to play avi and qt or mpeg files daily. Our design company was sending us either Flash presentations, or real avi files to show us the progress for our marketing/advertising material they were creating for us. So, no matter how much I might bitch later in this article for not including 2D/3D drivers from nVidia, this is an even bigger oversight/issue. This is 2002, people, and modern offices and businesses need full multimedia capabilities by default on their desktop. And Red Hat fails to deliver these. Hurrah for Windows XP and MacOSX in this particular issue.
![OpenOffice.org]()
On a less important matter (possibly equally important for some IT engineers working at their dark room with RH8 trying to listen to their music – eg. my beloved husband) is the lack of mp3 capabilities. Because of the licensing issue of mp3 (which exists for YEARS for the SAME price, but for some reason people seem to think that this is a ‘new thing’), Red Hat decided to not include mp3 libraries on their OS. This is their liberty, but let’s be realistic here, most people use mp3s, no matter if both ogg vorbis and even wma are better technologies comparatively. Be paid that $50-60,000 USD needed to include mp3s on its BeOS back in year 2000, at a time that they were with one foot off the cliff, financially-speaking. And Red Hat, a much larger company, with more money and millions more users (Be never had more than 100,000 active users at the same time), decides to not license the technology. Well, maybe that was an ideologic decision rather than a business one, but the bottom line is most of their customers won’t be entirely satisfactied by this decision. No matter how you turn it, this is a limitation of the default system, as mp3 is a very standard audio format these days. And manually downloading and installing the already created mp3 RPMs for Psyche, it will only make you an outlaw and not the solver of the real, larger issue at hand here.
On another XMMS issue, it refuses to play online playlists, like my favorite one (works on Lycoris, doesn’t work either on Xandros).
There are good things in Psyche, don’t get me wrong. GCC 3.2 rocks; all the binaries are really fast, the system feels fast, and by modifying the services to load on boot, will make your booting even faster (dunno why Red Hat decided to load things like wireless and PCMCIA daemons on this PC though – I don’t have any such hardware). The default blue background image is pretty good too. WindowMaker, is the fastest between Gnome2 and KDE 3 and it works great too. The system is very stable too so far, except for the problems I describe later about the graphics driver. The filesystem used is ext3 while the kernel used is 2.4.18 (yes, it would have been nice to get some of 2.4.19’s goodies, but hey, Red Hat’s kernels are always kinda modified and patched with special patches for stability and they get a long time testing – which is a good thing).
On the downside of things, my mouse was not recognized to have a wheel mouse and after changing its type via the mouse system panel (one of the 2-3 mouse preference panels with the same name… see above to understand the sarcasm) to get it recognized as a wheel one, the mouse would jump like crazy on the screen, as if I had selected the wrong type (I didn’t). Killing the X server (couldn’t use the mouse or shortcut to logout – there is no shortcut) and reloading X, fixed the problem and I now have full wheel operations. I am not the only one with the problem. It seems that Red Hat does not enable wheel operations for all mice. Mandrake and Lycoris recognized the mouse with no problems though.
And talking about the X server… Hmm.. should I start about it, or not? I better do, it’s part of the whole experience at the end of the day.
![More system tools]()
So, here is the story: First of all, there was no resolution available to pick above 1600×1200. This baby, a high-end SGI Trinitron 24″ monitor, I got here can do up to 2048×1440, but I wanted to set it up for the much more “conservative” 1920×1200 at 90 Hz. The X preference panel does not let you pick VESA resolutions except the very standard ones, and to make things even worse, you can’t pick the refresh rate you want. I hand-edited the XF86Config file, I double checked the monitor’s sync info, and then added the 1920×1200 res to the confing file. Restarted X, and I was indeed at 1920×1200. But it wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz, even if both the monitor and this graphics card can do more than 90 Hz for that specific res! I tried everything, I created a modeline via XTiming, nothing! It wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz. I downloaded nVidia’s official drivers, and install them successfully (I had 3D and all now). I reloaded X, and again, even nVidia’s drivers X wouldn’t let the refresh to go up to 73 Hz. To make the long story short, I had to email Andy Ritger at nVidia and ask him to give me his opinion of what’s up here. Andy is an incredibly helpful engineer (thanks Andy!) and he sent me his GTF command line application that creates VESA modelines. Even by using this app’s modeline, X wouldn’t go above 73 Hz. By forcing the X server to go at 85 Hz, it would downgrade itself automatically at 1600×1200. By sending the XFree log to Andy, he figured out that for some (stupid most probably) reason, X thinks that when you are on 24bit, the pixel clock of the card can be only 300 Mhz, while it is 350. So, if I downgraded to 16bit color, I would get 90 Hz as requested. It took some more experiementation and my husband’s additional help to modify BY HAND the modeline that GTF created and be able to get to 1920x1200x24bit @ 90Hz. There is no possible way that even Joe Admin in a remote office in Alabama would have figured out how to fix that without asking directly XFree or nVidia employees. For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn’t cut it, and as a result, why RH8 doesn’t cut it when configuring high-end monitors or other not 100% standard resolutions. Especially when Red Hat hopes to get all these ex-SGI animators over to their platform after porting their custom multimedia applications. These are issues that XFree should fix, include the (proprierty) GTF mechanism (there is no other way) and update the modelines for more VESA resolutions for up to 2048×1536. This is 2002 we are living in, not 1995.
Red Hat comes with DRI 3D drivers for Voodoos, i810, Matrox, Radeon and SiS. There is no 3D support by default for nVidia cards though. I was a bit unhappy about this a few days ago, but now I am over it. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a business desktop and as such it does not really need 3D, right? Well, not exactly. Think the… poor ex-SGI animators trying to port and work with Blender and other GL-enabled animation packages on a PC with Red Hat, or game developers. Developers are employees too and this a business desktop, right?
![Red Hat Network, System Monitor, File-Roller, Gconf, Grip etc]()
I downloaded and installed successfully the nVidia 2D and 3D drivers. OpenGL works fine in 3D game, except that the GL screensavers have a problem to start in accelerated mode (yes, the memoryLimit is set to 0). After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate I wanted, X would crash. SSH’ing in the machine and either stopping, or huping or killing X (which would now consume 99% cpu), it would completely kill Red Hat 8 (sign that the kernel was crashing because of the nVidia driver) and I would need to reset the machine. Andy told me to set the AGP settings to 0, and I did so. In the beginning, it was looking more stable, but after a while it would still crash in the exact same way. So, I just reverted back to the generic 2D “nv” driver that comes with XFree. The problem is that this nv driver could not drive my monitor at 90Hz. I could see the windows’ edges to render as zig-zag, which is a sign that something is getting overclocked (while the gfx card _can_ do it with other OSes or drivers). So, here I am back on 73 Hz, writing this. I can tell you, I am not happy about the nVidia and nv drivers situation. The nVidia driver, which I compiled from the .tar.gz packages are NOT stable under Red Hat 8 on my machine even if when I disabled AGP support. I wish that Red Hat, who are now a big respected company (I wrote recently about their dominance in this year’s LinuxWorld expo), could partner with nVidia to include these 2D/3D _better_than_nv nVidia drivers by default, but most-most importantly to have these drivers fully tested and ready for download for the time when their OS is about to come out. As for the standard XFree “nv” nVidia driver is so basic and untested on high resolutions that if it was something real that I could touch, I would have already thrown it in the river, which runs outside my house. And please don’t tell me to dive in to the code and fix it, I am not a device driver programmer, neither I want to be one. I am a user when it comes to Linux and I expect things to work as nicely as they do on Windows XP and MacOSX (I do some C/C++ development only for OSX and BeOS these days).
There are three last points I would like to discuss in this review, because these are indeed real issues in the last 5 days that I am using Psyche.
First, the focus of windows does not always work and this is either a window manager or a toolkit issue. For example, I have Nautilus, gedit and the preferences/mouse panel open and I click between them (in the application body, not in the window manager) and while the clicked app gets the focus, it does not come into the front (I am using the default “click to focus” btw). Half of the time it would work and the clicked apps would come to the front, while the other 50% of the time1 it wouldn’t do it. This might be a toolkit bug, because if I click inside a tab view area, the window will always come on focus, while if I click outside of this specific area, but still inside its window, it wouldn’t. Weird.
Most important bug in my opinion is the GTK+ 2 combo box bug. Example: I get to the System Settings/Display panel and I open the graphics card panel which has a combo/drop down box on its right side, with the name of the driver loaded. About 60-70% of the time I hit the little arrow to open the combo box’s menu, the combo box would get a different value, EVEN if I did not click to any value! In my case, it selects automatically the “mga” option! This is a toolkit bug, and while it does not happen all the time, it happens MOST of the time and if a user won’t be very careful of what got selected without his consent, he/she would end up with a non working X server until he/she gets to hand-edit back the XF86Config file. Messy.
![KDE, KOffice, Konqueror, KontrolCenter, Gaim]()
The last gripe I have is the shortcut and navigability this distro does not have. For example, as I described above, by selecting the correct mouse driver for my mouse to give it the wheel ability, until I restart X, the mouse would move like crazy and I was not be able to click anything. I had to ALT+CNTRL+BACKSPACE my X Server (which was something that was not nessesary, X was fine), because none of the Windows Keys worked. By just clicking the windows key and the context menu key on my keyboard, nothing would happen, no menu would open. Yeah, yeah, I know. These are keys that the evil empire introduced. But they are freaking useful for God’s sake. USE them! They are here, present on each modern keyboard! And what about the complete lack of navigation via other keyboard shortcuts? How do I logout via a shortcut, or even better how do I open a Red Hat menu (in order to navigate through it and do stuff or log out) via a shortcut or via the Windows key? The Gnome Help didn’t help at all on this issue!
Conclusion
So, there are two questions remain:
How well this distribution would do as a business desktop? Let me answer this like this:
Psyche is better than most of its Linux competitors, but still way behind in both the desktop experience and feature-set from both WindowsXP and MacOSX.
How well this would serve as a server OS?
I am sure it would be good server OS. It is stable and fast. Some GUI utils are missing for configuring more servers, but for the admin who does not need GUI tools, Red Hat 8 would be better and faster than ever.
But as a (business or not) desktop, I am sorry, but I am still skeptical about it. It isn’t ready yet, it has a number of rough edges, and I really do not understand where the whole fuss was about the last two months about Red Hat 8 being a Windows killer on the desktop. It isn’t one. Not yet anyway.
Installation: 8/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 7.5/10
Features: 8/10
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.9 / 10
Thanks to Ed Boyce for going through the pain of proof reading this article.
This is the first time that I’m seeing someone calling an “About” dialog as propaganda. 🙁 And why is it intrusive? Who forces you to call it? What requires you to click it away? Just to have an impression about your value system, how do you call the required registration to be able to update your system/fix security leaks? This is not intrusive and doesn’t put you into a rage?
About GTF (Generalized Timing Formula): It is not proprietary. Au Contrair – it is VESA standard. You can purchase the standard from VESA, download implementation in spreadsheet[1] from http://ftp.vesa.org for free, or find one of bazilion free implementation of GTF from the net. It is just simple formula. The default modelines in XFree conform to GTF. If you want to make custom modelines, you should use one of these programs, because monitor vendors use GTF standard for their products. Yes, lot of programs for Linux ignore GTF, as well as Modeline-HOWTO ignores GTF, but it isn’t fault of XFree or it’s drivers, but it is fault of those programs or docs.
About NVidia drivers: don’t expect opensourcing anytime soon. Lot of 3D work is done in software, not in hardware, althrough lot of people believe otherwise. This is where “25% improvements” come from. Hovewer, this applies to other vendors too.
[1] – OK, it is Excel 4.0 file, but you can use OO to open it.
XMMS not playing eurodance is probably there as a feature, not a bug.
RH 8.0 Sucks too much like one windbloze e(X)treame
(P)roblems.
KDE works fine on other distros but not in RH well.It was always so messy why i;m not surprise right now it is the same thing like before :-(.
Sorry Boys but you just add new stuff and don;t clean the mess!!!!!
Well now, it seems like Eugenia has an issue with a cheesy ol’ GF2 MX card that she’s “pushing hard.”
Any 2D work doesn’t exercise either the card or the driver. I have a Creative Labs Ti4200 and I’m using the latest NVIDIA driver for Linux. My idea of exercising both card and driver is to run up Unreal Tournament 2003 and whack the res up to 1280×1024, turn everything up to maximum, and go fragging at 32 bits per pixel for an hour or two. Or three. Or four 🙂
Rock. Bloody. Solid.
I’ve been an NVIDIA user since my very first 16MB TNT, through TNT2, GF2MX, and now GF4. I’m no fanboy – the Radeon 9700 has me drooling – but I just don’t see these issues, and neither does anyone else I know who runs Linux. I would suggest that you sort out your XFree86 configuration, or your BIOS configuration, or whatever it is that’s breaking, because I’m damn sure it ain’t the drivers.
However. The point, made elsewhere, stands about who gets to support you if the drivers hork up. Creative Labs are quite clear – if you run Detonator drivers from NVIDIA’s site on Windows, you’re on your own. Do not call them with a support issue until you have removed those drivers and installed the ones shipped with the card. The Linux situation is no different.
> Red Hat comes with DRI 3D drivers for Voodoos, i810, Matrox,Radeon and SiS. There is no 3D support by default for nVidia cards though. I was a bit unhappy about this a few days ago, but now I am over it. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a business desktop and as such it does not really need 3D, right? Well, not exactly. Think the… poor ex-SGI animators trying to port and work with Blender and other GL-enabled animation packages on a PC with Red Hat, or game developers. Developers are employees too and this a business desktop, right?
Huh! Shame that a lot of Open-source software reviewers are so _ignorant_ they don’t even know that the nvidia driver is a _closed-source_ binary only driver. Do yourself a favour, buy a video card that has an Open source driver around.
Half of LKML bug reports are centered around Nvidia binary only drivers, that should explain something.
See ya.
Hari.
I rethought my position and read all 105 comments; you’re right that the user should come first. But I still believe opensource drivers should be the standard, and that’s where NVidia (and ATI too, in my experience) fall short.
This seems to be a bug in the driver (arbitrary chip timing limit of 300); RedHat doesn’t make it and they can’t fix it. Blame=NVidia.
For the record: Eugenia is the hottest chick around who’s reviewing Linux distros, and I *slap!* [husband knocks me out…]
Didn’t want to come off like a zealout; The closed-source driver thing has been the bane of my existence because of ATI — a tremendous PITA to get my DivX movies playing on a TV.
Well, I’ll lean out of the window *far* on this one. You might want to consider it flamebait.
Re: y2kprawn:
Linux will never become a viable *gaming* option because far too many Linux users don’t like the idea of *paying* for software. That’s what pushed Loki out of business and makes Hyperion generate more income on game ports to AmigaOS (sic!) than to Linux…
Re: Driver Issues
Ain’t it stupid that a new release of an OS, which does not bring any fundamentally new (like XFree 3 -> 4), requires updates to drivers? I smell a fundamental flaw of concept here. Perhaps {shameless plug} supporting the fixed, platform-independant driver infrastructure of the UDI project would be a solution… but wait, that would “encourage non-open drivers”, as RMS claims… but then, better non-open drivers that *work* than non-open drivers that *don’t* work, huh?
{ducks and runs}
I am a chinese, but I don’t like xft used in RH8, so I put my fonts and add the path to XF86config, then I set GDK_USE_XFT=”0″ to disable xft used in GNOME2, that looks good, but when I want to set the kde’s font, I can’t find the font I set in XF86config file, the kcontrol can only find the font which list in the xft config file.
how can I make kde to use the font not in xft.
thanks.
> Do yourself a favour, buy a video card that has
> an Open source driver around.
With an attitude like that, you will never win Windows users over. Joe Average is pretty busy already ripping his system apart software wise. Now you ask him to rip it open *physically* too, because his hardware is not “in tune” with the oh so better “free” world?
🙁
RedHat don’t supply the NVidia driver not for licensing reasons, but because they don’t (can’t) support things they don’t have the source code for. Licensing issues are why NTFS support isn’t enabled in the kernel (it is uncertain if any Microsoft patents are being infringed) and Xine is missing. RedHat is a high profile organisation and they can’t afford to stray into the sort of legal grey areas smaller distros can.
Oh and why was “////k” moderated down?
Refreshing to see a review which concentrates on the real issues of a Desktop OS, based on this review I can see that Mandrake 9.0 is possibly the best way for me to go.
I find it odd that the multimedia aspect is so lacking ?
RH 7.3 included Xine and a host of other multimedia players/viewers – I agree with your stance in the article, as I work in the multimedia/web development field.
Alas, I only run Linux at home for watching DVD’s, surfing the net and at work for all server tasks (without a deskop) – the rest of the important business Desktop stuff is still done under windows.
Even if RedHat did manage to achieve a ‘windows killer’ objective from a Desktop use-ability perspective, we would still be left without the kind of quality applications available for MacOS and Windows.
It would be fine for your average Desktop user who requires little more than a Word Processor, email and Web Browser, but for those of us in the Multimedia and Web Development field – it’s a not an option.
A bit of a catch22
Since when was nvidia drivers a closed source binary? When I was toying with SuSE and Mandrake, I never had a binary driver to plunk into my system. Had to build it from source each time.
Had to build it from source each time.
What you were actually doing was building a small piece of wrapper code when married the NVidia binary to your running kernel.
This post is a work of art. If you have not read the post with the title “The crucial importance of usability criticism” written by quag7, go back and read it. It is probably post #99.
Anonymous: This is the first time that I’m seeing someone calling an “About” dialog as propaganda.
When you use Mac OS X, you are using, say Mail.app, and when you click the Help menu on the top of your screen, do you see “About Mac OS X” or “About Apple”? No. The same case with all bundled Mac apps, including chess.app.
On Windows, when you open IE, and click on the “Help” menu, do you see “About Windows” or “About Microsoft”? No. The same goes for every other middleware 9 stupid states are trying to remove.
Conclusion: It reflects your professionalism. Red Hat doesn’t want the newbie to know the difference between GNOME and KDE, and that’s why on a default installation, no choice between the two desktops are given.
I don’t see GNOME developers bitching about the removal of About GNOME menu entries…..
Anonymous: Huh! Shame that a lot of Open-source software reviewers are so _ignorant_ they don’t even know that the nvidia driver is a _closed-source_ binary only driver. Do yourself a favour, buy a video card that has an Open source driver around.
Have you even bothered to READ Eugenia’s posts? Firstly, her card is one of the most used 3D card, nobody, I repeat, NOBODY is gonna go out and buy new hardware to experiment with Linux.
Secondly, all consumer 3D card makers I know DON’T HAVE OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS. While ATI does release the specs for its hardware, NVidia doesn’t, but that doesn’t really matter to the consumer cause in my experience, having closed source drivers is MUCH better than buggy open source ones.
Thirdly, Red Hat is big enough to make deals with NVidia and make their own drivers, albeit it would be closed source.
Solar: That’s what pushed Loki out of business and makes Hyperion generate more income on game ports to AmigaOS (sic!) than to Linux…
Surface months after Loki dismissal is employees telling how corrupted the owner was. The guy lost all his friends because it was greedy enough to pay his wife and not his engineers, causing the death of Loki.
A lot of people pay for software on Linux – when Loki announce it was filling for bankruptcy protection, you couldn’t find any more packs of their ported games…
Besides, I wonder why Transgaming is doing so well for a startup its age….
Solar: Ain’t it stupid that a new release of an OS, which does not bring any fundamentally new (like XFree 3 -> 4), requires updates to drivers?
What? You talking out of your ass? Xfree86 4.x was very fundamentally different from XFree86 3.x, technically of course.
atypical: RedHat don’t supply the NVidia driver not for licensing reasons, but because they don’t (can’t) support things they don’t have the source code for.
Like Eugenia said, Red Hat is big enough a company to license the source code and specs of the graphics cards than any other distribution.
matthew: Alas, I only run Linux at home for watching DVD’s[…]
How?
Three leading distributions have just released new versions at about the same time, with similar features (gcc 3.2, Gnome 2, KDE 3 etc). These distributions are Red Hat 8.0, Mandrake 9.0, and Suse 8.1.
As other readers have pointed out, it would be useful to have a comparative review of these distributions. How have they addressed the problems of installation, user experience, features, consistency, and configuration? Which features “just work”, which ones require knowledge on the part of the user?
The review of Red Hat 8.0 is excellent at answering these questions, measuring the distribution’s performance against a standard of perfection. I would like to know how these three distributions compare with each other – for example, would a dedicated KDE user prefer Mandrake or SuSE to Red Hat? Which distribution makes it easiest to use fonts, etc.
What do you mean by this? What errors? What opinion masquerading as fact? How easy it is to make statements like that and not back them up. And, if you cannot discern why ///k was moderated down, you had better go back to school and learn how to read.
>> Ain’t it stupid that a new release of an OS,
>> which does not bring any fundamentally new
>> (like XFree 3 -> 4), requires updates to drivers?
> What? You talking out of your ass?
Now, now. No reason to get personal when the problem is with you misunderstanding what I said.
> Xfree86 4.x was very fundamentally different from
> XFree86 3.x, technically of course.
Exactly, and thus I would understand / understood that you had to change your drivers to match those changes in XFree 3.x->4.x.
But RH 8.0 does not introduce such fundamental changes, yet still it looks like it is required to patch the existing drivers to work flawlessly. That’s what I meant with “fundamental flaw of concept”: Obviously the driver concept is not downwards compatible even with minor revisions. Bad Thing ™.
I had trouble with NVidia’s drivers on SuSE with my PC – in the end, I found that they were fine if you disable APM in your boot options??? Buggered if I know why though…
You can find the take of a user on RedHat versus KDE here:
http://www.cyber.com.au/users/mikem/redhat8kde.html
It might help to clear some of the FUD spreading about Red Hat crippling KDE.
Your overall rating seems fair (7.9) based on my experiences with Red Hat. However, your article is not. You focus way too much on the negative, and give hardly any weight to the positive.
I too have had difficulties with certain hardware on various distributions. However, I don’t blame unpaid volunteers (XFree) for my problems. I applaud them for the work they have done and the effort they have put in. They get no compensation. To rant on and on about something that doesn’t work (and is a very NON standard set-up…how many people have >$2,000 monitors) is childish and unfair. You say you aren’t a driver programmer, and neigher am I, but did you even so much as file a bug report?
In short, you give Red Hat a 7.9 rating but the tone of your article is about a 4 or a 5. The two don’t jive.
Sorry, just to point something out…
I’ve tried the nvidia drivers and they work well.
Compile the NVidia kernel, install the glx libs,
change the “nv” line in XF86Config to “nvidia” or “geoforce” (depends on what you got) and remember to use it with a kernel with NO SUPPORT for agpgart, framebuffer or dri (these mess with nvidia code – or it’s the reverse thing? ;-P ).
Remember also to set the __GL_FSAA_MODE environment variable to 3 (for antialiasing of 1,5×1,5 pixel) or 4 (for 2×2)
I too have had difficulties with certain hardware on various distributions. However, I don’t blame unpaid volunteers (XFree) for my problems.
This is exactly what Linux Distros are for: get my good money and use them to help OS projects they are including!
The “Will Linux ever go to desktop?” days are passed over. Now the question is: “Your is your distribution good enough?” and the competitors are raising the bar day after day.
I agree. The negative should be mentioned, but so should the positive. The latter is equally important, if not more important.
> However, I don’t blame unpaid volunteers (XFree) for my problems.
When I review, I take the position of the user: My mother, brother, friends, online friends…
And I can tell you, none of them care if the organization who does the graphics stuff on linux is a company, or unpaid volunteers. These users expect the thing to work with the first effort. Otherwise, they just go back to Windows.
I hope you understand my mindset when I review things.
…
Why? I am talking about the Redhat’s Gnome menu panel.
Are we talking about the same thing? RedHat isn’t using Gnome menu panel (those who sits in the top of the screen, that segregates Applications from Actions) by default – I personally think it’s a pity, i HATE Start-menuisms, it’s counter-productive to click “Start” to shutdown your computer
I didn’t see any gui app called “swat”.
http://localhost:901
(I really don’t understand why RH doesn’t use Web-based tools like Webmin and SWAT by default.)
You’re not an outlaw for downloading an mp3 player, RedHat just can’t include it on the CDs they sell.. nothing wrong with downloading it. As a RedHat shareholder, I would be pretty mad if they paied $60k for the privlege of including a mp3 player which could simply be downloaded by the user (or as part of an automated process), that money could be better spent buying an additonal developer for another year.. Or better yet: donated to Xiph.org to further Vorbis development.
When you have SuSE 8.1 comming up soon? A much better distro than you Americans can come up with? 😉
Open Office does in fact support TrueType fonts, but it doesn’t simply find and use the fonts even if you have the in your font path/setup in your font server.
You need to su to root, and run
<path to OOo installation>/spadmin
then add all your TrueType fonts. It found mine (/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType), but if it doesn’t, then supply the path to the fonts. Exit and now when you run Open Office as a normal user, the fonts will be available.
This is grotesque and ugly, and I hope that it gets fixed in the near future, but once you’ve done this, it does work.
Tim
The review has plenty of positive remarks in it. The negatives always tend to stand out more. And, by their very nature (things that should be fixed or changed, in the auther’s opinion), these remarks (in any review) take up more verbage because the author has to say what they think is wrong, why and how to fix it.
runmad, I am anxiously awaiting my copy of SuSE 8.1 to come next month! Of the big distros, it is the one I’ve consistently used and I really think it’s great. It sounds like Mandrake is continuing to improve as are the newbie distros. I have to admit though, I also can’t wait for my copy of Redhat 8 to come – Linux is getting better everywhere you look!
You can read the RH8 package list:
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/technical/packages.html (reload if the page does not come up due to heavy load).
As you can see, there is NO Xine! So, there is no real video player coming with RH8 (kaboodle is not installed by default and it is very limited anyway).
Am I the only person who thinks Linux desktop is far better than Windows?
I run Mandrake Cooker on both my machines. The other PCs in our house run Windows, and using them feels *horrible*.
I mean, my typical usage – email, web browsing, music playing, instant messaging. Let’s compare.
Email? On Windows, what do you get with a basic install of Windows XP? Outlook Express.
Uh…enough said.
On Mandrake? Evolution 1.0.8, an utterly fantastic email application. Or KMail, equally great. Or even Sylpheed, if you like. Or…
Web browsing? On a basic install of Windows XP, you get…Internet Explorer.
No cookie restrictions, no control over javascript, no pop-up blocking, no tabs, security nightmare…am I in the dark ages here?
With Mandrake? Mozilla 1.1, Galeon, Konqueror, all of which blow IE away. Especially Galeon, easily the best web browser ever written.
Music playing? On XP, you get…Windows Media Player. Now, around version 6.2, this was quite a nice compact little app. Since then, it’s become a horribly bloated UI nightmare and a thinly disguised vehicle for mass advertising and DRM.
Ugh.
On Mandrake? You get XMMS, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea I admit, but basically a clone of Winamp, which is the most used player for Windows, without the annoying claptrap you get along with it (thanks to AOL buying out Nullsoft). Also Noatun, and (sorta) rhythmbox, which is a bit alpha, but still interesting. Anyway – I have XMMS, which is perfect.
Instant messaging? On Windows XP, you get…Windows Messenger. Not only is it a) shite and b) only supporting its own network, trying to stop the bloody OS advertising it at you every two minutes is an exercise in frustration.
On Mandrake? I get gaim, which is smart, small, modular, fast, well-designed and supports just about every protocol under the sun. Or if you don’t like that, everybuddy, gnomeicu or a bunch of other ones.
Other applications, too. For video playing there’s Ogle, Mplayer, Xine (with Sinek or Totem or KXine), all of which are way superior to that bloody WMP. For IRC I have XChat, which I find far superior to mirc or any of the various Windows IRC clients I used to use. Newsreader, Pan is lovely. Maybe the only area where Windows is still a bit better is Office, but remember – that’s NOT part of your default Windows install, it’s a separate package which costs a fortune to law-abiding people. On Mandrake I get OpenOffice.org, for free.
Sure, not all this stuff is 100% UI consistent, but it’s pretty close, and your average Windows box isn’t, either. Most Microsoft products at least more or less look and feel the same (bar…that bloody WMP, again), but how many 3rd party applications just can’t resist having their own “kewl!!!” icons, menu bars, cursors, whatever? It’s a problem that affects Windows just as much as desktop Linux.
Basically…on my desktops, I use Linux not because i’m a fanboy or a geek or have a burning desire to be ideologically correct (although all those are cool bonuses), but because it’s one hell of a lot stabler and one hell of a lot just plain *better* than Windows. There, someone said it…
An opensource company licensing proprietary drivers for distribution is not only a conflict of interest but a waste of money. The current licensing terms for the NVidia drivers only allow the driver to be distributed unchanged. Which of course wouldn’t work for redhat as they would need to modify how it’s packages for their specific installation. This is why the only Linux distributions that automate the installation of NVidia drivers or make it simpler do a special download install.
SuSE is the only distribution I’ve seen so far that will download and install the RPM’s for the NVidia drivers. But, even then I had configuration issues with X and the automatic setup of the NVidia drivers. So far I have yet to see any distribution get it right. As far as stability with the NVidia drivers under (null) I’ve had zero issues on my system at home, at 1600×1200@75hz, as far as the lack of a video configuration gui they have one in the control panel, I admit it was a bit hard to find, but once I did, I was able to select my video card and monitor from there as well as setup custom refrash rates, etc. Personally, I feel as if the great performance enhancements and other features far outweigh any negatives you’ve brought up for a normal Linux user, a windows desktop user is a whole different story, and not something I care about…
Your criticism of it as a “business desktop” is irrelevant since RedHat’s CEO in a recent interview said they in no way have aimed it at the desktop at all specifically. They have made changes that are steps in that direction, but they have emphatically stated that it is not yet a “windows killer”.
If this is an AMD system, your AGP “problems” may actually be due to some kernel “optimizations” that are not necessary on AMD processors.
If it’s an AMD go into your grub.conf (or lilo.conf as appopriate) and a mem=nopentium kernel parameter.
That solved my stability problems with using an NVidia Ti4200 on RH7.3.
-Alan
Sorry, but I think you are the one who is missing the point. In the Windows world, people even if they have Asus or other manufacturer’s cards, they still pile up in queues to download the latest Detonator drivers from nvidia’s own site.
Eugenia, it’s still not RH’s or NVIDIA’s fault if the OEMs prefer laziness nowadays, e.g. simply copying NVIDIA’s hardware reference design and throwing to the market instead of innovating.
People go download Detonator because nobody seems to get the reference drivers and customize it. Sad sad sad.
good review
Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market?
When I review, I take the position of the user: My mother, brother, friends, online friends…
And I can tell you, none of them care if the organization who does the graphics stuff on linux is a company, or unpaid volunteers. These users expect the thing to work with the first effort. Otherwise, they just go back to Windows.
IMO You really need to decide on who you’re writing this review for and then focus in on that group’s wants and desires. First you start off by talking about RH infiltrating the corp desktop segment, another you’re talking about SGI animators and now in this comment you say you’re reviewing from a user’s point of view. These are two very different groups (business and personal) with very different needs which require two totally different reviews. You seem to mostly review more from the home user’s point of view so we’ll go from there.
I would also take exception to the monitor you used and how much ink you devoted to the problems you had associated with it. Sure it’s a choice piece of hardware but exactly how many mom’s and pop’s out there have 24″ monitors and how much space did you spend complaining that RH and your nVidia card didn’t work together optimally? Its cool to mention the fact that you had a hard time setting the resolution and precise refresh rate that you wanted but you spent almost 1/2 a page talking about it. This to me is too much inch to spend speaking about a monitor which only the hardware elite have access too. I think the review would have been better served doing the review on a common 17″ monitor.
Overall a good review (I esp like the UI criticisms) although its the most negative sounding 7.9 I’ve ever heard. 😉
about 1/2 of the review didn’t have anything to do with RH 8.0 – after page 2 Eugenia started a rant on the X server and nVidia drivers.
Windows XP requires you to download nVidia’s drivers for 3D acceleration – especially to use OpenGL. So I don’t see how that is such a bad thing.
Furthermore I don’t understand why its expected that RH is supposed to Xfree’s job for them and make a working X server.
It just seems like RH 8.0 isnt being judged on how good it is a distro but how good X Server 4.20 is.
Red Hat sells a product that hans XFree in it. It is part of the experience. If you don’t understand that, then you haven’t understood anything.
>>Isn’t SWAT installed by default?
>I didn’t see any gui app called “swat”.
Sorry, but if you don’t know what swat is, read the samba docs. or better, keep your hands off samba.
I never used Samba neither I forsee that I will use it. As I said earlier, I am not a sysadmin. I use FTP when I want to move files around my PCs in my home network (powered by FreeBSD), it works well.
Hi Eugenia:
As always, I appreciate your reviews, whether I agree with them or not. I’m not sure people realize how much time and effort goes into a full-fledged critique like yours. Well, now that I’m done giving you your props…
A few thoughts.
1) I’m pleased at the number of thoughtful responses we’ve seen here today. The “fanboy” factor seems to have been kept at bay (for the most part).
2) I can’t help but agree with the many folks who make the point that your video card’s driver should be released and supported by the MAKER/OEM, not the source reference provider. Regardless of where most users get the driver from (I also get my source rpm from Nvidia’s site for my GeForce 2MX, and have never had problems). Your responses have been defensive and lacking in substance. Just once, I think you should admit that you’re wrong.
3) The ability to drop ttfonts into that dot directory is a wonderful surprise. I only wish (as you do) that this was publicized information. Even more so, it would be nice to see a gui tool integrated with this ability (unless it already is and I’ve missed something).
4) I agree with you with regards to the Samba GUI configuration tool. Yes, SWAT is OK… but it’s not great. If Red Hat really wants to push this as a corporate desktop, they should really be motivated to create something with the functionality/ease-of-use of the tools provided by Corel/Xandros or Lycoris. Web based configuration tools still have a ways to go. Webmin is decent, but it’s really just an http wrapper for text configuration files.
5) I’m glad to see you supporting RedHat’s unification effort. Overall, I’ve been very pleased to hear the feedback from the Linux masses of RH’s efforts here.
Keep up the good work. And for gosh sakes, realize that you’re not always right (heresy!).
-fp
//If they can’t provide a driver for X, then they should simply close up shop, and give up producing video cards, because obviously they have no intention of serving customers. //
That is the _dumbest_ thing I’ve read on these boards in months.
Yah, a major vid card vendor should shutter, since they don’t support X very well.
Gee, that lack of support would affect, what — maybe .00094% of their customers? Do you realize the utter domination of Windows on the desktop? Do you have any _phreaking clue_ about R&D and logistics costs for supporting a candy-ass OS like Linux? You’re lucky they have any drivers at all for Linux!
You’re an _absolute_ moron if you hold this line.
Just ordered Personal Edition 8.1!
>>Red Hat sells a product that hans XFree in it. It is part of the experience. If you don’t understand that, then you haven’t understood anything.<<
Eugenia, along those lines then – if Apache sucks people have to say oh wow Red Hat blows because it has Apache in it. However people do not do that – they say Apache blows.
If it was a problem that was specific only to RH 8.0 then fine hold them responsible but every distro that uses Xfree has this problem as far as I can tell – so why nail RH over it, why not nail Xfree instead, its their product.
> if Apache sucks people have to say oh wow Red Hat blows because it has Apache in it. However people do not do that – they say Apache blows.
A BIG mistake. If you downloaded Apache by yourself, then blame the Apache project. If you got it via a product that you bought, you blame the company who sold it to you. EVEN if it was Apache’s fault. That’s how it works in the consumer world. Don’t try to think of it the “geek way”. This is a product. You have to think of it as a consumer. NO MATTER if it is not really Red Hat’s fault.
Cesar Wrote: People go download Detonator because nobody seems to get the reference drivers and customize it. Sad sad sad.
NO, that’s not it either. People go download the latest Detonator for performance, software compatibility reasons, or in the case of Linux, to make the damn thing work in 3D! One of the biggest reasons for Nvidia’s success is their taking an active part in driver development.
How soon we forget the days of 3Dfx. Diamond had their driver set, Canopus used theirs, Creative had theirs, Hercules… Don’t get me started on Hercules!
Early on, there was mass chaos in the Windows world when you wanted to run anything OpenGL or DirectX (instead of the 3Dfx standard – Glide), on a 3Dfx chipset. Doesn’t anyone here remember the reasons why Nvidia kicked 3Dfx’s butt? This was a BIG reason. 32-bit color that had the same performance and compatibility in OpenGL or DirectX. It wasn’t until the last year or so of 3Dfx’s life that they worked to iron out the differences and unify the driver set. Of course, maybe that was because after they stopped licensing the chips to OEMs they HAD to support them! Heh.
For a moment, forget the consumers – that’s not the point: The games CREATORS out there know what to expect from Nvidia and they only have to worry about Nvidia’s driver compatiblity – not ASUS, Gainward’s, Leadtek, or any of the multitudes of Taiwanese OEMs that just happen to be using their chips. If these guys do an “add-in” feature like video capture or 3D glasses, then by all means, the OEM should take responsibility for them. But here’s a case in point – and this involves ASUS.
I have a ASUS GeForce 256 card. This particular model has a 3D glasses port directly on the card. It’s a fruity feature, but kind of fun for like, 15 minutes or so. Anyway, the only way these things appear to work (this is under Windows, btw), is by using the Asus driver… Which hasn’t been updated since DirectX 6.1… Which was like, 3 years ago. But I look at it this way: just how long is a company like ASUS expected to provide said compatibility for specialty items like this?
I know this is long, but one more thing. At a time where ATI is kicking the crap out of Nvidia in both the OEM laptop market and performance sectors, is this a time for them that we should be hearing about ANY kind of instability under Linux? How long does a driverset need before it becomes stable? No, it is clearly their responsibility, after all, they DO have Linux drivers on their site. It’s not like they tell you: “Not intended for use by Linux OS’s.” Shouldn’t they… I dunno… WORK?! And again, not to miss an importnat point, who else CAN offer them, really? Ultimately, only Nvidia knows the codez. Thanks for the excellent review Eugenia.
-KikStart
When a chip or transistor in your television made by a chinese company burns out, you do not blame that chinese chip company, you blame SONY or Sharp or who ever sold you and put together your TV.
RH’s only added value is to make sure that it all works well together. If it doesn’t, you blame them. Even if the bugs are someone’s else in reality. You have to learn a lot of how you should be “seeing” a “product” when reviewing things. No matter if outside of the review, I understand perfectly what you mean, because I am a power user too. But in real consumer life, that does not matter.
I’ve read this over, and I don’t see a RH 8.0 review. I see a bunch of gripes on various X releated issues and the window managers – but you do know RedHat doesn’t write those right?
Where is the mention of Apache 2.0? That’s pretty major of 8.0. How about python version 2.2.1 finally by default? How well does mod_perl / mod_python / php work under Apache 2.0? Why did RedHat ship a version of OpenSSL known to be hackable and even has a CERT? When you choose a database option, does postgres or MySQL default? How does laptop support fair? Wireless lan suppot?
I guess if you just surf the web, and maybe write a word doc then this review is fine – but then if that’s all you do why are you running a linux box?
Mike
They critisize KDE, and make GNOME their default desktop when KDE is much easier to use.
Why do they do this?
Because long long ago, Qt was not completely Free.
<RedHatEmployee> Hey I have an idea, lets hurt our company and cause our share holders to lose money so we can show those KDE guys. Yea! That’s the ticket!
Mike said: {I guess if you just surf the web, and maybe write a word doc then this review is fine – but then if that’s all you do why are you running a linux box? }
Because Mike, Windows XP Pro is $199 more than I want to spend. I hate to inform you but the point of this version is a WORKSTATION release, every bit as a server one. Web and Email are the kinds of things people do at their workstations. Easily being able to get to these things (and use them) is important.
Eugenia’s review focused on usability – there will be plenty of Linuxhead reviews on the services side – but you know, I was personally far more interested to hear about this because ultimately, this is where Linux needs the most work – integration and ease of use.
And you can’t blame her. Go to Red Hat’s site and see what THEY stress about their release. What you mentioned is secondary my friend. Right from their front page under, “More Info”:
http://www.redhat.com/mktg/rhl8/
And then there’s the “New Features” section:
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/features/
It doesn’t seem to me that Red Hat itself and focuses 8.0 on it’s server merits. The truth is, we all KNOW Linux works well as a server. If I thought I could replace every Windows box here I’d do it tomorrow but there are still a few issues that prevent me from doing it – usability is the main one. I can use Terminal Services for the rest.
That said, it is really encouraging to see how far Linux has come in the last year alone!
{They critisize KDE, and make GNOME their default desktop when KDE is much easier to use}
Yeah, I hate it when that happens. The deal here is, when you’ve bet the company on GPL-based software, do you want to take a chance of having the whole base of the GUI pulled out from under you? Don’t forget about M$’s stake in all of this.
I hate the whole GNOME / KDE war thing, but there’s no easy answers here.
Jane User here.
As someone who is hoping to install a *nix on a PC at home, I thought this was a very well written and insightful article.
I use real player, quick time, and MP3s on a fairly regular basis, and to find out that software for these is not installed is a major bummer. Everything I read makes software installs on any kind of *nix except OS X sound very scary and fraught with pitfalls. Until I hear “no, you just double click on the installer and application unzips itself into your programs/applications folder, parks a short cut in your “start” menu and asks if you’d like an additional shortcut on the desktop, and you’re ready to click and go” I’m not touching it. Linux is not going to gain a real foothold on the desktop until it is at least as polished and consistent as W98 (and we all know W98 really really needs a good round of brasso.)
Then there’s the whole thing about the problems with the mouse and not being able to set a monitor at the desired resolution and speed despite ~shudder~ hand editing several files.
The screen shots look really nice; this is the nicest looking *nix I’ve seen outside of OS X, … once again, so close and yet so far.
(And yes, I’m a very happy OS X user. It lets me do what I want, when I want, without getting in my way.)
It says in the review you need to register to be able to use the online update system. Does that require a purchased boxed copy of RH8, or is it free? And what other options do I have if I want free and simple updates to recent versions of the programs? I’ve only tried debian, which is certainly simple and free, but doesn’t have very recent packages (unless you use the unstable branch, which is always a hassle in my experience).
No, updates are not free. You need to pay for the Red Hat Network for *OS* upgrades and patches. If you want more applications, you will need to download RPMs created FOR 8.0, and then right click on them and choose to install them (it does not take care of dependancies though). This is what Red Hat sent me today via email:
https://rhn.redhat.com/network/sales/purchase.pxt
What does $60 a year get you?
* Instant ISOs of any Red Hat Linux public release for the duration of your subscription.
* Priority access to updates and ISOs — no busy signals, no searching mirror sites, no waiting.
How do I upgrade once I subscribe to Red Hat Network Basic service?
* After purchase, you will be directed to the Instant ISO page. From there, follow the instructions for downloading and installing Red Hat Linux 8.0 from the ISO images.
Anonymous: An opensource company licensing proprietary drivers for distribution is not only a conflict of interest but a waste of money.
Why? Red Hat after all helped IBM port their propreitary software, plus offered to license Office to be ported to Linux. Granted, they have worked on closed source stuff before, and open to it – so big deal.
Chuck Hunnefield: The games CREATORS out there know what to expect from Nvidia and they only have to worry about Nvidia’s driver compatiblity
Not really, most games are built for DirectX, and while DirectX wouldn’t be here without NVidia, it is GPU agnostic.
Chuck Hunnefield: At a time where ATI is kicking the crap out of Nvidia in both the OEM laptop market and performance sectors, is this a time for them that we should be hearing about ANY kind of instability under Linux?
ATI kick NVidia’s ass many times before, but they never dominated the field.
Mike: Where is the mention of Apache 2.0? That’s pretty major of 8.0. How about python version 2.2.1 finally by default?[…]
She was reviewing for the desktop. Did you at least read comments from 1-30?
Anonymous: They critisize KDE, and make GNOME their default desktop when KDE is much easier to use.
Wrong: one employee said KDE was crapland (and probably got a stern warning), another left RH for crippling KDE, but overall, they never critisize KDE. They picked GNOME because they have picked it years ago, way long time ago – they can’t fire all their GNOME hackers just because KDE is a wee bit easier to use than GNOME.
As for KDE being easier than GNOME, or vice versa – how about some proof? Some usablity tests to back them up?
Hey I’m really wondering what CD 4 and 5 is for. I went to RedHats site and they pretty much say you only need CD 1-3 but not explaintion of what CD 4 and 5 is. Right now I”m downloading all of them but of course I’ll stop it after CD 3 if I really don’t need 4 and 5.
>Hey I’m really wondering what CD 4 and 5 is for.
Source RPMs. If you do not need the source code, you don’t really need them.
so, I’ve seen in the years that linux has evolved. Now a linux instalation is easy for most configurations out there. Now, once all the menus, and UI issues are solved in 2 years or so, what’s next? once you get to the point of being a Windows clone, what’s the next challenge?
Well…
“I use real player, quick time, and MP3s on a fairly regular basis, and to find out that software for these is not installed is a major bummer.”
Well, software to play Realmedia isn’t installed on Windows or OS X by default, stuff to play Quicktime isn’t installed on Windows by default. There’s a Linux version of RealPlayer available – it’s pretty well-hidden on the Real site, but once you get there it’s just an RPM which will install very easily (as someone says, right-click and hit install…EASIER than Windows) without complaints on Red Hat and Mandrake at least. Quicktime stuff is made harder by proprietary codecs and Apple not releasing a Linux version, which sucks, but is beyond the control of anyone but Apple. Recent versions of Xine can handle quite a lot of QT stuff, though, and that again is available as an RPM (and is packaged for Mandrake by default, I could add).
“Everything I read makes software installs on any kind of *nix except OS X sound very scary and fraught with pitfalls. Until I hear “no, you just double click on the installer and application unzips itself into your programs/applications folder, parks a short cut in your “start” menu and asks if you’d like an additional shortcut on the desktop, and you’re ready to click and go””
Well again. Quite apart from the Windows applications whose install routines don’t ask you where you want icons, just adding them anyway, and which like to make a hobby of installing lots of software you didn’t ask for in the first place, installing much software under Linux is actually easier than this, at least on some distros. On Red Hat or Mandrake, you get very nice GUI tools which will install any of the software packaged for the distro – and this is a hell of a lot of software – with a lot less effort (and in a much less broken fashion). Installing unpackaged software can seem (and occasionally be) daunting, but packaging for distros is the best way to fix this, and it’s done pretty well, I think. It’s hard to find a piece of software without an RPM built at least for the latest version of Red Hat, these days.
To some extent the monitor thing is a legitimate criticism, but there again, did you notice the actual spec of the monitor? This is a specialist 24″ job which costs over $2k on its own. Something tells me you probably don’t have one. For any more common resolution (certainly anything up to 1600×1200), most distros should have no problem setting it up, and the review gives the impression RH 8 would have no problems with more common resolutions on the monitors most people own (which is basically the range from 800×600 to 1280×1024 and from 14″ to 17″).
OS X inevitably has it easier because…it’s a captive audience. It’s one OS, for (pretty much) one set of hardware. No hardware problems, because – hey! – everyone’s using more or less the same stuff, and Apple makes most of it.
Although it has much to commend it in other ways (well, it is Linux!), at any given time other distros have been far ahead of RedHat as a desktop installation. So I am frankly not surprised how poorly setup RedHat 8.0 is for the desktop, as that is just consistent.
I am often amazed at some of the “unrefined” distro qualities the RedHat users at work have to put up with. For the same money I have been using SuSE at home since 6.4, and find they have actually added value and made sure obvious things needs like multimedia applications and browser plugins work. There’s a little tweaking needed once in a while for any Linux installation, but I just don’t see much added value from RedHat. Not from a home user’s perspective anyways.
I was rather surprised that the reviewer “didn’t see the GNOME version printed anywhere”, so she couldn’t figure out the version installed. There’s a command called rpm isn’t there?
>There’s a command called rpm isn’t there?
And then what?
What I meant is that there is no About Gnome info panel. It would have been nice to be one. Somewhere.
No, updates are not free. You need to pay for the Red Hat Network for *OS* upgrades and patches. If you want more applications, you will need to download RPMs created FOR 8.0, and then right click on them and choose to install them (it does not take care of dependancies though).
Updates are free. You don’t need to pay for OS upgrades. When you double click on an rpm it *will* take care of dependencies as far as it can. It is recommended but not necessary to install redhat 8 rpms.
Common Eugenia, is it that hard to verify some simple things?
Poor Eugenia…
You’ve hit upon the curse of x86. PnPray instead of:
monitor: “hi I’m a monitor I can do 3000×2000 at 150hz”
GPU: “I can only do 115hz that OK”
*nods*
OS: “Well fine, 3000×2000 at 115hz it is then!”
Or you could buy a winmodem with closed source Linux drivers from the manufacturer, which sounds okay, until said manufacturer pulls support:
http://www.pcquest.com/content/linux/handson/102082101.asp
Either way, closed source drivers are bad news when it comes to open source operating systems. They’ll usually work only on Windows.
Thanks, I will look closely at buying a Matrox before an nVidia.
> Updates are free. You don’t need to pay for OS upgrades
Only if you download the RPMs and install them manually. I was talking about the Red Hat Network. It did ask me to enter the product_id in order to continue with OS updating!
>monitor: “hi I’m a monitor I can do 3000×2000 at 150hz”
>GPU: “I can only do 115hz that OK”
>*nods*
>OS: “Well fine, 3000×2000 at 115hz it is then!”
If you have read my article more closely you would see that this WAS NOT the case with me. My card *CAN* do 90 Hz in the requested resolution.
http://www.asus.com.tw/vga/agpv7100pro/specification.htm
Only if you download the RPMs and install them manually. I was talking about the Red Hat Network. It did ask me to enter the product_id in order to continue with OS updating!
Yeah, I was talking about up2date (system tools – redhat network) too. I was able to easily subscribe for free (without giving any sort of code), and was easily able to update and install my software. I checked just a minute ago on Red Hat (psyche) 8. It asked for a username and a password, I entered it, I clicked next, next, next, next, next, … Didn’t ask for product codes, visa, or anything like that. It’s free of charge.
Why mine asks for a Product_ID code? 😮
Nice review. I’m downloading the ISO images right now. Hopefully it will run on my Dell Inspiron 4150.
Reviewers version of a typical business user “A cad/catia designer, with a 24″ monitor, a $400 video card and 5.1 surround sound sytem working at Pixar with unlimited control over their PC’s.”
Reality ” A paper pusher with whatever system the IT department gave them, a 4Mb video card, 17″ monitor if lucky using outlook, Excel and an AS/400 terminal emulator, a sytem profile locked down so tight there are only 3 entries on the ‘Start’ menu, if it’s there at all.”
This reviewer is far far far from a the target for this OS. IT was NOT meant for her. Reading between the lines, this DOES look like a very good Business desktop. As an IT person I am delighted there is no sound/mp3/avi/mov/ogg/mpg players, that makes half the junk email my users send back and forth useless. I remove all the config menus anyway, looks like I have to remove some 4 times. oh well. Then I set those 4 icons on the desktop: Open Office, Mozilla, Evolution and the terminal emulator and, off we go….
JON
It is a known fact that kernels below 2.4.19 have a flaw in the speculative cache handling, even 2.4.19 is not fully immune to this. I’ve noticed the same thing with my box (A7V133,2000+, GeForce2 MX400). Don’t blame this on nVidia and RedHat alone, there are others to point the finger at.
Hey, someone said that finally Red Hat noticed that Python 1 is dead.
I don’t know why
, but I think this makes me a bit more sympathetic with RH 8 
If you’re going to rake companies over the coals, at least have the decency to proof your comments before posting.<P>
No, I blame both Red Hat, the XFree driver testing guy, and nVidia. They ALL have their share on the problem.<P>
You can’t blame both Red Hat, “the XFree driver testing guy” AND nVidia. You may blame all three, however.<P>
Great review. I like the attention to detail for things that drive everyone crazy but everyone just lives with.
With regard to missing software. RedHat is really trying to elimates all non-Free software from it’s distro. This includes things like NVidia drivers, Acrobat Reader, Java, and RealPlayer. All of these may be “free” but they’re not “Free Software”. I think you could have mentioned that in their behalf. It’s not that RH is necessarily cheap as you imply, they’re trying to be RMS compliant and I think that’s good. This is why they dropped Netscape for Mozilla.
However, for the business users perhaps they could include a “non-Free” CD of “free” software with these packages for an extra charge. What do you think?
Lsst comment from me, I swear: this reads like the classic “Linux sucks because it doesn’t have Internet Explorer” troll. Blame the open-source vendor because the closed-source vendor doesn’t provide support, eh? Classic, that, and not terribly nice.
I agree with the earlier comment regarding the reviews hardware.
I work with CAD all day and I don’t know anyone with a 24″ monitor. I think the monitor settings is a niche market and not what I would call the “business” market.
I would like to express my opinion that downloading a software package to install is not asking much.
I do find that every one in our office has a wheel mouse, so support for that, in my opinion, is mandatory.
Which specific mouse did you have? I did not find a description of your mouse brand or model.
Thank you for your time and have a good day
I am not a CAD user. I have no freaking clue how to use any CAD application.
I go this monitor, because I got this monitor.
>Which specific mouse did you have? I did not find a description of your mouse brand or model.
Keytronic PS/2 with a wheel.
The version of Red Hat 8.0 that was reviewed by Eugenia was the download version. For those of you unfamiliar with the way the download version works, it comes with very little to no non-free software. What does this mean? Applications like RealPlayer, Flash, and proprietary drivers are left out.
The in-store version of Red Hat includes proprietary software that is not included on the download edition.
And your insult is meant to prove what?
Matrox, substaintially smaller than Nvidia can put together a half decent driver and it is also opensource, however, it seems harder for Nvidia, a company substaintially larger to even get a decent driver out.
Lets also throw the *BSD into the mix, since they feed off the same XFree as Linux users, meaning, on average, Linux/*BSD has around 3.2% of the OS market. Sure, it is not large. I could understand if Nvidia was a small, strggling comparny trying to make ends meet, however, we’re talking about the Microsoft of the video card industry!
> Linux/*BSD has around 3.2% of the OS market
BSD and Linux together has less than 0.5%. Check the stats first from all the 3 big statistics companies…
jodie: once you get to the point of being a Windows clone, what’s the next challenge?
Unless you haven’t noticed, most of the desktop distributions aren’t made to be Windows clones (like RH). Heck, most companies making Linux distributions that act and look and fell like Windows aren’t doing too well financially.
AdamW: Well, software to play Realmedia isn’t installed on Windows or OS X by default
WMP can play some of Read formats, and it is as good as Xine playing Quicktime formats.
Quite apart from the Windows applications whose install routines don’t ask you where you want icons, just adding them anyway
This may be the case of *some* Windows apps (like anything made by AOL), but most software installations ask if you would like desktop and Start menu icons. Some even ask if you want QuickLaunch icons.
RDeschene: So I am frankly not surprised how poorly setup RedHat 8.0 is for the desktop, as that is just consistent.
It isn’t consistent. This is the first time Red Hat had bothered about ease of use and the desktop. While, yeah, it has its rough egdes, but it is because this is something new for Red Hat. Unless SuSE comes up with something new besides YaST, and Mandrake comes up with something besides….. well, I can’t think of any, Red Hat would inevitably overtake them.
Pete: Either way, closed source drivers are bad news when it comes to open source operating systems. They’ll usually work only on Windows.
Trust me, it would work as good as it does on Windows if Linux has an higher amount of market share (think 10% to 20%). Personally, I find closed source drivers than no open source drivers…. (Besides, for all the hardware with specs, why aren’t there any drivers for them? E.g. for all Radeons…)
Shane Simmons: Lsst comment from me, I swear: this reads like the classic “Linux sucks because it doesn’t have Internet Explorer” troll. Blame the open-source vendor because the closed-source vendor doesn’t provide support, eh? Classic, that, and not terribly nice.
Very different. Internet Explorer is made by that open source company’s competitor, so it is impossible to make them port it, unless you have a winning case against them in the court which could cause their second biggest cash cow to be pulled from the market.
Red Hat is big enough to license the specs and driver source code and make their own drivers that are optimized for its distro, cause NVidia wouldn’t license it to a 4 man business.
It is possible, IIRC, BeUnited would be licensing the specs from NVidia too….
Chris Parker: Applications like RealPlayer, Flash, and proprietary drivers are left out.
IIRC, Xine can play Real formats, and Flash is an open standard. Besides, if once upon a time they could compromize and ship their distro with Netscape 4.x default because there isn’t any altenatives, why can’t they do now?
I’m not sure on this but I think that the reason these are not included is that I believe they need to be recompiled with gcc3.2 to work with a mozilla compiled with gcc3.2. like i say i could be wrong this is just something I read… but it would also explain. Also I note they include non-official pdf reader and jvm/sdk.
Looks really good though! i’m not really redhat’s target market but it still looks good….
ahh – here it is (sorry to reply to myself:)
xap/mozilla-1.0-i386-2.tgz: Recompiled with gcc-3.2/libstdc++.so.5. Note that various Netscape plugins such as Java and flash will need to be recompiled using gcc-3.2 before they will work with a gcc-3.2 compiled Mozilla, galeon, Konqueror, or other browser. The plugins will continue
to work in Netscape, so if you must have working plugins you’ll need to use that (at least for now).
from http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386
I’d assume now that redhat is running 3.2 this will happen quite soon. and that is a good thing!
Hey, someone said that finally Red Hat noticed that Python 1 is dead.
Python 1 isn’t dead. It’s pining for the fjords.
Sorry. The setup was just too perfect…
I don’t need the whole 5 cd set to get a minimal install, do I?
Linux customers are not desktop users. At least
not the ones that depend on it. Linux customers
are network and database developers.
MS and Sun know that. They cater to to them developers with .net and .com products. Sure there
stuff outside RH for developers eg. CORBA, I just
don’t like to hear that RH is a Windows Killer, who
cares if RH has a pretty GUI?? Still is slow as
molasses since intel and network cards cater to closed source.
RH should stop looking at candy-eye desktops and
get smarters tools and libraries for network and
database development. That’s the right stuff.
J.
Default install (minimal): 2 CDs
If Ed Boyce is in pain from proof reading this article, he has a very low tolerance. I mean no personal disrespect to anyone, and I hate to say this, but the article doesn’t look proof read at all. For example, I’m still trying to find the definitions of “satisfactied” and “huping”. Some of the grammar was confusing also. Just some constructive criticism. Otherwise, a very fine article in terms of content.
==========
I downloaded and installed successfully the nVidia 2D and 3D drivers. OpenGL works fine in 3D game, except that the GL screensavers have a problem to start in accelerated mode (yes, the memoryLimit is set to 0). After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate I wanted, X would crash. SSH’ing in the machine and either stopping, or huping or killing X (which would now consume 99% cpu), it would completely kill Red Hat 8 (sign that the kernel was crashing because of the nVidia driver) and I would need to reset the machine
=========
If it’s not too much of a hassle, you could try using the 2960 drivers instead of the 3123 ones I assume you used during the review. Seems like quite a few people have stability issues with the 3123 driver.
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_1.0-2960
Yes they’re 5 months old, but then again, ASUS’ official Windows drivers are build 2880.
Seems that tha nVidia cards are tearing up a storm at the moment. IF people had also been paying attention to the XFree86 newbie list, you would have seen that there have been some issues with the nVidia card (among them, having to manually start the drivers, configurations having to be manually entered, drivers starting part of the time, etc). I know that there is a contingent of people who have had nothing wrong with thier nVidia cards (<troll> hey, it is just like me saying that I have never had MS Windows (9x, NT, 2000 or XP) become really unstable in my corporate enviroment and that all the instabilities that I have encountered are do to bad configuration choices or bad hardware choices (the video card with the only english words “nVidia”, “Windows NT” and “AGP” is NOT a good choice. oh well, fire burns and people must touch). </troll>).
Kudos on the balanced review. I am still a Mandrake and NetBSD fanboy, but I did enjoy your review. (I know, Mandrake is an off shoot of RedHat).
Sean.
Bob, thanks for clearing that up about RHN/ up2date. Another question: Is it possible to upgrade my 7.3 installation directly to 8.0 without downloading isos, burning cds, etc? If not — can I install from ftp/http just using boot disks?
I’ve converted to Linux recently because I want to learn about the Linux kernel. I believe that open source software is best used for research and development via computer science. I am running Mandrake 9.0. If you don’t have it, it’s a free download, you don’t have to wait for someone to mail it to you, just make sure you have a cable connection.
I’m very happy with the Gnome 2.0 desktop. My printer configured during the beautiful Mandrake 9.0 setup and every usb device was detected. The multimedia is poor, however, Xine or XMovie were able to play .mpgs and .mov files (I only tested a few files, not many). I don’t expect the multimedia to be very good on an open source system, at least not for some time, not until everthing else is up to par. The multimedia will be the last feaure to take root because it’s just about purchasing licenses for millions of dollars. They don’t want to feed the hogs yet and I don’t blame them. Why not make them starve a little. I think that Redhat made the right choice if it didn’t provide multimedia out of the box.
Your crazy if you are trying to hook up big screen televisions to your computer. I have a 17 inch monitor with a flat screen and i’m not feeling any pain. I don’t think that Linux is a gaming system yet. I think that the implementation of systems that support 3d animation needs to be reengineered. I want to see Linux develop some open source frameworks with the mind to support distributed computing. This is a future avenue, why wait for vendors to take the lead in development.
I like the fact that I can run Linux on old hardware. I don’t want to throw way my whole computer every two years. I’m happy that the economy has been slow and that technologies are suffering because that will force corporations to improve the quality of their products. We have way too many WinME or Win95 systems out there, lets not let such poor quality products polute our environment.
I agree with jkl and the “…Reading between the lines, this DOES look like a very good Business desktop….” A business desktop as seen by the IS dept is not a “user” desktop. I (as part of IS) want to lock down the machine. We do not want the liability of unauthorized/unsupported/unlicenced(illegal) software. Most business users are task oriented. They need (according to IS, again) to preform discrete functions in an effiecent manner. The fact that the desktop does not have mp3 ability out of the box affects very few who “need” to have that ability. Don’t confuse the company’s PC to your own home machine. IS needs to manage, support and account for the software, hardware and users under the corp umbrella. A company of any significant size will understand this need; most company “users” do not.
Thank you for the review.
I’ll probably wait 8.x. Seems like RedHat can be relied upon to make intresting but problematic .0 releases.
TO ALL who ask more proofreading. I submitted the article at 4 AM in the morning in the team of editors we have (I worked all Saturday night for it). They got it the other day, in the morning. The article had to live in 6 hours after these editors got it.
And you know, it was Sunday, NO ONE is getting paid here, so people have other priorities than to try to proof read my article on a Sunday morning.
THIS is why this article was not thoroughly proof readed. Not enough time from the time I submitted it to the time it had to go live.
Please, try to understand that no one is getting paid here. But we do try our best.
If you’re not afraid to potentially fuck up your system (I didn’t try this method), you can go to http://www.freshrpms.net, download apt4rpm for your rh7.3, modify the sources.list to point to the 8.0 directory, and do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
your article was fine Eugenia. I agree that Redhat must make some changes to their desktop organization before it is an intuitive desktop. Certainly toolkit style guides is one way of taking action. This is an area of debate. I just wish that your article had a broader base and that it took into account technology and society rather than being too focused on high performance video output. I know that video support is important to you, because you paid for them and you feel short changed that they do not work on a new system. If that is the case than certainly stay with closed vendor platforms. Use a Linux distribution on an older computer. I appreciate your willingness to write these articles. I hope that some of the information is studied critically by Redhat. It should be a resource to them. Least of all thank you for your time. I did read the whole article. I personaly download these operating systems for the source code so that I can examine the system implementation. I find it entertaining that Linux even is becoming a candidate for home entertainment. I think that it will certainly make it there given time and legal freedom. That is how this operating system will defeat current vendor systems (if that is even important when there is freedom). It’s just a matter of being able to keep the door open and gaining exposure. Redhat 8.0 is important. I’d also like to see Linux reviewed on different hardware architectures. An operating system is constrained by its hardware architecture, not that intel is a poor architecture, but it is only one. I don’t use Mac OSX but I believe that they built their own microprocessors and sell their computer as a single unit. for this reason you will not have any hardware compatibility problems. I don’t use Mac though, but theoritically this makes sense if it were true. Microsoft is compatible because it maintains license agreements with OEMs and has monopolistic buying power. If Linux is to be compatible than it must find ways to make standardization possible through new system design (this is over Redhats head). Watch for support in 2003 comming from Sun Microsystems and IBM. Linux will be good to go, but in the full spectrum I am looking forware to much improved technology. I hope that competition can foster it.
My understanding is that RedHat removed all multimedia applications that had MP3 en/decoding capability (like Xine) due to Thomson Multimedia’s recent “alleged” license change.
I am a UI designer and programmer. I have visited OSNews countless times and read more than I care to think about from Eugenia regarding her analysis of different products. I must admit that I tend to disagree with her 90% of the time but respect the professional opinions she has. That said, here I go.
Redhat 8.0 has been a jewel for me – I ran Limbo, then Null. I accepted that Mp3 support was no longer present. I accepted the lack of nVidia drivers. I accepted the lack of many multimedia features. I accepted the lack of Flash, and Real Player. Why? Because I recognize that Redhat’s first priority is to SoftwareLibre, the GPL. That belief was tantamount in the foundation of their company, the creation of a collaborative Linux kernel, and the GNU utilities that make the OS run at all. Things that are not GPLed are not welcome, they are by nature considered to be unaccpetably inferior.
If you don’t like that, run Windows, MacOS, or another BSD based system, but Linux is not for you. Linux was not created to provide you with software, make your life easy, allow you to be productive, or to save money. It was created as a collaborative community of developers scratching their own itches. If by happenstance your itch hasn’t been scratched yet, consider scratching it yourself, or go buy a product that does. That’s not old-school. That’s how it is. Linux is a system for developers and sys-admins, all the end users out there should just be thankful that such an rich system is even available for them to use barrring any non-compatible expectations.
Hey,
Can they make it so that commonly compressed file formats (.ZIP, .GZ, .TAR, etc.) open up by default in a GUI decompression utility (take yer pick)? Seems like a basic concept to me.
It just seems silly that this isn’t done by default in most distros. If I wanted to use cmd line for everything, I’d boot in text mode!