Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn’t always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world’s first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots. Update: Added one more screenshot.
The installation process hasn’t changed much, it is pretty much the same, but fortunately this time, Anaconda (the Red Hat installation routine), was able to correctly probe my 19″ Envision monitor and obtain the modelines, without me needing to input them manually. In the past, this didn’t work with my monitors, so everytime I was installing Linux, I had to dig up the monitor manuals and type the numbers manually. Thankfully, this is no more (gtf is a Good Thing (TM)). At the end, my installation of the beta was not as lucky, as GRUB didn’t want to install on /dev/hda2, but later, after booting with the floppy, I managed to install LILO manually, so it’s all good now, up and running.
The UI hasn’t change much since Red Hat 8.0, but Gnome 2.2 is included and things are a bit more refined and polished. Positive surprise would be the launch feedback you get when you load something from the Gnome Panel. Nautilus feels faster, the Red Hat menu is a bit more organized (no “Extras” anymore!), the BlueCurve theme is as sharp and clean as ever and it has seen a clean-up/update in its looks.
New mouse cursors are also there, as Phoebe comes with a beta of the XFree 4.3, which has quite a number of new features (including the ability to change real resolutions (non virtual) on the fly). For a beta, XFree86 seemed very stable to me with the “nv” 2D driver.
KDE 3.1 is also there, included, but it is not as refined as Gnome 2.2. Red Hat has put quite some weight on taking care of Gnome as this is their main environment, but KDE users should be satisfied as well, as KDE is present and works as expected, in my experience with the system.
Red Hat Phoebe 3 comes with a number of development packages, KOffice 1.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.2, Mr Project 0.8, FileRoller while some RPMs created for RH 8.0 that I tried, worked on 8.1beta just fine.
Overall speed is good, but both QT and GTK+ apps should do better when resizing and improve launching times (could someone please explain to me why even the smallest Gnome/GTK+ app takes longer to launch than the much bigger Blender?).
A pretty large number of preference and system tools is coming with the system, making it easier for people to configure their system (however, having 76 setting panels under Preferences, System Tools and System Settings, is really not all that great to be honest).
This is a beta release, so it doesn’t come without bugs. I encountered about 7-8 bugs so far (odd behaviors and/or app crashings), plus some UI bugs (however, I was told that the source tree is in freeze regarding UI bugs). Also, I was not able to hook into my shared Windows XP directory via Samba, not sure why not, yet. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out for the final release.
Overall, even by being a beta, I feel that the Red Hat 8.x series are the strongest releases today in the Linux world and Red Hat, Inc. the leading Linux power which brings Linux one step beyond to the corporate desktop and the server space. It is the most consistent, polished Linux desktop available, it has major support by developers and companies who partner with Red Hat, Inc. and its server side is also strong compared to other Linux solutions today.
Having said all that, there is always room for improvement. The desktop could be much better and media formats could be licensed to fill the multimedia gap (currently a thorn for my needs) in order to better compete with OSes beyond the Linux scope, like WindowsXP and Mac OS X. But the important thing is that Red Hat is on the right track and they race against the big OS players, having already outpace their Linux-oriented competitors. Red Hat is definately the next big, continuously rising, OS company to watch in the future.
Trever – I’m using Mozilla1.3b, one of the beta versions compiled specifically for RedHat 8.0 and it definitely uses GTK2 to some extent. Changing the GNOME2 fonts changes the menu/dialog fonts in Mozilla as well.
I can’t beleive the number of people that buy into Redhat. Their distributions are constantly 3 or 4 versions behind SuSE. SuSE is a much better engineered distribution than RedHat. I challenge any of the RedHat sheep out there to compare the tools in Redhat (GUI requiired) to SuSE and YAST (text based and graphical) or the Xwindows configuration software SAX which rivals commercial software. RedHat is far from being better than SuSE. Like the article points out popular doesnt mean better.
> Is that an SWF authoring program I see in your second screenshot?
Yes, it is Moho, the cartoon maker. Download from http://www.lostmarble.com
I don’t think so. I’ve got 8.1 pro and I can’t rpm anything that rquires rpm 4.0.x. I don’t know what you mean about red hat being 3 or 4 versions behind redhat. Much of the software that came with Suse (eg. anjuta, evolution, pan) was behind those that came with redhat, and I couldn’t upgrade because either the rpm version was incompatable, or the gnome libs were out of date. (there was one case asking for bzip2 even though I had it installed).
Yast may be nice, but it’s very slow.
The distro couldn’t see my second cd/rw. It required some work to get that going.
The menus are a maze to challenge Odyseus. They are much cleaner in Read Hat.
Suse didn’t come with apt, and I couldn’t install a replacement without being dead-ended into dependency hell. At least with Red Hat I could.
The one thing that Suse had going for it was the installation of the Nvidia drivers, which was much better than that for Red Hat, which is why I got Suse in the first place, but with all the other problems I’m trying the red hat beta now.
I know
I was just kidding around….. Of all the distros, it has to be the easiest to install, and hardware detection has even SuSE beat. It is quite tempting. I still have a box I use as a gateway with RH 7.2…. Red Hat has by far the easiest kernel upgrading process going. Whe I upgrade a kernel, it leaves me with two, one of which I can pick via GRUB.That way the permanent switch doesn’t occur until the system has bee tested and adjusted via configs…. a simple daily process, a little at a time. You can’t beat that! As far as the KDE vs Gnome menu system and the changes to KDE’s system…, it doesn’t matter to me because I use neither Gnome or KDE…. I prefer XFce or Wmaker. A word of advice: be sure to use an APT/Synaptic combo with Red. It’s got even RedCarpet beat as to fulfilling dependencies, and the sources lists are easily configurable.
I think Redhat 8.1 Beta 3 is much better than comes across in this review. I have no idea why you can’t get windows networking working, worked fine for me. And why the hell are you trying to install your bootloader on /dev/hda2? It works fine if you use /dev/hda1 like a normal person.
2000 dollars per developer remember. that very quickly mounts up. I did consider using Qt once for a project of mine, but I didn’t know if it would sell well. I wasn’t about to blow $2000 on a speculative project with one developer, when GTK+ is just as good. It’s not being stingy, it’s being realistic.
I’m personally glad that RedHat didn’t go with KDE. It’s also one of the main reasons they have my business. THEY (RedHat and GNOME) are the one that’s accepted in the commercial market, KDE while it’s nice if you want the Windows look is not. Sure, most of the other Linux’s support KDE as their standard, but look at the marketshare of all of them combined. RedHat, SUN, and HP are all supporting GNOME, and all of the most refined applications use GTK (GIMP, Evolution, Gnumeric, Mozilla, AIM, Yahoo, etc..) KDE is playing catch up in all but look and feel. As for QT’s $2,000 license all I have to say is WHY when everyone else is using GTK for nothing? LOL
>I think Redhat 8.1 Beta 3 is much better than comes across in this review.
I found more than 10-12 bugs so far, and I am in constant communication with Red Hat about them, off-list. Maybe you were luckier than I was, but that doesn’t make the product any better or worse. The fact that a particular system configuration doesn’t produce bugs, doesn’t mean that bugs are not there. Get a clue.
>I have no idea why you can’t get windows networking working
In fact, I get *constant* crashes on Nautilus about my samba, and I am talking with Red Hat about it as we speak. I just sent them debug info 10 mins ago.
>And why the hell are you trying to install your >bootloader on /dev/hda2? It works fine if you >use /dev/hda1 like a normal person.
Who told you that I am a ‘normal’ person? As far long as I remember myself, I was always standing out from the rest of the girls by being a complete geek and in love with Mr. Spock from Star Ttek.
I have other OSes installed on that machine, and I want a specific bootloader to load them, not to overwrite my MBR with Red Hat’s. This is why it is imperative for my system to have the chainloader on /dev/hda2 which is the root partition for Red Hat. /dev/hda1 is the /swap, because hard drives are faster in the beginning of their drives, so it makes sense to install over there the slowest parts of the OS, which is almost always, the swap file.
Happy now? Do I have to explain to you what I ate for breakfast too and why?
Nice review, Eugenia. Those who followed RedHat’s phoebe-list a few days ago know, how a lesser person might have vented some justified anger.
I look forward to read more of your reviews.
Matthias
You mean Eugenia is not normal???? Thank god!!!!!!
I appreciate your help but I still have some questions:
1.What directory am I starting in? Do I have to create one, and where?
2. You have a “kernel-source-2.4.18-24.8.0.i386.rpm” in your first line. Do you mean “NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191.src.rpm” or
“NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191.rh80up_2.4.18_18.8.0.i386.rpm” and if I have a P4 would it be the “.i686.rpm” ?
3.I’m using Red Hat 8.1 right now. Will this still work?
when apt-get for rpm 4.2 is going to be ready?
Redhat makes a lousy PPP client. I have to content myself with KPPP or just /sbin/ifup ppp0
Please in future dont modify things like the fonts (as you say you downloaded the fonts, they arent the standard ones) since it makes looking at screenshots pointless.
Personally I’ve always found SuSE to be a better choice than RedHat, but perhaps that’s just me? I expect that it all boils down to taste.
Phoebe can’t use the nvidia binaries, becasue the kernel is compiled with one version of gcc and X windows is compiled with another version of gcc.
So, essentially, owners of Geforce cards can’t use the GUI of Red Hat 8.x series properly? Red Hat doesn’t seem to realize that they are excluding a HUGE bunch of people by this trick. I switched from 8.0 to 7.3 because I couldn’t compile the nvidia drivers.
And what is wrong with wvdial (shipped as standard) – easiest ppp utility there is
I agree with most of your findings with RH 8.1 beta (phoebe3)
The distribution is looking a lot better than I imagined and has some improvements that I really appreciate.
Multimedia support is a problem that needs ironed out for more people to switch to Linux.
Jim
Not sure if anyone else noticed the difference, but the new XFree looks absolutely stunning. I can’t wait.
“686 optimization is nice without having to babysit a Gentoo install for 24 hours on a fast connection.”
What “babysitting” are you talking about? When I installed Gentoo, I left it install Glibc, GCC and others and I went to bed. In the morning it was finished. Then I left it install Fluxbox, Xfree and others and I want to work. When I got back, it was finished. Then I left it install everything else. No babysitting required.
Why should I stare at the screen while the machine compiles?
He Wrote:
“I will never read an article here again. EVER!
Dear Eugenia Loli-Queru,
You are a retard. ”
Such wit. Such cleverness.
I’m sure it will be a great loss felt by all.
On the beta list for Pheobe, a while back, users were asking the RedHat engineers about optimized distros. They even asked about Compiling from source, like Gentoo. RedHat engineers explained that there’s hardly any benefit for most applications. If you want to do it yourself though, you’re more than welcome to do so.
My complaints about version 8 have gone unresolved.
SuSE has managed a much easier method of importing TrueType fonts. Better still, they all *work* on the first crack.
RH8.0 and this beta all require lengthy hacking at the x-font server settings, creating and establishing font directories and after all that effort, the fonts may or may not be useable in RH8 or the beta.
RH8 and the beta do not automatically detect NTFS, ReiserFS or XFS partitions, which is sort of a drag (Mandrake and SuSE do).
With all that though, I continue to use RH for any Linux servers because of what I believe is their sane approach to init levels, ease of command administration and decent support costs. If they ever get Bluecurve resolved to suit the persnickety tastes of Windows users, they’ll have a clear winner.
I have over the years tried various versions of RH 7.0 through the current 8.0 and have not ever been able to get the darn OS to mount my NT 4.0 server shares or other samba shares. MDK has had no troubles in mounting these. Also, MDK has had better luck detecting all my hardware on my work machine and several older machines (PIII, K6-2) at home. Until RH resolves the issues with SAMBA and the hardware I will be forced to stick with MDK. I have read of several other people having the same issues with RH.
So, essentially, owners of Geforce cards can’t use the GUI of Red Hat 8.x series properly? Red Hat doesn’t seem to realize that they are excluding a HUGE bunch of people by this trick.
I’m not sure I understand. The 2D XFree86 ‘nv’ driver works fine for GeForce cards, yes ? If so, what’s the point ? Unless you’re a member of the small minority that needs hardware 3D accleration for some modelling program there no need to worry about nVidia’s own drivers working.
What’s that ? Games, you say ? Please… if you want to run 3D games, dual-boot with Windows. There’s no way in the forseeable future that Linux will catch up to Windows in this arena. There’s just no motivation for game development companies to support Linux.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big Linux/*BSD/OSX fan. I use Linux for real work and boot Windows almost purely for games – but I’m also a realist
Uhh how hard is it to make a ~/.fonts folder and copy your fonts into it? That’s ALL you gotta do in RH8, oh and then wait ~30 secs..
Is Bluefish included with this release? I saw it in the screenshot, but it doesn’t appear to be in the SRPMS list with Phoebe3.
< quote >
One question that just occured to me about applicatoins like a PDF viewer or a Media player, is if they are actually often started standalone by themselves? Personally I never do that, and I rely on just opening a file and having the associated app launch to do something automagically. For that kind of ‘passive’ stuff, it seems to me you could just remove them from the menu’s altogether.
< /quote >
I disagree on the matter of the media player. Especially with complex media players, such as Xine (http://xinehq.de), once you run it, you basically have a panel of media options to choose from: DVD, file, URL, etc.
Then how about playing TV? If you’re not including the media player in the menu, then you must include an (some) icon(s) for the V4L device(s), which is cumbersome and prone to errors. Same goes for DVD/SVCD/CD – how can Nautilus recognize what’s the actual media in the device without using the media player itself? I’m not even going to mention media URLs.
Yes, in an ideal world, you’re right. The desktop itself should be “media-smart”. However, we’re not there yet. Although, both Gnome and KDE are trying to achieve a multimedia foundation, Gnome with GStreamer, and KDE with Xine. That means, you have a library of smart media functions, and every application can link to it and use it. Things like “play any media file from any application” become possible; also, your dream of making the media player icon useless is also achievable. But don’t hold your breath yet.
< quote >
I inserted my computer name and lan name at installation. And I have no trouble accessing other computers using nautilus “smb://pcname”. Is there another way to access shares on other comuter under gnome?
< /quote >
What’s missing is a SMB LAN browser, a la Network Neighborhood. Better yet, integrated with Nautilus.
< quote >
3) Do they include alsa sound system?
No idea, does it matter? As long as it works…
< /quote >
It depends on what you’re doing.
If you’re like me, doing all sorts of Dolby5.1, playing all types of media stuff and having Xine running on my desktop all the time, then you kinda need ALSA.
I’m currently on RH 8.0, but i installed ALSA over the default kernel.
Fortunately, ALSA is now in kernel-2.5
< quote >
even with apt gstreamer can be a real pain to get installed(even under 8.0)
< /quote >
GStreamer is still rather beta. So do expect issues.
On related news, KDE started to use Xine http://xinehq.de/ for the same purpose. The advantage is that Xine is already a full-fledged, stable media infrastructure/player (people call it a player, but developers should look at it as a library). The disadvantage is that it has less streaming features than GStreamer; actually, it has none.
Anyways, both projects are going in the right direction.
< quote >
Redhats decision to leave out mp3 support is just going to get harder and harder to deal with as our desktops evolve.
< /quote >
Yes. It would be nice though, if they would make it easy for people to install third-party plugins to magically make MP3 work. Such as the MP3 plugin for XMMS provided by http://www.gurulabs.com/downloads.html
< quote >
I switched from 8.0 to 7.3 because I couldn’t compile the nvidia drivers.
< /quote >
The proprietary nVidia drivers work just fine for me with RH 8.0. Their compilation was quite straightforward. If you need help, e-mail me.
However, i’m worried about hearing that the proprietary nVidia drivers won’t work anymore with RH 8.1. Is any of that true?
>Is Bluefish included with this release?
No, I installed it manually, as I did with the other app showing in the shots, Moho.
< quote >
On the beta list for Pheobe, a while back, users were asking the RedHat engineers about optimized distros. They even asked about Compiling from source, like Gentoo. RedHat engineers explained that there’s hardly any benefit for most applications.
< /quote >
I believe it’s a trade-off thing. If you compile, say, Evolution with -march=i686 or -march=athlon-xp and you get a 5% speed improvement, but you double or triple the effort needed to solve the bugzilla tickets, then of course you won’t optimize your apps.
OTOH, the kernel and glibc are optimized, because that’s where the most speed improvement lies, and it doesn’t backfire with the bugzilla issues.
As a matter of policy, when i compile stuff myself, i go by default with -march=athlon-xp for everything related to multimedia: codecs, libraries, apps. Otherwise i don’t care.
When Red Hat will really start to worry about playing multimedia on RH desktops, probably they too will start to provide optimized media apps.
ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/freshrpms/testing/phoebe/apt/apt-0.5.5cnc1… from
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=apt&submit=Searc……
I’ve been using this for ~2 weeks now.
Yea, I just found it myself. But I can’t find synaptic for it. Can I use the Red Hat 8.0 Synaptic, or any Red hat 8.0 rpm for that matter, or do I have to use strictly Phoebe rpms?
From the article
>>>
could someone please explain to me why even the smallest Gnome/GTK+ app takes longer to launch than the much bigger Blender?
<<<
Not sure if anyone has answered this one,(couldn’t locate any in my quick perusal of replies) but here it goes:
Eugenia,
Do an ‘ldd’ on each of the executables you are comparing..
Don’t know much about Blender – but gnome apps use in the order of 50 shared libraries. Each time you start the appliation – the run-time-loader has to do all the symbol resolutions across all these libraries. (think in terms of compiler when linking with 50 libraries)
KDE tries to overcome this(long startup time) by having a init process – which has already done this runtime-name-resolution part. New aplications are launced by ‘forking’ this init process – and morphing itself into the appopriate application – (trades compliexity for startup time or something like that)
Dear Eugenia,
I found your preliminary review on Red Hat Beta 3 most informative. I’m planning to switch over to Linux on my desktop, and so I’m trying a few distributions. Prompted by your review, I downloaded and installed this latest Red Hat, and I aggree with you with regard to its overall features. However, as a newcomer to Linux, I would like to make you some questions:
* To what extent did Red Hat modify KDE?
* Do these modifications affect KDE’s functionality?
* If I decide to use KDE as my basic desktop, should I look for a distribution that is more KDE-oriented?
* I do lots of writing on the computer, so font quality for me is of prime importance. Even though fonts on RH beta 3 look OK, they are still not as good as those on my Windows 2000 machine. Is there an easy way of improving font quality on RH?
Thanks.
Luiz Cardoso.
I like that new screenshot, Eugenia. Thanks for updating!
I’ve optimized myself by recompiling ALL RPMS from source (RH 7.3) using:
rpmbuild –rebuild –target i686 <package>
I only noticed a marked improvement within XWindows and multimedia applications, especially on slower systems where 5-10% is noticable. Otherwise not a whole lot of difference.
The downside of this is that every time errata is released, I have to recompile from the SRPM before deploying the update if I want to maintain the “optimized” system.
In the end, it may not be worth the extra effort for most people. Took me 4 days to do the entire tree on a PIII-933.
Also of note – doing this does “break” some packages (i.e. perl and it’s add-in libraries).
-Rick Johnson – RHCE
What is the landscape program that’s shown in the third screenshot? .. looks really good.
RedHat 8.1beta doesn’t mount any of my windows drives, including fat32 partitions. This is frustrating, no easy tool is there to mount (no linuxconf).
Also, a package manager isn’t present for installing local packages. APT should be standard with servers in the source.list to make things easy.
>* To what extent did Red Hat modify KDE?
Not that much in my experience. KDE behaves for the most part like the rest of the KDEs out there.
>* Do these modifications affect KDE’s functionality?
Not that I could mention…
>* If I decide to use KDE as my basic desktop, should I look for a distribution that is more KDE-oriented?
Try Red Hat first and if you don’t like it, try another one.
>* Is there an easy way of improving font quality on RH?
There is a font panel where you can change some options, like subpixel rendering and such.
>What is the landscape program that’s shown in the third screenshot?
This is version 0.6.1 I think which is not available. You will have to get it directly from the author, or wait for him to release it. http://www.witchspace.com/
Okay I know the rest of my post is huge flame bait, so those that can’t take stuff that like just skip it…
Bluecurve is the biggest piece of crap ever. It doesn’t look nearly as good as KDE 3.1 with Keramik and Crystal icons. And if you want a unified look, use Geramik. All available at kde-look.org. As for Red Hat, its distributions are a joke. They are terrible, and I will never use another distro of theirs. And I’ll be surprised if I ever see Eugenia give an unbiased review. Anything with Red Hat or GTK in its name is sure to get 10/10 from her, whilst any distro that uses KDE as its default WM is totally trashed. KDE is FAR superior to Gnome, epecially for developers.
Seriously, I don’t know why anyone but a total newbie would inflict Red Hat on themself.
I guess like most people I have strong opinions about all things Linux, and as much as I have come out against Red Hat and Gnome, I think people should see my post as a rant, and make the choice for themselves… I did.
>Bluecurve is the biggest piece of crap ever.
It can certainly be much better and more sexy, but it is better than other GTK+ themes.
>It doesn’t look nearly as good as KDE 3.1 with Keramik and Crystal icons.
I hate Keramik for the most part. Especially the tab widgets are out of place and don’t blend to the tab views.
>As for Red Hat, its distributions are a joke
Right, and which one is good then? Personally, I don’t use any of them, in fact I dislike all of them, but Red Hat does the job better IMO. My main machines are XP, OSX and BeOS and then FreeBSD and then Linux.
>I’ll be surprised if I ever see Eugenia give an unbiased review. Anything with Red Hat or GTK in its name is sure to get 10/10 from her,
Are you on drugs? Haven’t you read my last years’ Gnome review? Or the previous red hat review? Get out of your high horse and read some articles from the archives before you open your big wormy mouth and talk trash.
I’d like to meet one person insane enough to run the newer Red Hat’s on i386’s or i486’s. If you want linux as a fileserver or router with no GUI, why not just use slackware or something? Most people (id venture a guess and say over 80%) of people running Red Hat do it for a full GUI OS. There’s no reason, especially with the gcc3 opts, to include full optimization, at least a 586 for their OS. I’d be great if they could provide 586 and 686 releases, seeing as how most people nowadays run a 686, and if they arent, chances are they aren’t running Red Hat.
I think that the Red Hat 8.x _are_ i586-optimized already.
Anyone know/tested if Creative Audigy 2 works “out of the box/iso” with 8.1 beta, or do I have to download drivers myself?
what about zaurus support WITHOUT having to apply crappy patches that sometimes do not work. You would think that it would make sense to be able to plug the zaurus right into the cradle and be able to start using it without needing to “tweak” your kernel and recompile since your PC and the zaurus are both linux devices, c’mon!
ive been using linux for about 7 or 8 years now and i cannot get my stinkin zaurus and linux PC to talk with eachother using patches, upgrading the kernel, etc… after patching and compiling and upgrading i can get linux to recognize that the zaurus is there, and i can even assign IP addresses to the interface but i cannot get the two to talk