Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 beta, codenamed “Severn“, was released today. Read more for a quick commentary and six screenshots of the release.Installation hasn’t changed much, it is now more refined, and the last bit about configuring graphical/text mode booting and X configuration is now completely gone. Red Hat Linux beta has successfully probed my E-540 Sony 21″ monitor and my Matrox card, but for safety reasons, defaulted it in 1024×768 res instead of 1600×1200@85Hz (monitor’s recommended). All hardware is working correctly, it even found my USB Creative WebCam Pro for use with GnomeMeeting.
After you install the 3 CDs and you do the first booting, right after the kernel is loaded, you are greeted with a graphical booting procedure. It is plain, but it works… I have to note here that while Red Hat successfully told LILO to load an SMP kernel for my dual Celeron system, it would stop loading the OS right after initializing the swap. Reseting the machine and booting with the non-SMP kernel, worked fine.
There is a first-time wizard, where you can create new users, subscribe to Red Hat Network etc. After that, Gnome is loaded and it looks pretty much, exactly the same as in Red Hat Linux 9. There are of course some new packages, like Evolution 1.4.3, Mozilla 1.4, but a lot of other packages are still not updated, e.g. OOo, the core Gnome itself (2.2.0 the About box says), but they should be before the release.
There are updates on many preference panels, and a few news ones too. There is new panel for graphics display (and even a per-user resolution panel –no need to be root to change your res), an updated package manager panel, updated hardware list panel etc.
There are still a few bugs around, which is normal, as this is a beta. Most noteworthy are Mozilla’s fonts which are now bolding on many web pages where it shouldn’t (including osnews’ and parts of slashdot’s), the Theme Manager has a problem when displaying the little theme thumbnails when changing themes, notification area is completely buggered up on my fresh installation. I am sure these small problems will be fixed before the final version though.
I hope some packages will be added till then, like the Vera fonts (which exists on Rawhide, but not on Severn). Another addition I would like to see is BlueFish 1.0, Gnumeric 2.x and AbiWord 2.0. At least two of these packages should be releasing their final versions before the release of Severn itself in October.
Please note that the screenshots below are showing the Gnome desktop using the high quality Vera TTF fonts, which I installed afterwards. The default Red Hat installation is still using the Sans fonts as in its previous versions.
I downloaded the SRPMS of the newer initscripts & rhgb from rawhide and did rpmbuild –rebuild blah.src.rpm on them on my fairly new RH9 install. They work fine, kudzu took forever to run or something so I disabled it.
I have a pretty minimal set of services enabled, so it might screw over your install if you have a lot of stuff installed. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it does make the system have a more integrated/polished feel to it. The text fading out after a few seconds is a nice effect. The nVidia logo popping up at bootup is annoying.
what text fading are you talking about? BTW how is the background of the bootup in your system? Does it display all the colors? Or does it look blurred just like in my case…
I run both SuSE and Red Hat and like them both. However, SuSE has much better multimedia support than Red Hat.
Absolutely there is GUI menu editing … it’s called Nautilus (if you have Gnome installed).
If you double click on the Start Here icon on the desktop, it will open up Nautilus.
If you don’t want to see the icons view then at the top right select View as List and you can make the size of the list (or Icons) larger or smaller.
Now, just double click on Applications and you have a the entire menu to mess with. You can rearrange, remove or add new folders or application launchers … it is just like using windows explorer to edit the windows start menu!
Clay … if you mean that SUSE installs more multimedia stuff off the install discs, then I might agree with you…
But, anything that runs on SUSE will run on RedHat … so thier Multimedia support IS THE SAME.
If you want to use MPlayer, it installs on both … so does VLC, XXMS, etc.
Anything you want to install is available and able to be installed.
For RedHat 8 and 9, go here and install apt and synaptic and you can point and click almost anything onto RedHat…and be as up to date (on the cutting edge) as you are willing to chance.
http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/
As people have touched on earlier, the default fonts are ugly. The default serif font is Nimbus Roman No9 L, and the default sans-serif font is Luxi Sans, regardless of whether you have the new Bitstream Vera fonts installed.
I suspect there have been changes made to the font renderer or font configuration as well, as Luxi Sans looks much narrower and harder to read than it did in Red Hat Linux 9.
Probably just my slow, slow system, but if the text saying the latest thing it’s starting stays on for more than about 3 seconds the text fades out.
Nearly forgot – I didn’t notice anything bad about the default background image.
Maybe its my video card that is messing things up. Thanks anyway. BTW, is it possible to get a screenshot of this.
JohnnyH, you are correct. Better for me to have said, browser plugin support…i.e., when I visit a news site or live streaming audio (say, a radio station or a live webcast), Red Hat would not do anything. They packaged Mozilla browser, but no plugins. Suse packaged a lot of browser plugins for almost all types of media. I still had to download RealPlayer 8 for Linux and Java for Linux. I managed to get Java to work and Flash also. Until there is better browser plugin support and ease of installing, Linux has a way to go in that category. This site has helped me a lot http://plugindoc.mozdev.org.
Found the culprit that makes the bootscreen bg in my system blurry. My system is set on 16 bit color. I set it to 24 bit color and the prob went away!! Nice!
Clay … Agreed that GNU/Linux in general has a long way to go to have the same multimedia capibility as Windows XP … mainly because of the number of apps that are there for XP … but most of the major linux distros can use most of the Plug-ins and multimedia stuff … but SUSE was easier to install from the Distrubution disks … but there were no ISO’s to download for SUSE, so it had to be bought or instlled via web/ftp … which is a much harder (or more expensive) install.
I would highly recommend MPlayer built with Real, Windows Media, DivX, Quicktime(mov), MPEG, MP3 and oog support. I have the MozPlugger plugin ( http://mozplugger.mozdev.org/ ) that plays almost everything via Mplayer … and it works very well. I use RedHat 9.0 and apt from here ( http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/ ) to get all the latest apps.
I’m running it on Windows XP over the latest VMWare and it works perfectly as far as I can tell so far. Only thing was DHCP internet took a google search to solve. And it even allowed dell dimension integrated sound to work without any special config…that wouldn’t work using a regular install on the system.
And so I just finished installing RH9 (severn) but I was just wondering if someone can tell me a way to adjust the mouse speed. TIA
I’m not sure what Big Red has against Sun but configuring their java plug-in for mozilla with any release of RH is a wasted effort. Can anyone explain this to me please?