New Red Hat Beta

Alkini writes "Red Hat just announced a new beta, codenamed Phoebe. Their highlight list includes Mozilla 1.2.1 with Xft antialiased fonts and glibc-2.3.1. The new beta can be downloaded from RH's FTP site or one of the mirrors."

8.0 was great, but...

[MrZeebo]

...it left me feeling it could have been much better. It showed promise, but had a few faults which keep it just short of being, well... perfect. I always felt that if Red Hat addressed just a few concerns, 8.1 could be great. Problems, in my opinion, were:

*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters

*That silly "Extras" menu: you never quite know where software is going to turn up

*Lack of a good package management front-end: That Windows-like one they include is good for managing the software on the RH8 CDs, but for removing, installing, and upgrading third-party RPMs, one must resort either to the command line, or better yet, apt4rpm. Apt4rpm should be in by default.

*No MP3 support in XMMS

*DMA is off by default on CD-ROM drives. This is easily fixed through config files, but for the average user, this is a hurdle to DVD playing and CD burning.

*No nVidia drivers

These were all easily fixed if you knew what you were doing, but kept RH8 out of the realm of being usable for average people -- or even being usable out of the box for techies. Does anyone know if any of these gripes have been addressed?

No thanx.

[Martigan80]

Sorry but if it is like 8.0 they can keep it. I'm still running fine with 7.3. I appreciate the intense struggle for RH and other companies to improve their distro to help the community out, but are they not trying a little too hard to keep pushing out the newest release? I mean it almost feels like the CPU race where we are told that a 900Mhz is too slow to keep up with a 1.4GHz. It just seems a bit over kill. I'm not blaming RH, at least they make sure their Distro is beat and tested against many arch's and problems.
I know this is a beta but come on, when was 8.0 released??

Good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running Mozilla 1.2.1 with Xft antialiased fonts on my gentoo box and it is pretty sweet. The fonts in mozilla now look as good as the ones on my new apple TiBook. Good work ou guys.

Re:I was hoping they would wait.

[Phillip Birmingham]

KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit. ... KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit.

I think you just answered your question before you asked it. RedHat has no assurance that the release of KDE 3.1 won't be delayed further. At some point, you just have to go with what you have.

P2P to the rescue?

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout someone with the full images put them up on a Distributed P2P network like Overnet [overnet.com] or eDonkey2000 [edonkey2000.com] so we can take the load off of the mirrors and help proove that P2P is usefull for something other than piracy.

Re:I was hoping they would wait.

[Jahf]

Go for it.

This is my opinion regarding everyone who posts responses like this when they don't like something that one of the other distributions has done ...

If you have both the time and experience to run Gentoo or create your own distribution, then you're not the type of person who Red Hat is targetting.

If you have the knowledge to install your own updated KDE 3.1 then you're also probably not the customer that Red Hat is looking for.

I find it refreshing that Red Hat has not only recognized that most people with that skillset aren't their core customers (honestly, what percentage of the Linux "elite" pay for Red Hat?) AND that they have the balls to do what is right for their customers. It means they have a model that is starting to work, which is good for all of the Linux community.

Re:Another Redhat, more Microsoftalike?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they are not both Window Managers.

And you can still change the god damned default theme in Redhat.

Is it that hard for you people to change the default theme to something else? I go to http://www.kde-look.org all the time and change the look of my Redhat 8 setup.

Put Redhat on Kazaaa and get it there

[HanzoSan]

Upload it to Kazaa so the rest of us can download it from you