Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed 410
Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.
A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:3, Informative)
You answered Mosfet's points very well. So far as I can see, all of the points made against RH on this one have been driven either by ego or misinformation. I use KDE, I dislike GNOME, yet I use Mozilla, and wouldn't consider using Konqueror until it works as well as Mozilla. To an IE user, Mozilla is *far* nicer. Though Mozilla does use GTK+, you're right in saying that it isn't really a GNOME app. The same goes for KOffice/OpenOffice. You could almost say I use the "toolkit" that RH8 ships with by choice, despite KDE giving me othe rdefaults. Man, I'm so awful, I'm just hitting on KDE
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE-Galeon (Score:2)
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE-Galeon (Score:2)
Too bad it's factually inaccurate in 100s of plac (Score:2)
Doesn't really matter, they're slashdotted. Their php script reports back a mysql error - too many connections - guess someone should tell them to set "FATALS_TO_BROWSER" to false.
Besides, people will d/l it and make their own decisions.
Regards, Tom
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
I've only had my own experiences and information from other people I've researched the topic with. If there's errors there (and there undoubtedly are) then I suppose you'll send me some email explaining exactly what's wrong, and providing supporting evidence. You do believe these opinions are correct, right?
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
Cheers for the correction, but you could be a bit more civil about it. As the document states, I'm approaching this from a users point of view, oddly enough, where Red Hat are aiming.
PS: The second URL you posted doesn't seem to work.
Further, you claim that every contributor is listed in "About App" boxes. I invite you to look over commit logs of any KDE application, and you'll see that there are dozens of contributors who aren't listed in the about box - bugfixers, proofreaders, people who fix up UI improvements. Heck, a casual look at kde-cvs archives will show that.
If this is the case (I doubt anybody would assume it was off the bat) then have you reported it to bugzilla?
And, BTW, I consider opinions based on inaccurate information meaningless.
That's nice dear. Meanwhile, in the real world, peole can and do make mistakes. My article certainly debunks more myths than it propogates, and unlike many of the critics, my page will be corrected when I find better information.
Mike
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
People can and have have hinted that Red Hat broke Konqueror plugins (and caused every other bug that has or will appear in their KDE) on purpose to discredit KDE. Yes, these people are idiots, but others still believe them.
Konqueror plugins and Bluecurve are both fixed. I think they have have been for a fair while.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
That seems odd when according to your link "The problem is khtml doesn't correctly interpret the tag and thus, flash animations which are not inside a pair work ok. Like
the one above." Doesn't look as if it was Red Hat's bug to fix...
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:4, Informative)
That's simply false. Red Hat host the site, but non Red Hat developers from KDE, Gnome and many other projects have contributed to many of its standards - eg, the Window Management specification that's supported by both environments and a increasingly large array of leightweight window managers.
2- about Qt+Xft, it's simple: they have shipped Beta Software. This is not good, and, unsurprisingly, they have done it for KDE, not GNOME. The same about VFolders. About this, RH's attitude looks very close to a (bad) fork.
Both the QT addons and the standard VFolder support stuff are a patch by Red Hat. Just like your distro doesn't ship a standard Linux kernel (most major distros don't). Yes, they'll be in future versions, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat 8 hasn't goen through extensive beta testing.
3- Mozilla uses GTK, you're apparently not aware of it.
GTK is not Gnome. Especially when its a backend for XUL.
4- About Mozilla & Konq again, you're making a small mistake. You say that Konqueror doesn't render properly web pages. This is false, for the simple reason that Konqueror can use KHTML or Mozilla, precisely, to render web pages.
Its not false, I'm assuming the default renderign engine of the software - which is a reasonable asummption to make as kmozilla isn't anywhere near as maintained as khtml is.
5- about changing default apps, you failed to notice that this will prevent interaction between apps when using KDE. Namely all those nice interactions between KMail and Konqueror and KOrganizer and Kaboodle, through KPart or DCOP, that most users point as the "added value", the "big plus" of KDE, are simply nonexistent if you use most RH default apps (simply because these default apps are not KDE apps).
Then choose a different app. Or better yet, standardize the interface. The bug isn't that peopel dare use applciation from other toolkits, the bug is that doing so often gives them a worse user experience because these application use nonstandardized mechanisms to interact with each other.
Also, don't fail to consider that _most_ users _will_use_default_apps_ that they are proposed
Good - Red Hat have taken some time selection good defaults and its nice that they showcase the best of what OSS has to offer.
because this is the attitude that years of microsoftian lobotomization has lead to.
No offence (I think your post is quite intelligent), but many people won't take you seriously if you use words like `Microsoftian'.
For all Linux newbies using RH, the mandatory conclusion if they try KDE instead of GNOME will be "KDE is crap".
By that same logic Gnome is crap, because they're missing out in Abiword, Gnumeric, and Galeon, in favor of non Gnome alternatives. Wait a sec. Abiword can't open, edit, and save MS Office documents reliably. Neither can KOffice. If a new user is given these defaults, anmd reasonably assumes they're the best the platform has to offer, the user may very well incorrectly l assume Linux is crap.
Thanks for your post. But I think what Red Hat's doing provides for a better desktop experience for end users. I love and use KDE, but no matter how hard the developers try, my platform is Linux - not KDE. I can and will choose the best apps avaliable to me regardless of toolkit. If that means those apps will miss out on some functionality because of that, the solution is to allow those non-KDE apps to integrate with KDE to the best of their ability - not to tell Red Hat that they should include a beta-quality office suite as a default because it uses the Right Toolkit.
The same goes for Gnome too.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
That's a true point, one I'm about to add to the page, but not what we were talking about. You said Red Hat was freedesktop.org, I provided soem evidence that it wasn't.
About point 2, considering how bad were the RH's KDE packages in the past, i'm almost sure it wasn't tested enough.
As someone who used those packages, I disagree.
About point 3 and 4, i just advise you to use as correct and accurate language as possible in your article, if you want credibility.
Fair enough, I can see your point and will add it to the page.
About OpenOffice you seem to ignore that it includes some GNOME interaction (not a lot for now though, granted)
Interesting. Could you be more specific?
However KOffice is very light and coherent when used within KDE, and i'm sure that for a lot of people such qualities are very important. This raising the question: on what basis did RedHat determine what is "best" Linux software ? KWord imports very well Word document as far as i know and have used it.
Does it export it? For most users, the ability to save to the file format that `everyone else' uses outweighs some sense of desktop interoperability. Likewise, being able to view web pages. Not everyone has the power to change other people's desktop habits or HTML coding skills.
That said, i know i'll be able to reconfigure everything, but most users will simply not do it.
I did. I don't know about other people, but I think if desktop users are unsatisfied most be aware they can chaneg and might do so. The best idea though is to keep them satisfied from the start.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
There's plenty of stuff for (real) KDE users to be upset about.
Is there anything specific that's not covered in my article? I'd be happy to add it if you wish. As you can tell I don't think everything Red Hat changed has been beneficial, so if you have real criticisms and evidence to prove their case, post here or send me an email.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
You don't seem to understand the difference between Red Hat's changes and the resulting side effects. Red Hat didn't rename the
Stop trying to include me in the Myterious Anti KDE Sinister Organization. I always acknowledged the file renaming has no benefit I can see for end users, and I've criticised other Red Hat desktop decisions in the article too, such as the poor menu setup. Just because I agree with Red Hat on a few points doesn't mean I don't think independently: clearly I do, or I wouldn't be disagreeing with them on other points.
Oh well, your loss. The article's getting a few hits and I think you look bad by not providing evidence to support your claims of other breakages that you say aren't mentioned.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
to KDE written by GNOME developers
that serves no purpose except to
break things in KDE, but in your
mind this is somehow a "side effect".
No, the patch is not a side effect. I never said it was. The services breakage is a side effect. if it was the intended purpose of the patch, they wouldn't be trying to fix it.
But I think you know this and you're trolling me.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:2)
I agree that it seems unnecessary (I can't udnerstand why they'd do it either) but I think you're missing the difference between the problem and a side effect. The side effect was unintentional - otherwise Red hat wouldn't have a highly priority bug concerning it, and wouldn't be working on a patch to fix it.
Re:What about the other bits? (Score:2)
gentoo (Score:5, Funny)
That's why i use gentoo.
It's so eleet it doens't even have an installer!
you just copy the stuff over by hand!
that just proves you have to be eleet to use it!
my mom got mad when i installed it on our dell in the family room but it's just cuase she's not leet!
you posers in the data centers running redhat on the huge server farms are pussies compared to my leet mp3 server!
uh my mom needs to get a recipe off marthastweart.com, gotta go!
keep it leet!
w3rd em up!
Eugenia Linux! (Score:4, Funny)
> Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money.
Wow, Eugenia sounds like a cool new distribution!
The next Debian unstable (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. Pedantic (Score:2)
RH 8 is out (Score:3, Informative)
It's scheduled for release at 10:00 AM -4GMT.
No multimedia?? (Score:2, Informative)
Wonder what the are trying.... it is a real funny business decision, I wonder how many home users will really want a distro without those...time to switch to mandrake 9?
And the KDE hacking sucks.. those people have not even given them credits... all abouts have been removed... It is really unethicalxine is in (null) (Score:2)
Re:xine is in (null) (Score:2)
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:2, Informative)
About boxes in programs should show information about the current program, not the toolkit it is based upon. About KDE should be placed inside the kde configuration tool, or somewhere accessible from the kde menu. Afterall, if your running kde apps under gnome, the about kde option may be somewhat confusing to people.
It would also be nice, if about boxes showed some compiletime configuration options and memory/cpu usage stats instead of just an advert.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:3, Informative)
I made a few screenshots of the last RedHat 8.0 Beta installation that I did over the weekend and just to show that it DOES come with XINE:
Screenshot3.png [8bit.co.uk]
Well, they may have taken it out in the final version.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:5, Informative)
We don't put closed source, or binary only software into the distribution itself, that's what keeps our distro fully GPL'd.
As for the decision behind not shipping mp3 players, that has more to do with the nature of mp3 patent licensing and royalty scemes. There used to be very clear terms allowing us to ship such things, but that seems to be changing, at least enough to put it in the gray area.
That said, nothing is stopping an end user from getting any of the software they are used to having on Red Hat Linux, we chose to err on the side of caution and not become someone's test case for litigation down the road.
On the other hand, try using Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3. It's not so encumbered with gray area, it's open and patent/royalty free.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is definitely legal, but quite impolite.
OTOH, they sat still when Mandrake took their (was it 5.2?) distribution and started a new company. Perhaps they deserve some slack. (Yes, they had to allow it, but they were polite about it.)
Still, they *are* being impolite now. And I suspect that they will continue to be so. This is coloring my perceptions of them
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:2)
Never had mplayer, anyway (Score:2)
Anyway, point is that mplayer wins hands down as the best media player, and RH doesn't package it (and the mplayer guys strongly discourage binary packages, anyway)...so I always just download and install the thing. Not exactly that much pain.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bluecurve kicks ass. . (Score:5, Interesting)
I just tried Mandrake's latest release on a dual Celeron 533 and a Tecra Laptop, both dual boot systems. I had the latest Redhat beta ((null)) and installed it right after installing Mandrake. No comparison. The Redhat interface looks much better, and the intergration of the menus is a much needed improvment. All of the program defaults make logical sense to me, as I use OpenOffice, Moz, and Evolution by choice.
I am waiting for the mirrors to update RH 8.0 like a Lion waiting for fresh meat.
Re:Bluecurve kicks ass. . (Score:2)
I'm not waiting, I'm pulling 8.0 from RedHat directly. Rather then buying a CD copy, I bought support a while ago. I am able to log in directly and download the ISOs. I'm getting 90kB/sec at the moment. Should take about 2.5 hours for each CD. I pull all of my ISOs down from them, and I know that some money goes back to them directly. Best $50 I spent all year.
Re:Bluecurve kicks ass. . (Score:2)
Errr.....hasn't Mandrake had this menu integration since at least Mandrake 8.2 (probably earlier, but I can't remember now) ?
Or is that what you meant by "No comparison" ?
You may have a point about the default interface looking better - I don't know, I've not used the new Red Hat distribution. But I don't know a single Linux user who doesn't tweak his/her environment to get it just the way they like it.
Upgading from 7.3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2, Informative)
Something in the new version requires you to put in a single like about DDNS AD-HOC mode.
Other than that... smooth as silk
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:3, Informative)
The installer will however tell you about any conflicts as a result of your custom packages, and if worst comes to worst, you still won't loose any data - the Linux packaging system will use your existing configs (and create [config].rpmnew for any config files from new packages) or back yoru existing configs up as [config].rpmsave if the config file format has changed.
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:5, Informative)
Ahemm. Watch out, Apache 2.0 will bite you in the ass if you're not careful.
Null used Apache 2.0 as apposed to 1.3.26 in RH 7.3. So yer default config files are now somewhere else, and all of your carefully massaged virtual things are now nowhere to be found. It can be fixed pretty easy, just RTFM.
There are probably a few more "gotchas" but that one stuck out like a sore thumb.
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2)
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2)
I have done the following upgrades and all of them went mostly smoothly:
5.1 -> 6.0
6.0 -> 7.3
6.0 -> 6.2
7.1 -> 7.2
7.2 -> 7.3
and probably other cases that I don't remember right now. What's your definition of an update that's not smooth?
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2)
More to the point, though, is that the GCC and underlying libraries may be radically different enough so as to make upgrading like that not work - what were the jumps in gcc from 7.0 -> 7.3? I can't remember.
RH8 for business - question then... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RH8 for business - question then... (Score:2)
Re:RH8 for business - question then... (Score:2)
Step 1: Install Red Hat
Step 2: Install mplayer and xmms
Re:RH8 for business - question then... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, home users like to brag about how "professional" or "better" Photoshop is while the real professionals [sourceforge.net] use Gimp [gnomedesktop.com].
Face it, Gimp is good *enough* for most people.
Audio distributions (Score:2)
Or Planet CCRMA [stanford.edu]?
Another write-up... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another write-up... (Score:2)
"This much software from Microsoft would cost about $400"
This is just plain wrong. This much software from Microsoft would cost a lot more than $400.
The office suite and the Operating system alone would cost more than $400.
The other thing is the statement about Microsoft Internet Explorer still being the best browser out there, without any argument to back it up. Why is it better than anything else out there? For me it certainly isn't, since I'm way too bothered by all the pop-ups..
Otherwise a decent piece.
Re:Another write-up... (Score:2)
Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license (GPL, LGPL, BSD), sharing code but with appropriate attribution, using open standards and tools (autoconf, etc), and so on. The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world. Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits? When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license, then perhaps free software can really evolve past its geek-oriented roots to something that the masses can embrace.
Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:2)
Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license?
I think your point is a little off, by targeting "developers in the free software community". This is RedHat's distribution of GNU/Linux, and it sounds like the author's gripes would need to be addressed by RedHat. It doesn't really sounds like a programmers view of the UI, but the distributor's. I am not disagreeing with the author's point, just that the comments should be directed appropriately. If RedHat wants to put the same menu in 15 times in 15 different places, you can' fault the person who coded the menu.
Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:2)
Problem is of course such guidlines do not exisit, but it would be great if, for instance, the KDE, Mozilla, Gnome and OpenOffice people could each appoint a team member for a group to put something like this together. This would also be much preferable to having changes forced upon them by RedHat.
Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:2)
Not exactly, but close. I would like to see guidlines that are meant for all projects. I believe currently, for instance, Gnome and KDE both have their own guidelines. I would like to see a set of guidelines which has the universiality and authority of the LSB, written by people from KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice and Mozilla, etc., not just the Gnome people.
Why Free Software UI tends to suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Why free software usability tends to suck [phrasewise.com]
Why free software usability tends to suck even more [phrasewise.com]
To address a few things mentioned in your post:
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license
Because Free Software is currently Freedom As A Programmer Envisions It. As the Free Software concept was nutured by Richard M. Stallman, a programmer, this is not surprising. Freedom As An End User Envisions In (also known as The Freedom To Get Stuff Done) has never really been considered by the Free Software community to be a Valid Freedom.
Funny you should mention, I'm currently drawing up a public license that enforces usability and goes after the people who've kept linux so very unusable.
The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world.
I commonly hear this phrase "We've gotten so far on the server, it's only a matter of time before get to the desktop." Unfortunately, this statement makes the assumption that the same abilities, values, and methodologies that lead to success on the server do the same for the desktop. Linux has been doing so well on the server because people in the linux community were really good at doing server stuff. Unfortunately these people were the most absolute worst people you could have ever sent to do desktop stuff. 30 years of anti-newbie RTFM baggage, command-line junkihood, and having a userbase that entirely consists of programmers and sysadmins does not behoove the creation of high quality user interfaces. In contrast, the mac developer community has for 17 years put very strong values on consistancy and non-geeks being able to use the software. That's why they've been able to succeed on the unix desktop in 3 years where linux has failed for the last 7-8.
Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits?
It's already been tried, and has been tried by people with very strong usability/HCI backgrounds. The response they generally get from programmers is "stop whining. If you want to fix something, you should learn how to code". Or sometimes you'll hear "Don't complain about what you get for free". Or "That's what you want, that's not what I want. That's just your opinion."
Or if a usability person criticizes a UI in front of a kernel hacker, the kernel hacker might say "I can't believe that people actually get paid to criticize the work of others" (true story).
When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license
First of all, you have to be pro-active about creating good user interfaces. Users generally do not actively complain about specific application interfaces unless the interfaces are truly, truly, horrible. They will usually passively complain, trying to find execuses to use the program less, or unconsciously creating some workaround, or saying "I hate computers" around the watercooler. You won't get active feedback very often from users, so you need to actively watch them using your UI. So often what makes a UI unbearable is a bunch of little, annoying things that add up to one cumulative bad user experience. To catch those little things, you really have to watch the person using the interfaces. You should also do research ahead of time to learn (before you design the UI) to learn what the most common annoyances are. Unfortunately, most Free Software UI's are cranked out and *then* people try to do active damage control. Much like the world of commercial software, actually.
Another problem with your suggestion is that most of the current userbase for Free Software/OSS are the geeks who've been so clueless about good UI (and some of whom who think that HCI is a load of bull). These people adapt very, very well to badly designed UI's, often priding themselves on doing just that. They often don't take notice of the little, annoying things and are often not confused by ambiguous widget layouts or jargon-laden wording. When you consider these facts, it's not surpising why StarOffice gets such glowing reviews from the geek community. Assuming you manage to find a geek who gives you feedback about the UI, chances are he's not going to a suggestion that jives with all of what we've learned about HCI in the last 20 years. Just because you get feedback doesn't necessarily mean its usable feedback.
Hope I've answered a few of your questions.
In other news... (Score:2, Informative)
A dilemma (Score:2)
Redhat has some nice advancements in terms of integration of the UI and consistency for the look and feel of administration tools. So I should make the switch right?
Well, then I hear that the multimedia, plugins side of Redhat sucks hard. I started gathering some of the packages needed to make this better but my god there is a lot of missing things.
So I am at an impasse. Should I stay with a distro that is not aimed at my primary desktop or move to a distro that is but will take a lot more work to get functional?
Any ideas?
_______________________________________________
i386 Optimized (Score:2)
Then another buddy introduced me to Mandrake. Everything good about RH, but compiled for CPUs that were actually fabbed in the last 5 years. Ever since 1998, I have had a love/hate relationship with Mandrake. Not very stable (compared to RH), but at least I have the comfort of knowing that it is somewhat optimized for my system.
I still try RH releases. I love to see the work the guys have done. If I ever convert my office to Linux, I will reccomend RH. But why, oh why, can't the guys over there just update the compiler options. Would it really take that long to compile for i586? I know there are some people still running 80486 chips (esp in the embedded world), but why do they insist on keeping 80386 as a baseline?
Actually, I guess people like me are never really happy. I bitch at Mandrake for not moving to i686 as a base. In any event, my home box runs Gentoo now. Gcc 3.2, -O3, march=athlon, and whatever else I want to throw in there. I'm happy with my system, but I still look at RH 8.0 and their snazzy desktop/installer/awesome support, and wish they would take a few days to pump out an i686 ISO.
RedHat is 686 optimized Re:i386 Optimized (Score:5, Informative)
And anyone having run a few benchmarks knows
1) Compiling for Pentium sucks on anything who is not a true Pentium. On a PII/PIII and on the K6 (I don't have access to an Athlon or PIV) they are markedly slower than code optimized for the 386 and much slower than code compiled with -mcpu=i686
2) Using the -march=i686 allows gcc to use PII/PIII specific instructions but benefits are small (about 2%) respective to -mcpu=i686 so you throw away universality for little benefit. Mandrake uses -mcpu=i686 -march=i586 but gcc is not smart enough to use 586 instructions when optimizing for 686 so it silently reverts to plain -mcpu=i686.
3) For those packages where 386-only instructions don't make sense since they have perfoarmnce-critical parts written in assembler (kernel, glibc, sasl) RedHat ships packages specific to the PII/PIII family who are compiled with -march=i686 (full optimizations) and another set specific to the Athlon compiled with -march=athlon.
Good points. Here's a few more. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also like to point out that I've done a bit of benchmarking gcc, and optimizing for a particular processor makes almost no difference on the vast majority of software.
The biggest win comes from flipping on -O3. Then if you can get away with it, -fomit-frame-pointer, which helps the register-starved x86, but keeps you from looking at stack traces and debugging crashed programs (or sending in useful bug reports). -fexpensive-optimizations have also helped a bit too, and for certain packages, -ffast-math can be big. -march=pentium2 makes next to no difference on anything I've tried benchmarking. -DNDEBUG is potentially good...seems like most production software is compiled with assertions enabled, when they're really intended for debugging.
The Pentium 1 sucked at running code compiled for the 386/486. This is why you got compilers like pgcc, a Pentium-optimized Mandrake distro, and lots of talk about architecture optimizations. With the Pentium 2, Intel realized that all software was not going to be recompiled for each processor (at least in Windows land), and did a really solid job of running 386 code.
So, as far as architectures go, the Pentium 1 is the odd man out. If you have a Pentium 1, it sucks to run any code other than stuff compiled for your chip. If you have anything else, you'll generally get very minimal gains from compiling specifically for your processor instead of for the 386.
Finally, most people don't actually care about the maybe 10% speedup they can get by recompiling software using optimization flags other than just -O2. They care about interactive latency. Look at Mac OS X. OS X is *hideously* slow, but it *feels* pretty fast because it has good UI latency -- it jacks UI priority and puts a lot of emphasis on slapping something on the screen that's updated as soon as the user does anything.
On Linux, here are the big culprits.
Jack the nice value of X from 0 to -10, if your distro doesn't already do so (take a look in top and see what it's running at). The nice value doesn't make it much "faster", but it does significantly improve latency, so you can get crisp edge-flipping and updating.
Turn *on* DMA and umasked interrupts (insert usual warnings about potential problems with *really* old computers having these on). hdparm -u1 -d1
If you're doing something that doesn't need low latency in the background, *nice* it. I run all compiles niced to 20. I can be compiling six or seven packages with no user-perceptable slowdown at all. Software that's always sucking down a little CPU in the background but still should be interactive (like lopster or gtk-gnutella) should be niced to 5 or so.
Make all your cron jobs run at nice 20 (crontab -e, edit command line to contain nice -n20). They have no reason to demand interactive latency, and you *do* need said latency for your UI.
If you run any servers on your workstation, they should run around nice 10. They need to get back to the user, but they shouldn't make your UI get unpleasant when they get hit.
Renice esd/artsd to -15. If these don't get CPU *right away* when they need it, your sound will break up. Frankly, I dumped esd/artsd, and got a sound card with hardware mixing (ALSA
Use a decent window manager. Sawfish is incredible if you're an edge-flipping maniac like me and like zero edge resistance. Why? Sawfish is actually not that *fast*, but they've compensated for that fact, which makes them beat any other window manager I've seen at edge flipping latency. Sawfish doesn't block other app redraws when edge flipping until it's redrawn its titlebars, as other WMs do, so you get much faster redisplay of app windows. Beautifl design.
Finally, I've had good experiences with redefining HZ in the kernel. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of using the X11 architecture is that anything going to the screen has to wait for a context switch -- first, the app tells X to display something, then we wait until X is active and actually display it. This isn't a huge deal unless you have a bunch of processes that all want CPU time, and you have an app or X that's blocking on I/O (say you've paged out an app). Then your ten compiles, and the lowly default 100 HZ in the x86 kernel mean that it takes a full tenth of a second just to move from the user app to X. If the app is displaying a big pixmap that has to be paged it, it has to draw a little bit, start paging the thing back in, draw a little more...it's I/O bound and yet it isn't gettting a chance to keep the ATA bus saturated. Jack HZ to 1000 or 1024 and recompile your kernel, and you should notice slightly better UI latencies (NOTE: at one point, this caused oddities in some libc call lke usleep or something, and made a couple games run too fast...I don't think this is an issue any more).
Other wins: Use mozilla 1.1 (much faster redraw than 1.0), use an up-to-date version of gtk2 (wow, the version RH is packaging is much faster at rendering aa text than the old snapshot I had from Ximian), use the blisteringly fast rxvt instead of the slow gnome-terminal or konsole. Use gnuserv mode in emacs/emacs -- that way, you open a *single* copy of emacs and then just open new windows in it. Opening files is about 50 times faster.
After following all these tips, you can play with Linux the way it was meant to be seen.
Missed Points in the review (Score:2, Informative)
RH 7.x users will love this distro.
Myths: KDE/Qt is broken. My favorite KDE
The new scheduler is not mentioned, but this really improves the snappines of the desktop. Windows and dialogs move, open and close really quick.
KDE has a really good printer setup mechanism with CUPS. (IMHO should be the default for RH - LPrng is a PIA)
Bluecurve in the shipping version is really quite smooth and easy on the eyes. You can see a lot of work was put into making fonts readable everywhere.
Most importantly, this has a great many of the tools needed to slip Linux into the corporate enviroment. I would not suggest any Linux distro to Windows clients until seeing this.. This is the most important part of RH 8.0
Well, ... (Score:2)
Anyway, I get the impression she is a graphical designer. She nitpicked the Gnome UI apart. Everything is visual for her. Form is more important than function - at least that is my impression of her opinion.
Most of the proposed changes she mentioned seem to make the interface look more like Windows and less like Gnome. While I agree some changes are warranted, does it have to look exactly like windows to please her? Puleez!
Also, a unified desktop where everything is the same old boring thing is just... well... boring. I get mental images of that tennis shoe commercial where everyone is exactly the same... then some offcenter person appears wearing tennis shoes of a different color and is immediately chastised. Oh well. A consistent way of doing things is great but to have everything EXACTLY the same EVERY TIME with no variation at all. Bleah.
After that I got too many users error... prolly for the better.
Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
And this is very important if Linux ever is going outside the geek block.
Since she seems to be a mainly Mac and BeOS user, it is also unlikely she wants stuff to work like windows, but OTOH, if you want to get into businesses, what are the odds that the machine you are replacing is a Windows machine? What would the *USERS* want, you think?
Consistency is great for productivity. I only need to look at the fact that I am switching back and forth between Emacs on Linux and TextPad on Windows to see that it costs time and productivity doing things differently. Even if it is measured in seconds, tops, it adds up. And that is just two text editors.
I really like both, and don't expect any of them to change, but on the same OS I want stuff to follow certain principles, so I can at least learn a few OS's instead of thousands of apps. It is fun when you are playing, but not when you try to get job done.
And no, no really good way ATM to do all editing in one of them. Emacs on Windows you say? Well, then it doesn't behave like the rest of the OS, which is worse.
Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
>consistency. DWIW and "least surprise", in other
>words.
How does changing the shading on a non-selected tab on a tab control, while a nice cosmetic addition, add to the consistency or usability of the control?
>Since she seems to be a mainly Mac and BeOS user,
>it is also unlikely she wants stuff to work like
>windows, but OTOH, if you want to get into
>businesses, what are the odds that the machine
>you are replacing is a Windows machine?
The changes made to the default controls and apps seem to me to reflect a windowsish look
>What would the *USERS* want, you think?
I think the users want an easy to use computer that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and that doesn't crash on them all the time. One that they can get good software for and doesn't lock them into an expensive solution.
>Consistency is great for productivity. I only
>need to look at the fact that I am switching back
>and forth between Emacs on Linux and TextPad on
>Windows to see that it costs time and
>productivity doing things differently. Even if it
>is measured in seconds, tops, it adds up. And
>that is just two text editors.
How can you compare Emacs and TextPad???
Many Windows apps have a minimum of consistency in the naming of the menu selections and buttons... not a whole lot more than that. Anyway, take any killer app or tool and compare it with any other app or tool - Photoshop and Dreamweaver for instance - they don't have consistent interfaces do they? Didn't think so. I figure I save alot of those seconds, you say I lose with allegedly inconsistent interfaces, by not having to reboot multiple times a day and setup my whole development environment every freakin time.
>I really like both, and don't expect any of them
>to change, but on the same OS I want stuff to
>follow certain principles, so I can at least
>learn a few OS's instead of thousands of apps. It
>is fun when you are playing, but not when you try
>to get job done.
What you, and she, seem to really mean is that you want applications to look and act more alike - it's not the OS you have problems with. The windowmanagers could use more polish also - true. But to say they are inefficient at getting a job done because they need a more subtle shading and to round a few pixels on the edges... then I say you need to take off yer windows colored glasses and get an eye-exam as well as an electroencephalogram to check for brainwave activity.
>And no, no really good way ATM to do all editing
>in one of them. Emacs on Windows you say? Well,
>then it doesn't behave like the rest of the OS,
>which is worse.
Emacs is an OS.
RedHat Linux 6.2 and 7.2 support status (Score:2)
It will be a shame if RedHat 6.2 and 7.2 are desupported. Both are fine, stable dists. We have standardized on 7.2 (by the way, believing that 7.2 is the last minor release in 7.x series) only eight months ago and it would really suck having to upgrade all of our 7.2 machines
The best line from the entire review... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod me down as flamebait, call me a troll, do your worst. But...
I've been saying this for a long time. If you want to keep Linux small, and only accessible to the enlightened (read that as "Lucky enough to know how to code, or content to run no exotic new hardware) few, then ignore that statement.
Wanna play in the business world? Read this article, and understand why she's dead-on with her complaints.
XP, for all that it's produced by Microsoft and has security holes, DRM issues, and privacy problems, works out of the box. It has been rock solid in EVERY implementation I've done. I can give my Mom a copy of XP, and she can install it and run it. She won't have to worry about having java support, or plugins. I will not have a call from her in the middle of the day complaining that she can't install an application because she hasn't met her dependencies. This is the "Mom-Test (tm)", and XP passes.
Just because I don't run it, doesn't mean that I don't respect it.
XP easy to install? (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux really isn't hard to install any more, at least to the point of getting it up and running. I'd call the installation process on at least RH simpler than the Windows procedure.
That being said, configuring stuff not-out-of-box is where things get ugly. It's damn easy for an end user to just get a new video card, download their InstallShield program, and use it. And to *uninstall*, simple as that may seem.
Software packaged by your distro "just works" and at least with RPM is really easy to install and uninstall. However, a lot of drivers are not packaged in said manner. Sometimes you can't get a driver to compile, or instructions are written for another distro. Got a laptop with a wireless card, or an Nvidia card, or a weird USB device? If it works in Linux, the install procedure is not necessarily trivial.
A few other things that are nasty include:
* Networking. i swear to God that there's either a bug in the Linux kernel or in RH's networking scripts since time immemorable, since *every* system I've ever used will sometimes, despite the fact that the routing tables are correct, refuse to properly route information. I can pretty consistently get this on a wide variety of RH's distros by running
* Windows has ZoneAlarm. Linux has the amazingly powerful iptables, with *no* really good, really solid front ends (though lots of half-finished freshmeat projects). If you want a personal firewall, Linux can give you an incredible amount of power...*if* you're willing to fight with iptables for a few days.
* Linux has *no* fully working, reliable ICQ program. This is an embarrassment. It isn't really Linux authors' fault -- trying to reverse engineer ICQ is not trivial -- but if I try to send a Windows user a file and can't, the only thing they learn is "Linux can't do IM properly". Yes, I know about Jabber -- which no one uses.
* Linux has, AFAIK, *no* finished, fully featured 3d modelling programs. Someone who likes to dabble with 3d work can run out grab lots of low end 3d modelers on Windows. There are *tons* of Pov front ends, none of which begin to compare to fully blown Windows modelling programs. Oh, and I'm not talking about multi-thousand dollar movie studio packages -- I mean stuff that a home user could use.
* Linux has *no* finished, fully featured vector graphics programs. Yes, lots of projects underway like sodipodi, sketch, kontour...and none of them are remotely usable for a real life production artist.
Linux just gets better - just as Windows had to (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows has had many years to garner the market share and see trends in development to adequately support their users. With this comes innovations such as the driver management system, streamlined interface, overall stability, self-maintaining (semi), and a united Win32 SDK. Through these innovations comes revenue - with revenue comes research and development.
These features are taken for granted considering they are relatively "recent" or modern innovations, even in the Windows world. The rock solid reputation Windows has is as a result of many releases - much feedback (largely from the corporate space). The driver model used in the NT-based Windows releases was pretty good in Windows 2000, but is considered even better in Windows XP because it comes with so many drivers pre-installed. No one would have ventured to make the claim with regards to stability and flexibility with Windows NT 4 and, God forbid, Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.x. Apple touted its MacOS as a vastly superior model to Windows - Microsoft simply learned to put the "good stuff" ("lessons learned" from other operating system offerings) in with its own product and, voila!, we have stable (for the most part), easy to install and use, and widely support Windows releases. Microsoft may not be saintly in its operations - but in a business sense, it is extremely smart to give people something to suckle on - easy to take and get used to. Believe it or not, it is what the majority of bipeds want.
Software innovations come about from much trial and error. Linux is breaking out of the stages of its infancy - catering only to those willing to take the dare and challenge of migrating from a Windows world to a UNIX world. But times are changing, and Linux is changing with it. People who can describe the average Linux distribution in 1995 will tell you that hardware support was hit or miss - and if it was a hit, it often only was a partial (never a bulls-eye).
Personally, I feel that Linux has made HUGE strides towards that perfect operating system for any niche. If you consider how long it took Microsoft's Windows line to fully mature - Linux is ahead of the game. Businesses will just need more time to listen to feedback and implement those features that people can suckle on - and using Microsoft and Apple as references with regards to their own products is a great start - they obviously figured something out to appease the masses.
Members of the open source community (users, developers, and companies) need to pay close attention to the desires of the community as a whole. Many of the projects that make up Linux (and other open source operating system offerings) have the ability to receive feedback to make the project better. Griping is one thing - channelling the gripe to the write email address is better for the whole. The applications that make up Linux thrive on contributions (ideas, source code, and comments [good/bad]). The more feedback - the better the product.
The capabilities in Linux are there - the opportunities for Linux just need to be taken advantage of - users, developers, and companies alike.
Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hope! (Score:3, Interesting)
This should fix most if not all problems with Red Hat and multimedia.
Re:Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hop (Score:2)
Possible reason why KDE unhappy (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a comment I made on another list:
I doubt if the changing of the themes and such was the problem. I would not lose any sleep over single vs double-click or a few icons and bitmaps. This would not justify Bero quitting and claiming that KDE was "crippled". Part of the real problem, ironically, is that the changes Red Hat made ARE merely skin-deep. This is exactly what the KDE project is not.
A perceptive Slashdotter earlier saw that the problem was not in the superficial reskinning, but in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
Red Hat has in effect substituted other apps for every major KDE app. The KDE apps are not gone, but they are less visible. This means that a typical Red Hat user will install "KDE" and never run a single significant KDE application. What you get is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps stitched together by superficial skinning, but not quite fitting together. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
For pros, the best-of-breed approach is the status quo. IMHO, a beginner need not start this way. The default KDE apps may simply be good enough, with the common UI and infrastructure compensating for the individual weakness. Sure, a deliberate decision can be made to pick a better app, now or later. But this should be done with the concious knowledge that this goes "off the KDE ranch", that the various integration, uniformity and usability improvements of KDE will not apply. Starting off a beginner with a best-of-breed approach leaves him with the usual Frankenstein collection of disintegrated apps, all unalike. I.e., this is the status quo that KDE was supposed to fix. Trouble is, Red Hat will not let KDE be KDE.
Re:Possible reason why KDE unhappy (Score:2)
But Red Hat has made the correct decision in picking and choosing the best apps, even if this harms integration. It says it is attacking the "business desktop" market. It can offer its customers Koffice, or the usual Gnome/Gtk apps Abiword and Gnumeric, or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is neither KDE nor Gnome, but it's the only free suite that does a reasonably reliable job of importing and exporting MS Office apps, meaning that it is the only suite suitable for the business user.
Similarly, while Konqueror does a great job of rendering documents that were correctly written according to the specs from W3C, it does a much poorer job than Mozilla of dealing with the real Web. Since business users frequently need to access web sites with broken HTML to get their work done, Konqueror does not yet cut it, and the inconsistencies in the Mozilla GUI vs the KDE desktop will only be a mild annoyance compared to the annoyance of not being able to work at all.
Using a pure KDE suite would work fine if it is mandated that everyone in your organization must use it and no one is allowed to send or receive a document from or to the outside world.
Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
For awhile now, I've seen lots of people saying they think this distro will make it to the desktop seen, and now RedHat 8.0 is aiming the "Business Desktop". I find it hard to believe that RedHat will accomplish that anytime soon.
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
But I don't see how that's going to happen. I've done lots of research on my part to try and find an ERP solution for my company that can run on linux. But I haven't found anything. Whether it be an OSS or proprietary solution, client-base or web base soltuion, I wasn't able to find anything with the power of SAP or any of these ERPs to run my company's Information System.
If you do know of an application, let me know!
Re:Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
I'm inclined to agree with you - in order for the linux desktop to really make it in the business workplace, there need to be Linux clients for the major ERP applications. Now if you have total control over your own workplace machine and Lotus Notes is your only sticking point against moving to Linux, then format that harddrive now. Lotus Notes runs really very well on Wine these days, and while the performance isn't quite as snappy as I would like, it's certainly good enough even on an old cranky PII400.
I live in hope that we might see a Lotus Notes client make it out into the wild in some shape or form. I think Lotus might be surprised at how many development shops would welcome the flexibility to run Lotus Notes on a Unix-like platform rather than being limited to Windows platforms only.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
A fair review (Score:5, Interesting)
That said the review seemed pretty fair to me. She's write in saying multiple menus or counterproductive. I mean either include an app under the main area or don't include it. There should NOT be duplicate subcategories on the menu. Can you imagine if Windows XP shipped with the Acessories menu listed twice?
Second, regarding multimedia. If its multimedia abilities are as castrated as she's says, that's a big negative against RedHat 8.0. I still can't believe and MP3 player isn't included. As if that lets them off the hook for years of including an MP3 in every RedHat release?! Now Out of the Box multimedia is broken, which won't stop me, but will stop the average user who has never used linux before. There should dam well be a single button you click that restores MP3 ability. Making a user try to figure out how to get MP3 back into XMMS is NOT user friendly.
Lastly while obvisouly most people are not running at the resolutions mentioned in the article, having something as basic as being able to change your refresh rate ala Corel linux should be standard by now. It actually quite pathetic that its not.
Anyway, I'm downloading it now so we'll see how it goes. The one thing I am looking forward to is decent fonts for once. If they get that right I can probably forgive the other things.
Great fonts! (Score:2)
two points (Score:2)
For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn't cut it
This is a problem in A driver for A video card. It is not an issue with
X, or really even XFree86. NVidia's own drivers were also unable to
probe the correct DAC from the card. NVidia is responsible for
addressing this issue.
After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate
I wanted, X would crash.
Again, this is NVidia's responsibility to fix. They distribute a driver
which is, in part, binary-only. The binary portion of this driver was
compiled with an earlier compiler, and is not compatible with the kernel
compiled by gcc 3.2. NVidia was informed of this situation by Red Hat,
and their response was to release a driver that had the information
identifying the compiler stripped out, so that the Red Hat tools could
not warn users that the binary wasn't compatible.
This behavior is extremely irresponsible, and NVidia needs to address it
properly.
MP3 support... why? (Score:2)
One from the Boston Globe (Score:2)
Her comment on MP3s shows a lack of understanding (Score:3, Informative)
The second point about Be doesn't apply to RedHat either. The licencing on BeOS was such that if you paid for it then you couldn't redistribute it but if you didn't pay for it then you could. This is allowed by the mp3 licence in that they are only interested if money changes hands and at that point they want some. This allowed Be to buy the unlimited mp3 licence and be done with it.
RedHat can't do this because they can't restrict the redistribution of the software without being in violation of licence and so can't distribute it at all. Also they can't buy the unlimited licence because that is not transferable and only applies to them (so others can't redistribute their distribution, back to square one).
The author seems to think RedHat is in a pretty good financial position and if they are to stay that way then they can't trust the good intentions of PR people and walk into legal minefields and get their arses sued off when it turns out the PR people are full of shit (a rarity but it does happen).
Re:Very interesting quote (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The 2 best distros (Score:4, Insightful)
Firstly the review advocates Windows users not bothering to switch unless they absolutely have to, but also the FUD about Linux + Apache being insecure due to the (now patched) OpenSSL vulnerability was ridiculous. Sounds like a MS shill to me...
Then, to cap it all, advocating choosing RH7.2 over RH8.0 was ludicrous. The reasoning goes along the lines that 7.2 has been in development longer than 8.0. WTF? That doesn't even make sense.
I've downloaded 8.0 for my home network and installed most services, and it all works fine for me. Whoever wrote that article doesn't know what they are talking about.
Re:The 2 best distros (Score:3, Interesting)
My laptop is a Compaq Armada D500 (PIII 600/w 128Megs of RAM). The system seems to run a lot faster under XP than it did under RedHat 7.2 or SuSE 8.0. Even compared to when I had a custom compiled kernel and apps on it. The wireless PCMCIA worked with no need to grab drivers (my Windows 2000 experience on this laptop) or recompile anything. All apps load quickly. The suspend feature works exactly as expected. The environment is much more organized and task oriented. Etc... The bottom line is that Linux distro makers can't rest on the old laurels (Linux is more stable, secure, you can tweak the code, etc...) and ignore the MS camp. Take a look at what Windows is today. I mean a REAL look. Most of today's Linux distro's are great alternatives to Windows 2k, but they leave something to be desired when compared with Win XP.
I have been forcing myself to use XP here at work for the past month and it really does blow most Linux distros away in terms of a basic work environment. The only problem I've had so far is that I can't get under the hood and tweak as much, but I haven't found that there is a need to either...
As far as your experience goes, what make/model of laptop were you trying to install Windows XP on? That could be the key to understanding why it didn't work.
I still won't use it at home, not because it isn't as good as Linux, but because I can't afford it and the licensing sucks. Joe User doesn't think that way though...
Re:Check your mirrors... (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for my favourite little known one to open its doors. It always maxes out my adsl line no matter when I go there! No, I'm not telling
Re:Check your mirrors... (Score:2)
Re:Why 386 instead of 586? (Score:2)
Take a look at the
Now, you may ask why they would want to support ancient hardware? Well, the sad truth is that rich kids (that is to say, people who can afford a good machine) who buy computers to dual boot Linux for real work and Windows for games aren't the only people who use computers. There are many in the wealthy countries (US, Europe, Japan, etc) who need to be able to re-use old hardware and even more in the developing world. Red Hat is a great OS choice for many of these people, and as it becomes entrenched in places like South America, it becomes the choice of schools and small businesses too, which will eventually become Red Hat customers for support.
Re:Why 386 instead of 586? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why 386 instead of 586? (Score:2)
Greenrd's Law (Score:2, Funny)
Btw, it's "grammar".
Re:Slashdot grammer! (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that too, at first. I thought that some of the mistakes she made sounded like English wasn't her native language. So instead of choosing to be a smart ass and make some "clever" comment about it, I chose to educate myself. I looked up the info on the author (by simply clicking on her name at the top of the article). She is Greek, so English isn't her first language. While it isn't perfect English by far, it got the point across. In the author's own words:
I am Greek and english is not my native language. We do OSNews for fun (however, OSNews takes most of my time every day), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too) b) send me a proofread version of the article in question. Whining about something I can't radically improve overnight, is not an option.
Re:Slashdot grammer! (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot grammer! (Score:2)
Re:Resolution.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers.
Re:install 8.0 for a new server installation? (Score:2, Insightful)
is there a compelling reason to install 8.0 instead of 7.3?
For a server install I wouldn't bother. Usually what happens when any new distro comes out there are a flurry of bugs/security issues noticed in the first few weeks and loads of patches released. This is a natural process due to suddenly having a much wider test base that the Redhat 8 beta had. Also, since this is a new major version the are likely to be even more problems. Redhat 7.3 is stable and as long as you have applied all the updates it is adequately secure. I can't see that there is anything in 8.0 that is desperately needed for a server install. I would wait for the storm to calm and then take a look at it. Just my two pence worth.
Re:Usability (Score:2, Funny)
Come on people, try and have a little freakin perspective here. "Life a living hell for new users"? Yeah, sure. Somehow I don't think this Red Hat build would've made it out of Quality Assurance if this were the case. I can picture it now:
Project Lead: So, what do our testers in QA think of Red Hat 8.0?
QA Manager: Oh, it's great! They love the ease of installation, the sexy new themes, the way it's easy to find the program they are looking for, whether it be a web browser or a word processor.
Project Lead: Any complaints?
QA Manager: Well, ordinarily I wouldn't bring this up, but since you asked, 99 out of 100 testers say the minor alterations to KDE, such as making the slipshod KOffice suite harder to launch so they can marvel over what a terrible job of opening Word documents it does, and changing a couple About boxes they have never opened, have made their life a living hell. Never mind that this is just a day job, no sir -- it's hell for them 24/7 and no getting past that. Most say they can no longer sleep at night, as their dreams are haunted by emaciated KDE developers crying out in anguish. One claimed his dog bolted from his house, never to be seen again, after Mozilla came up instead of Konqueror. Another got into a terrible accident because he was so preoccupied with guilt over his part in butchering KDE.
Project Lead: Oh that's terrible! We must not release this distro into the world! Quick, let's start over. I hear Slackware and Gentoo are doing great things on the ease of use front.
QA Manager: Yes sir! Our focus groups have reported that secretaries and housewives everywhere wish their computing experience included more compiling software for a 0.00001% increase in speed and less out-of-the-box functionality. Not that we could really go so far as to call Red Hat 8.0 "functional" with so many life-is-a-living-hell bugs plaguing it.
Re:Business desktop? (Score:2)
> desktops of corporate machines (and greater
> penetration into the consumer market) if the Wine
> project would mature to the point that you could
> run any Windows app flawlessly on your Linux
> machine.
That won't happen - EVER. You can't even do that with different versions of *WINDOWS*, after all. Now it's true that most Windows apps (depending on what niche you use your machine for) will usually still run when you upgrade windows, not all will. And Microsoft has all the documentation and source code for ALL versions of Windows!
> Barring that, if there were even a collection of
> native Linux apps that could read and write
> perfectly to the MS Office document formats
> (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ACCESS, VISIO,
> PUBLISHER, etc), Linux would see a major boom.
Again, that's another impossible task - for exactly the same reasons as above. Even different versions of Microsoft Office don't get everything right when opening documents created in an older version. How do you expect Star/Open Office (for example) to read and write "perfectly" to Microsoft Office format when Office itself can't. (Heck, we sometimes have trouble here sharing documents created by the same office version, but that's another story
> Ready for the "business desktop"? I don't think
> so.
By your definition, only Microsoft has a chance to be "ready for the business desktop", and its chances aren't so good.
But back to Red Hat 8. If the screenshots are any indication, it looks like I'm putting this one on my laptop. The font stuff looks particularly nice. Has Open Office in RH 8 been linked with the system's font libraries (so antialiasing looks nice)?
Re:Business desktop? (Score:2)
> different GUIs. I don't think the typical desktop
> user wants 11 different GUIs.
Nor do I. Luckily, most of the desktop work is down to two majority desktops these days. As long as I can run stuff from both and have things like the clipboard work, I won't complain much. But neither desktop environment is perfect, and I'm glad that people still see the need to work on both.
> I think it would make more sense to improve
> Linux's ability to run MS-Windows applications,
> or access windows documents. Rather than
> forever tinkering with dozens of different
> GUIs.
While I agree to an extent (I'd like a Wine that runs Quicken a little better), I'd much rather deal with native Linux apps than bastardized Windows ones. The Linux apps - when they exist - just work better. I'd love a version of Quicken that ran on Linux with no futzing around with wine! (Hear that, Intuit? You want me to ever upgrade past Quicken 98, you port Quicken to Linux. Otherwise, no $oup for you.
As far as accessing Office documents, Open Office at least has halfway decent filters. They aren't perfect, mind you, but they're better than some give them credit for. (Some of the errors in opening Word docs, for example, can be reproduced in Word simply by changing your printer driver. This caused me no end of grief with my thesis, which had to be done in Word.)
The other side of the coin is this - these KDE and Gnome developers probably like to work on what they're working on. If you want better filters, you might consider making it worth their while to write better filters.