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Red Hat 8.0: The new ease and power Linux champ
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CommentsRecently, I tried out Red Hat's new version 8.0 ("Psyche") on my testing machine -- a machine whose purpose in life is to prevent me from making stupid mistakes with actually important data, equipped with a hard drive that's frequently wiped and refilled from scratch. Without trying to strain your credulity, I will say up front that Psyche's installation process (and the finished, freshly-installed system) is the best combination of ease and power that I've seen yet in any version of Linux to hit my hard drive.
First, an obvious point.
The biggest controversy attached to the new version of Red Hat (even leading well-known developer Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer to resign from the company) is the inclusion, by default, of a switch-hitting theme called Bluecurve -- this is a soft-edged, cartoonish desktop which appears as identical as practically possible under the Free Software world's two most visible desktop projects, GNOME and KDE. I haven't seen a Windows XP desktop for several months, but my memory says that Bluecurve could pass for XP without much hassle. Users accustomed to any version of Microsoft Windows will without much training be able to navigate WIMPily and happily through the system. Simple system navigation has been fine for the past several years, though -- what's new is that with Red Hat 8.0 (as with Lycoris, and possibly Lindows), former Windows users might not even notice that they're using a Free, available-for-free operating system. I'm in favor.
How to screw up a mostly great install
Outside of the small circle of people with the inclination and time to tweak their computer's OS, there is a much larger and more restive crowd who want things Just To Work. That's why I think that for any piece of software, but most importantly for an operating system, that installation, first impressions, and sensible defaults are more important to non-gurus than they seem to be to the designers of certain pieces of high-maintenance, geeks-only software. (And no one will ever accuse me of being a guru.) With this release, Red Hat's install has passed for the moment Mandrake, my usual vote for "decent system with the easiest install." (Because I like and most often recommend Mandrake, that's what I'll draw my comparisons from.)
Two things fouled my install; one of them was trivial (and my fault), the other (not my fault) I think is more serious.
Trivial first: I grabbed a bad ISO and failed to check the MD5 sum before starting my install. Like any distribution of Linux -- particularly after a major release -- just finding the software to download can be the most challenging step. Even several days after the release, it took a bit of drilling down the list of mirrors to find one willing to shoot me the ISOs, before I started downloading ISOs with wget and burning them with cdrecord. The first image I downloaded, burned, and stuck into my testing box's CD drive. It failed to boot -- and it turns out that it was just a bum ISO. A pain, but easily fixed with a few more thought-free hours of downloading, this time from a different mirror site (for luck), and testing the MD5 sum. Success! However, it turns out that wasn't the last ISO I needed, which is the bigger complaint.
From comments on Slashdot following Red Hat's release announcement, I was under the impression that only the first two ISOs were necessary to install Psyche (Don't trust everything you happen to read on Slashdot). So to conserve bandwidth, time, and my dwindling supply of white-topped CD-R blanks, I downloaded and burned only those first two disks. Nowhere did the installer (called Anaconda) ask me to specify which disks I had to work with (a question I had anticipated and was expecting; Mandrake's installer intelligently prompts the user for available disks up front), but I figured "So what? It'll just give me a dialogue box later asking me to skip installing from Disk 3, if it even comes to that." Not so; no go.
The install did go smoothly for a while. Before the Red Hat install proper starts (and this time with a disk less mangled than my first attempt's), there's a very smart text-based integrity checker that pops up to test the current install disk, and offers to test your other install disks, too. I tested all three, and all three were rated "pass." Every distribution should do this kind of early-stage sanity check.
In "channeling-my-dad" mode, I chose the graphical install rather than the text version, and started pointing and clicking. As I've come to expect from modern Linux systems, all of my computer's hardware (most of it wildly, fantastically powerful no more than three years ago) was correctly identified. Choosing the path of least resistance, I let Psyche take over my whole disk, but picked a "custom" install. This provides a decent set of defaults, but allowed me to select or deselect individual packages; I ended up with a projected total of about 1,800 MB of software.
The Red Hat approach to package selection, I think, is better than Mandrake's nested-tree listing of available packages. Anaconda presents a list of categories (like "games"), and clicking on a "detail" link attached to each category presents a scrollable, legible list of contents, neatly separated into base packages (not removable if you want to keep the category at all), and selectable packages, checked or unchecked as you desire. (If you think picking categories and packages is a bore, there's also an "everything" choice to inject your system with more than 4GB of Red Hat. I was too impatient for that.) When I finally hit the button to initiate actual system installation, the cute blue progress meter started moving -- great!
After about 10 minutes, I was prompted to switch to the second disk, and the install continued. Shortly thereafter I was surprised to hear another beep, and see a prompt for disk 3. (Wasn't that "just documentation?") Since I didn't have disk 3, I hit OK, expecting the installer to recognize that I had no third disk to offer. Instead, the install seemed to hang at this point, intent on getting that disk at all costs. I was stuck in a dumb loop: the machine would ask me to insert the missing disk, and I would doggedly fail to do so. Control-alt-delete wouldn't turn the machine off, and I couldn't even reach a virtual terminal to gracefully shut down. So I power cycled the machine, not my favorite thing to do. Red Hat's installer should fail gracefully at this stage, in fact not "fail" at all -- it should be designed to deal with missing packages by building a system around the ones which are available. Wouldn't it be smart to make the first ISO capable of at least building a working system?
At least I could tell exactly where the install failed, and try it with the third disk in place, but I suspect most people just trying it out would be frustrated out of continuing, which is a shame. A few more thought-free hours later (find speedy mirror, download, burn), I repeated the install with all three disks, at which point Red Hat 8.0 slipped happily onto my hard drive. I looked more carefully this time, but still didn't see a place to specify which disks I had to install from. Total install time for this round: about 20 minutes, not counting time between disk changes to grab some chili. Some Linux distros go on faster, but I found the process pretty snappy. After a necessary reboot, I went through Red Hat's post-install program (the "Setup Agent"), another few minutes of dad-friendly pointing and clicking; kudos for the sound-card test, with separate left, right and stereo samples -- very smart. Faster than expected, I eluded the Agent, logged into the default Gnome environment, and smiled.
One nice thing about Bluecurve (perhaps the nice thing in fact, and the reason for its existence), is that once you log in, it's difficult to tell at a glance whether you're using KDE or GNOME. You may, like Bero, consider this instead to be the worst thing about it, because it erases the distinguishing appearance and feel which stock versions of each desktop have forged for themselves. Because KDE and GNOME will happily allow power users (even low-power users) to apply wildly different themes as they please, it didn't bother me that Red Hat has supplied exactly one common theme between the desktops. Trivial point: I also prefer the utilitarian, clean-lined Bluecurve XMMS skin to most of the bizarre alternatives.
The desktop, and the OS, is supposed to do stuff though, not just look a certain way. To that end, Psyche has quite a bit to offer, and you'd do better to look at a list of available packages than let me try to list many of the options. As easy summary is that the included everyday-use software is plentiful and well chosen. There are the heavy hitters, like Mozilla (version 1.0.1 is nice, but I hope to see Phoenix in the next RH release as well as the Mozilla browser itself), Evolution, The GIMP, OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord and more, as well as the goodies that come along with KDE and GNOME, like Konqueror, Kmail, Nautilus, various CD burning apps, games and much much more. There are also programming languages aplenty, PDF viewers, media players of various kinds (though without MP3 tools), and ... you can see why it's a bad idea to list them here. I can handily assure anyone interested that it comes with more, and more useful, software than does any version of Windows.
Complaints Department
I've noticed a few things not to my liking so far. First, getting to a terminal. Whatever the benefits of graphical tools, there are some things -- like checking mail with pine -- impossible without a terminal app. With the Bluecurve theme, there's no icon for a terminal on the panel, and instead it's found under "system tools," using Konsole under KDE and the GNOME terminal under GNOME. While it's fair to call a terminal app a "system tool," it's important enough I'm disappointed that it isn't more visible. Not Red Hat's fault entirely (same is true under every Linux desktop I've tried, to various degrees), but the assignment of various tools and applications into menu options is always interestingly random. For instance, why is there a "games" submenu under "extras," in addition to a separate "games" listing in the main Red Hat menu? Is that for second-class games?
(Once I found it, it was easy to drag the terminal app from the menu to the panel, but not something a new user should need to do. And this must be done separately for KDE and GNOME. Many new users may never know they have other window managers available.)
Second, despite the ecumenical graphical approach that Bluecurve represents, Red Hat has not made it at all obvious to users even how to change the window manager they are logging in to. This requires choosing "session" from the X-based login screen itself, at which point one can choose from the installed WMs, including WindowMaker (yay!).
Upshot
I'm probably going to leave the hard drive I just overwrote with Red Hat in its new state for a while rather than "fix" that mistake. Why not? Red Hat 8.0 is clean, responsive, and has given me a desktop system I'm happy to keep.
Comments
on Red Hat 8.0: The new ease and power Linux champNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
So installing random packages from the Internet is nice but having a _real_ installer, decent config tools, sensible application programs (not every bit of junk floating in the net) and a good environment for _working_ (you don't spend your life installing things isn't it?) are IMHO far more important.
The gcc compiler has been upgraded from version 2.96 to 3.2, maybe this can cause some binary incompatibilities.
Anyway, working OpenOffice RPMS are included and for pdf files xpdf is good enough.
BTW a large part of open office was/is written in c++, which explains its trouble being used with libraries generated by the new compiler.
More informative though, I recommend Robert C. Dowdy's well-written introduction to <A HREF="http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1890">infusing RH 8.0 with multimedia goodness</a osnews.com> (found at OSNews.com). He provides a very good guide to installing DVD playback software (which I used successfully) and some other things which don't apply to me, like Nvidia drivers, but these are really side benefits to the installation -- which he details -- of apt4rpm, which allows you Debian-style easy software installation.It's very slick.
Cheers,
timothy (T. Lord)
I also like the fact that TTF font can now be "installed" systemwide by sticking them into $HOME/.fonts<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... not bad. Still not able to use them in Gimp though that way.
While I am at it: My Other gripe is fixed now, too: The ugly fonts are gone (even in OOffice)!
Only "serious flaw" that I ran into this far is the fact that RH now uses UTF-8 ASCII encoding and that caused some non-printable characters in various man pages and using licq. Furthermore, it prevented my beloved Adob Acrobat 5 (acroread) from starting at all.
I got around that by editing<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/sysconfig/i18n and throwing out UTF-8, replacing it with an ISOxxxx-x set.
Rainer/OKC
To run applications that lack support for Unicode locales, you may work around by setting the LANG environment variable at the shell prompt to C prior to typing the application name. For example:
env LANG=C acroread
The Red Hat approach to package selection, I think, is better than Mandrake's nested-tree listing of available packages.
It's been a while, but the last time I did a Mandrake install as a regular user, not as Expert, you don't get the package tree. And even in Expert mode, you still only get the package tree if you click on "Select Individual Packages." Otherwise you get a selection of categories like Games, Multimedia, Internet Client. Can't remember all the choices. What I like about Mandrake is that I can click the categories I want and then click on select individual packages to prune out the things I don't need. For example, clicking Office Productivity (or whatever it is called) installs things that I want like the various office suites and their dependencies, but also things I don't want like jpilot. I don't have a palm, so I can just uncheck all of them.
Just like in Red Hat 9, where you can also select to install individual packages in either a tree view in categories or in a flat alphabetical view.
A very minor point, but it is worth noting that the difference doesn't really exist.
I find the install of Mandrake 9 is easier. They difficulty factor is about the same for each. Redhat has made a nice improvement in the look of it's install utility. I'm pretty sure this mostly due to the use of gtk2. Mandrake definately has the more colorful install, they both are very polished and provide a very good install experience. The time it takes to complete the install is the main difference. RedHat 8 takes about 1 1/2 times as long for the same amount of packages. Redhat can take up to two hours to complete an upgrade. After 2 Redhat upgrades, I started wiping the machines and started clean, except for the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home partitions. Mandrake took about forty five minutes average to complete an upgrade. Upgrades to Mandrake from 8.2, can break some apps, this is due to fact that Mandrake 8.2 put kde3 in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/opt/kde3 and Mandrake 9 put kde back under<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr. So any apps installed outside the distro become broken. This can be a real pain,and one that could have been avoided by moving the kde2 libs in MDK8.2 instead of kde3. The favorability among users is pretty much kde vs. gnome. The users who prefer gnome love bluecurve. Those who prefer KDE love mandrake, (with an added liquid theme!).
The configuration tool for Mandrake is much more integrated, intuitive and mature than what redhat has done. RedHat got rid of linuxconfig starting with 7.2 and replaced it with a bunch of individual apps and wizards that can be run from nautilus, sort of like the control panel in Windows. For experienced redhat users everything has completely changed and not nessasarily for the better. The Mandrake Control Center is a much easier to use configuration tool. Using urpmi to install rpm's is great, it finds the dependencies and installs them even from the commandline which makes administering a server without Xwindows a snap.
Both distros look great & have their own unique menu systems. Unfortunately, in RedHat when you install software not in the distro you have to in most cases make your own menu listings. Many kde apps in the psyche cd's don't show up in the menus for gnome. The same goes for kde, not all the stuff installed for gnome is listed. Alot of stuff that is there you have to hunt for under the extras menu. They managed to break a few apps that have been stable for years. For example try playing aislerot, double clicking on the cards too many times causes it to crash in every machine I tried. It's a minor thing but damn annoying to someone who plays solitaire during lunch! I think both distributions look and work great, but after using & adminstering both daily, Mandrake 9 is a little bit better in my humble opinion.
RH 8 is here to stay on my box. I love it!
I tried to install it over RH 7.2 which has been very stable.
The installer hanged all over the place! Finally frustrated with hunting down and ommitting the hanging packages, I tried a minimal install without anything selected.
More errors. X wouldn't start. After a full weekend (including an all nighter) of trying to get 8.0 to work, including several repartitions, I had to give up and reload 7.2 only. No problems. I look forward when RH 8 can be loaded onto my laptop.
Has anyone else had luck installing 8.0 on a laptop? I got the ~$40 upgrade red box (although it doesn't TELL you it's an upgrade, from what I could see) !
I updated the RedHat 7.3 side, made sure dual-booting still worked right, spent a couple hours playing with 8.0 and decided to flush windows and do a full install.
Only problems I've had:
Couldn't get the darn Orinoco Silver card to connect to my access point at work. (I think that may be because I'm not sure what I'm doing.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
Got the 3com pcmcia card to connect to the wire though.
I need to tweak the modem and soundcard some, but otherwise I'm happy.
I wisely did NOT choose "Update", but "Custom" install. When you get to the Partitions screen, there is an option button to leave existing FAT partitions (WinCrap) as is, and to delete all existing Linux (ext2, ext3, etc) partitions. The following screen displayed exactly what I wanted and I clicked on Next.
After I went thru the screens where I could select and unselect packages I wanted, and it detected the ATI card and I chose a resolution, the actual install went smoothly.
I was surprised how simple it was to configure my Orinoco gold wireless card. Wireless connection with the cable modem works fine. I can sit out on my deck with the laptop and enjoy Linux and beer.
look for one online. Someone, somewhere has had the same problem you have.
My complaint was that now fluxbox, and or blackbox no longer render properly and are incredibly slow to load and or change styles (i.e. reload). I don't know if it is the new compiler or libraries or just RH's f'ed up X pakcages but I'm going back to slackware or maybe I'll try SUSE again because RH has gotten too customized with both their kernels and their X packages.
They may be making their distro better for mom and pop users but it sucks if you have any knowlege at all and want to tweak it. (BTW, I'm a Microsoft developer so you know my knowlege is limited.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;P)
Very impressive, it sure has come a long way since RH5.2, the distribution that got me started with linux.
I had similar pre-conceptions. Reading about how bad the GUI is, got me off a little bit. But ofcourse there is a that Menu thing which is kind of weird. and I cannot edit it like Mandrake allows me to.
The language selection doesnt work properly. I selected and installed other languages like Tamil annd Thai, but when I switch over to Tamil/Thai font, i cannot see it, all i can see in the menu is garbage.
And there is no selection for OpenOffice-Tamil/Thai even though at install time I did install those fonts.
Even though the look is clean and tidy, I still could not get my serial-port Palm to sync with it. And I didnt put much effort in it either.br>
I am a KDE user and I hate gnome, but this new interface has me fixed on it and am not going back to KDE. Even though I do miss my Kmixer tray icon or even my Clip-board icon or even my Korganiser. I searched and could not find my Knotes-postit look alike.
On the other hand, it RH 8.0 did not have any issues recognising my wireless keyboard and wireless mouse. But didnt like my Webcam.
Mandrake on the other hand is nice, but has a problem with my wireless mouse and also my Dell Monitor.
There is some more work to be done, before which my father/mom or people who want to save money on software can start using Linux on their home PCs.
regards
-GGR
I am a sysadmin that uses RH7.3 as a desktop (X terminals mostly) in a real world office environment with around 100 non-technical (very NON) users.
I would sure like to see someone actually talk about real world usability. It seems that articles like this assume that making it easy for poeple to try Linux will sell them on using it. NOTHING could be further from the truth. I found it easy to convince poeple to try Linux. Just from the standpoint of money. However, keeping them interested in using it when they find out you need a CS degree to install fonts is another matter. And yes it is still WAAAAAAAAAY too hard to put good fonts on the system and have them work consistently.
And fonts, printing, speed(OOo in Linux), pretty icons, and toys are really the issues that make people willing to spend money for M$.
If there is any future for the desktop in Linux the whole focus has to shift to the user experience. This is going to require programers actually spending time watching and helping real users. I have been a sysadmin for many years and even I was surprised by the kind of problems users are having with Linux when we switched. And I did a pretty extensive testing phase with a limited user group first. It's that first few minutes that determine their attitude from then on. If they decide "this is crap" in the first 5 minutes it may take forever to unring that bell.
To be fair RH is on the right track, sort of. But this distro strikes me as very green. (who uses 7.0) And I anticipate a point release soon to debug (especially KDE) and I may wait until then to upgrade.
Just my 2 cents
Tom Possin
I like RH as much as the next person but configuring your distro is for the configuree inclined. As much as I hate comparing Linux to Windows, there has to be an install program that installs safe and useful default packages while unsafe daemons like sshd or telnetd are not installed by default. Someone has to step and create a dummy-user safe install. None of this 10 different mail clients installed. It makes no sense.
You're OS is not supposed to be a toy. When I have to use Windows, I don't look at it as a toy. You sometimes have to configure stuff in Windows and though not difficult, you may run into problems and tell yourself 'this is what I don't like about windows'. Now imagine how often you here those words from linux users.
quinn
and I can tell you Linux can load my own stuff
much faster than Windows can. In fact, it can
load most programs a lot faster than Windows
can.
However, there are a few programs like Open
Office and Star Office and Netscape that are
absurdly slow. Don't tell me it's about
features. Microsoft Office loads much faster
than Open Office for Linux, and OO in linux has
the linux speed advantage! The problem is that
it's poorly written, and that's all there is
to it. It's not built for speed.
Look, you people can say it doesn't matter all
you want, but most people do not want to wait
a full minute before their word processor
loads. *(On my faster computer, it loads in
about 30 seconds.) And once it's running,
it's slow as shit.
The problem is that MANY open source
programmers simply are not taking the time
to optimize their softwaer. That's it, that's
the problem. OSS people don't tweak the
software enough. There are a few good programs
out there, but for the most part this stuff
is poorly written.
The big problem with Mozilla (and, I suspect, with OOo) is that it's rendering itself with a theme-rich rendering engine that loads on top of the the GUI construct at hand. This explains why MS Windows and GTK+/Qt apps seem to load so quickly in comparrison: MS Windows widget apps and GTK+/Qt apps already have had their widget and theme constructs loaded when the GUI loaded.
Case in point with Mozilla: XUL renders the browser itself. This explains why the smaller browsers out there that load gecko, but are really using standard GUI widget sets and frameworks, are so much faster.
Don't get me wrong, XUL is a great idea. But rendering a user interface in XML is a bit cumbersome for UI generation when compared to binary and linked-library processing.
Why does Mozilla seem to operate better on MS Windows? I'm not certain - I suspect it has something to do with the libraries loaded at boot-time, but I'm probably mistaken.
app. Unless they are loaded already, like a
qt program running with KDE loaded, it can
take quite some time.
They really should have just used GTK on
Mozilla. They have GTK on Windows, just a
little bit of workw ould make it preform
better...
Where are you guys getting these 30 second and up times? I am not seeing them and I do not have a "super-duper" computer. No scsi drives, no honking fast cpu, no gee-whiz graphics card. I don't know if you are ram starved or just have a funky HD<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... but something is wrong with your machines. I am getting performance 300% - 600% faster than yours. My K7-750 is okay<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... but nowhere near the top of the pile.
My 486DX/33 with 32MB Fast-page-mode RAM and 3600RPM hard drive may not be the fastest machine in the world, but TWM and Lynx ran just fine, so there is no excuse for OOo and Mozilla. I mean, OOo takes and hour and a half to load!! BLOAT!! BLOAT!!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-)
In reality, all these people probably have less than 128MB of RAM. In my experience, using any modern GUI requires *no less* than 128MB, better w/ 256MB or more. Also, no less than a P3 processor. Sorry, if you cant afford even that small price tag, you can't play with modern GUIs.
Sure there is room for improvement, but lets be realistic folks.
But regarding speed. I have no problem on my machine either. I was talking about a network with<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home mounted NFS and application (terminal) servers. (which are NOT feeble) I am talking about a recently converted windows shop with a zillion word, excel, and PP files. When a user finds a word doc in thier home dir and clicks on it, what happens? do you know? I don't think so.
Maybe you are saying I should not use NFS or remote X sessions, etc. But then my question is why am I using a *nix? Take away these features and linux has little to offer. These are the type of things that make a true multi-user OS attractive.
To me your presumptuous comments here are a prime example of the type of attitude that I think is retarding the progress of linux on the desktop. It's a "it works for me, if it doesn't work for you your probably just dumb" attitude.
While most of the commenters here seem to be jacking around with linux I have actually put it to work on the desktop. I would like to see articles that stop fantasizing about that special someday when linux will be on the desktop and realize it is already on the desktop in many places. And with a little more polish will be on a lot more soon.
I would like to see open source developers secure enough that they listen to comments from end users without feeling the need to belittle them and disregard their comments.
I would also like to see RH build a GUI for LDAP and incorporate installing an openLDAP directory server into their install. But that probably won't happen either.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)
Have a good one,
Tom
It's not a slow machine by any means.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
I didn't time my startup time for Mozilla or OOo in my post - it's certainly less than 30 seconds on both counts.
But, frankly, I've built GNU/Linux systems from source code that boot in a DHCP network environment to runlevel 5 faster than Mozilla loads on my new box.
I was just trying to explain why the performance was as bad as it was.
If you like 8 second load times for apps (which is not bad and doesn't both me) and sluggish response (which is my pet peeve) then fine... I'm just a bit picky on performance.
Which distribution are you using?
(These questions are relevant to the performance of Mozilla and OOo)
I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments! These "reviews" which concentrate on tedious and ultimately irrelevant installation details and then completely ignore the maintenance issues (which are somewhat more significant with Red Hat) really bring nothing to the table.
How good the icons are is of secondary importance (to be generous) compared to whether Red Hat has resolved things like font installation, and given their hyped desktop unification efforts, I'd want the font installation to work for *both* desktop environments.
A few years ago, people were impressed when Linux distros could be installed without lengthy command sessions and an intimate knowledge of partitioning. We're not so easily impressed any more, so stop writing reviews that assume we are!
As far as the other points raised I would like to clarify. I have used Linux (RH) as my only desktop for years now. I get how to work it, and my copy works fine, thanks.
However, when you slap the thing down in front of "regular" people this changes fast. Example, when you connect a bunch of these machines together and connect them all to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home via NFS and then upgrade. What happens to everyones desktop then. (I know this one by the way, not good) These are the issues I would like to see discussed.
Install it get it working right and turn loose the the hords of unwashed and uneducated on it. Then write down their remarks. And comment on tips to make this whole proccess less painful.
There is an article I would like to read.
Cheers all,
Tom
why ximian doesn't get much press i guess is that they're not a "distro", and they get corp. backing from sun, but if you haven't tried ximian, you're missing out big time.
Install problems? none at all. I had zero problem installing redhat 8.
Upgrade problems? You betcha. The upgrade took eons longer than the install did, and kept getting hung up on stupid stuff (I finally just reinstalled everything). Thankfully I've got seperate partitions for<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home/<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/multimedia/, etc, so I can afford to do this.
Complaints? Only one so far. Xine/etc don't seem to actually work correctly, leaving my dvd drive useless.They seem to not be able to decrypt fast enough, causing some crucial pauses in the dvd. The funny thing is it's not just one single player, it's all of 'em (xine, ogle, vlc, etc). Perhaps it's the new(er) gcc, perhaps the fact that i'm using OSS(paid) rather than standard OSS or alsa, but i like multi-channel support (ie: 2 sounds come in, they don't block each other, they can play together), and OSS(paid) seems to handle that rather well indeed. Or it has untill now.
All in all, I like what I see. I don't notice a large difference in the desktops, but then again, I havent played a lot with it.. Kudos to the redhat team for yet another fine distribution
Interesting. As I wrote, I was not upgrading in this case (though it would be smart of RH, if possible, to offer an upgrade path from other RPM-based distros), but I did hit the same thing when I upgraded Linux Mandrake 8.2 to 9.0 -- the install actually took *hours* rather than the 20-30 minutes I'm used to. Not sure why this would be, but the next machine which got 9.0, I knew better than to upgrade, and just backed up date, then plonked it back on. (Or rather didn't, but could have -- I kept my<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home partition intact.)
Perhaps someone who works for one of those companies (or just knows anyhow) can explain why an upgrade should take longer than a new install; I had hoped for the opposite.
timothy
An upgrade has to see what you've got installed, take copies of any configuration files you may have edited, work out how to upgrade what you've got (KDE2 to KDE3 isn't a simple "remove kwm and install the new one over the top") and what dependencies will be required. An intelligent install (though I suspect none of them do this) could even spot that you've installed certain packages by hand, and upgrade those for you (eg, "aha!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/local/apache/, but no Apache RPM installed. Remove the old, install the new Apache RPM, put your httpd.conf back in place. Maybe even upgrade from 1.3 to 2.0, interpreting your httpd.conf and changing that to a 2.0 format.)
There is a lot to do when upgrading a machine; installing from scratch is simply throwing bits at the hard disk.
So Redhat supports freedom? Yeah, right...
This is about several million people beeing threaten by REAL oppression by a cruel tyrannic government, not just a bunch of geeks who thinks that their freedom is horribly abused then they can't have the source-code.
It's not that funny, as a matter of fact it's quite horrible.
I think you overestimate Red Hat's importance. Where's the proof that Red Hat "supports the will" of China's dictatorship? And don't point me to Mosfet's site. Show me something real, something tangible. Not the rants of a child.
China would declare war the moment Taiwan tries to claim independence, it don't really matter if they do it themselves or the UN do. All parties are aware of that, the UN is, the US is, Taiwan is and China is.
In reality Taiwan is independent with their own flag, president and elections to choose their own leaders in a democratic way. Even if they are not formally a country most people in the free part of the world recognise it as an independent country and certainly support it. China is a brutal dictatorship.
Taiwan from the list as part of a Chinese
conspiracy.
Red Hat, Red Flag, No more Taiwan.
Now, explain for me, why?
Can you offer any good reason why they would
do that?
It's quite clear that it's about money, they simply sold out the people of Taiwan to try to sell a Redhat solution to government administrations in China.
Also, China is not a communist government. It's socilist totalitarian with hybridization on the Eastern coast.
I don't care what people want to call themselves and what other people might have called them.
By definition, communism and totalitarianism aren't even remotely compatible. For their to be a communist state, there can't be stratification. Stratification is an essential component of a totalitarian state.
After all, according to Marx, the state is merely a weapon of oppression for the ruling classes. After a proletarian led socialist revolution, the proletariat is supposed to take control and institute a proletarian dictatorship to replace the bourgeoisie dictatorship under capitalism.
(Note that Marx use dictatorship to refer to one groups rule over another, which means that even a majority rule can be a dictatorship in Marx' terminology, and Marx' considered even "democratic" capitalist countriest to be bourgeoisie dictatorship by virtue of having only political "democracy", and no democratic control over the means of production)
The goal of the socialist state, according to Marx, is to abolish class rule, because the proletariat, being the underprivileged masses, have no interest in perpetuating class rule - after all class rule is what is causing their poverty. So Marx' solution is that the proletariat must subsume the capitalists. By putting the means of productions in the collective hands of the working class, the bourgeoisie would have no other choice than to become workers to survive.
This is what according to Marx and Lenin should lead to the withering away of the state, and the transition to communism: Once the bourgeoisie has been subsumed into the working class, there are no more class divisions, and the state as a tool of oppression seize to exist.
There may in a society that is communist still be something that resembles a state apparatus to coordinate various functions, but no central source of power or military might, as a communist society per definition is ruled by the communes of the workers.
This is what originally gave the
Soviet Union it's name: the Soviets were the originally democratically elected councils that ran the communes, based on delegates that could be recalled on literally a days notice if they didn't represent their constituents well. Unfortunately the Bolcheviks quickly saw that this wasn't in their best interest, as their power base was with the workers, which gave them control in the large cities, but Russia was a largerly agrarian country, and the Bolcheviks never managed to build support among the peasants, something they would have predicted in advance had they not ignored the whole chapter in the Communist Manifesto devoted to describing the relationship between the proletariat and other classes. (Lenin discounted all of it in an article he wrote in 1893, and tried to present an alternative theory to justify what was to become the Bolchevik line that landless peasants was the allies of the proletariat, and that contrary to what Marx' claimed, Russia and not USA and Europe was best suited for a socialist revolution)
None of the so called "communist states" that have existed in modern times have called themselves communist, and many of them didn't even officially think that communism was achievable in the short term (and this includes the Peoples Republic of China) - time scales up to thousands of years was mentioned as the likely transition period to true communism.
Unfortunately, none of the "communist states" of modern times followed through on the Marxist ideas of the dictatorship of the proletariat either - instead they quickly degenerated into a new ruling class that just used socialism and communism to provide symbols and an ideological backing for their power grab and oppression, much as Hitler did the same with nationalism and his symbols (like the Swaztika).
I consider myself a communism, and believe most of Marx' political analysis is correct to this day. If anything, the failure of the Soviet Union, and the degeneration of the PRC into totalitarian regime validates part of his theories. In "Die Deutsche Ideologie" (The German Ideology), Marx writes (paraphr
Quick question
Posted by: Joseph Cooper on October 08, 2002 06:14 PMinstall?
Try downloading a few RPMs off the net and see
if they install OK... That's the most important
factor when I pick a distro. "Is it a bitch to
install a program?"
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