[PLUG] Redhat 7.3.92 so far...

Alan alan at clueserver.org
Mon Jul 15 18:24:56 UTC 2002


Well, I downloaded the latest version of the Redhat beta.

There are some good things and not so good things.

It installs very well on my Vaio with NO additional kernel options. 
This is a good thing. It is one of the only distributions that will do
that correctly.  (I won't comment what it took to get Gentoo on it. 
Lets just say it involved ritual sacrifice and the blood of the living.)

The graphical distribution hosed up.  There is an error in the script
somewhere.  The text option worked fine.  (I use text mode anyways. Much
easier to read on my laptop screen.)  The graphic mode install looks
much better than previous versions.  They are going away from the
horrible icons for packages.

The install went smoothly.  There was no glitches.  Took about an hour.
Mandrake on the same machine would tend to choke on later discs for some
odd reason.  Maybe a French thing...

The distribution defaults to the Gnome 2.0 desktop.  it is not quite as
full featured as the old desktop, but works smoother.  I cannot find how
to change Window managers within Gnome2, however.  It uses Metacity for
its themes, but the theme changer is set for Sawfish.  This is a royal
pain.  (The default theme is OK, but reminds me too much of XP.)  There
are few, if any, themes for Metacity yet.  http://themes.freshmeat.net
does not have any themes for it yet.

Redhat is moving towards multi-language support for the shell as well. 
This causes some off problems. Not all of the language information gets
set up correctly and directory listings can become strange.  (But only
for the "color" directory listings and man pages that have formatted
text.) Going in and setting the country codes and locales seems to fix
it.

KDE uses 3.0.2 from cvs.  Works pretty well. My only complaint is that
the menues do not contain any of the Gnome entries or the switchdesk
app.  (KDE seems to think that once you use KDE, you will not want to
leave. It is a little too controlling for my tastes.)  The KDE themes
are pretty sparse.  There are lots of KDE apps however.  (You will want
to run KDE once to get the environment configured if you use Gnome.
Otherwise KDE apps tend to core.)  "switchdesk" will allow you to switch
back.

The kernel is INCREDIBLY full featured.  The low latency patches are
installed.  There are patches for crypto hardware, foreign binaries
(like BSD and COFF format), and a whole lot of other stuff.  My prism2
wireless card did not work out of the box.  (Not a big concern for me as
I needed to install hacked drivers for it anyways.) The kernel souce is
already preconfigured in a way that it will not overlay the default
kernel. (The kernel is 2.4.18-5.58. Any kernel you compile identifies as
2.4.18-5.58custom.)  My only complaint is that they are not including
the FreeSWAN and Crypto patches.  I will be testing if they will patch
cleanly soon.  The kernel does work with the current wireless-ng
drivers.  (Compiled from source.)

The compiler is GCC 3.1.  So far, it has worked very well. No problems
yet...

The system uses Grub for a boot loaded.  If you use the text install it
will give you an option for "lilo". DO NOT TAKE IT!  Your system will
try and boot using Grub no matter what.  It will fail at this point.  I
prefer lilo.  Grub's method of configuration is a little too weird for
me.  Maybe it is what I am used to...

This version uses Apache 2.0.x, instead of 1.3.  I have done next to
nothing with the 2.x code on Apache.  (Due to waiting for it to get
stable and a general mistrust of multi-threading services.)  I guess it
is time to learn it.

All in all, this is a VERY promising release. It has some rough edges. 
(To be expected with a beta 1.)  If they can clean up those and fix a
few of the more unusual problems, it could be a very worthwhile release.
I am pretty happy with it so far.






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