[PLUG] Reviews of RedHat 8.0 - is it worth $150?

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Bill Thoen wrote:

> After fighting all day trying to install Red Hat 7.1 on a brand new
> Athlon XP1800 and having IDE bus problems (drivers don't seem to
> work), we were wondering if it would be worth just snagging the $150
> RedHat Professional 8.0 CD set from CompUSA (y'know support the good
> guys and have it NOW rather than slooowly teasing off the FTP
> archives.)
> 
> We do want server capability, but are the improvements worth the
> price? Is it going to install on this hardware anyway? Any caveats
> about doing this that anyone here is aware of?

It depends on how you'll be deploying the box. If you're mostly 
interested in providing network services (http, dns, etc), I'd stick 
with Red Hat 7.3 (and its subsequent updates).

If this will be someone's desktop machine, and you're interested in 
the latest GNOME and KDE releases, then 8.0 offers a better solution.

A couple things worth knowing about 8.0:

* it ships with gcc 3.2, which produces binaries that are incompatible 
  with prior gcc dynamic libaries

* it ships with Apache 2.x, which may or may not be what you want

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>