[PLUG] More RH8 Trouble

Carla Schroder pluglist at bratgrrl.com
Tue Jan 28 21:31:01 UTC 2003


On Tuesday 28 January 2003 08:54 pm, Kyle Accardi wrote:
> Carla Schroder wrote:
> > On Tuesday 28 January 2003 07:16 pm, Robbert van Andel wrote:
> >>What's odd is the hardware browser comes with RedHat.  I did not install
> >>it.
> >
> > Lots of stuff comes on the distribution disks that are provided 'for
> > convenience', but they don't support them, or even claim they will work.
>
> This is news to me.  I haven't looked at 8.0, but have noticed that RH has
> significantly reduced the included apps at least since before 6.2.
>
> My guess was that they got popular enough to need to cut down on support
> calls, so they only included what they knew to work.
>
> Don't know if it's still true, but SuSE used to ship 8 or 9 CDs.  If you
> didn't have a decent pipe, you could check out all kinds of stuff.  Find
> something you like and get the latest version from the maintainer.  That
> was about the time RH cut back to 3 cds.
>
> Where does RH disclaim their included apps?  Or do I have a hook in my
> mouth?

OK, I don't want to leave the wrong impression here. I doubt that any of the 
distros offer support for every weirdo app that comes down the pipe. Sometime 
back I asked them about the problems with Abiword and Gnumeric, and a few 
other issues, and this was the response:

"To preface, in Red Hat Linux 8.0 we take the best of breed applications 
and spend
resources to refine that specific set.  Open Office and Mozilla are 
perfect examples.  Abiword and Gnumeric are examples of applications 
that are included as "extras" in our menus whereas Open Office is really 
our preferred office application."

This is where being on the bleeding edge left some apps behind; Abiword and 
Gnumeric do not yet support Unicode. Lots of other apps don't either. The fix 
was reported in the release notes. The release notes are quite comprehensive; 
combine them with the bug tracker and the user list, and you ought to be able 
to figure most things out. This is the price of using a bleeding-edge 
distribution. 

For users who just want things to work, and have less hassle, previous 
versions of Red Hat are still available. 7.3 is solid.

-- 
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Carla Schroder
www.bratgrrl.com
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