[Sussex] Red Hat 8.0

Geoff Teale Geoff.Teale at claybrook.co.uk
Mon Oct 28 15:07:00 UTC 2002


Afternoon all,

As promised here's a brief rundown of Red Hat 8.0.


1 - Installation
----------------
Installing Red Hat 8.0 was an absolute breeze.  The process will be familiar
to anyone whose worked with Red Hat 7.x, but has been refined somewhat.  The
new installer has been written in gtk2 and the result is a softer, cleaner
look and feel which is consistent with the distrubution as a whole.
Tasteful graphics are good for impressing newbies but more importantly the
install process seems to give you plenty of flexibility when you need it
without getting confusing.  Sensible defaults were set everywhere and
hardware detection is much improved.  This is the first version of Red Hat
to succesfully configure my rather esoteric graphics setup (an i810 onboard
and a PCI Voodoo3) on it's own accord - SuSE managed this back in 7.0.  What
it didn't manage to do however was install support for hardware accelerated
OpenGL on my VoodooIII - this is proving a real pain - Mandrake
distrubutions all succesfully achieve this, SuSE 7.1 could do this (although
later versions have all failed) - why has it suddenly become so hard to get
Hardware acceleration on an old bit of kit like a VoodooIII?

A newbie could probably run through this installation just pressing "next"
and typing in a root password when they are prompted to set it and end up
with a very nice installation.  

A nice thing about Red Hat 8.0 (from a Newbies point of view) is that is
doesn't default to installing every program ever written.  It's nice for us
experienced LINUX users to be picky about what programs we want to use, but
for a newbie some sensible and familiar defaults are helpful.

2 - First Boot
--------------
Having completed the installation Red Hat prompts you to reboot.  During the
boot a program runs to check for any new hardware attached to the machine.
In my case Red Hat detected and configured a Canon BJC6000 printer on the
parrallel port and my Digital Camera acting as a USB Mass Storage device.


3 - Desktop Environment
-----------------------
Once booted the default Red Hat 8.0 build drops you into the Gnome2 version
of gdm with a Red Hat theme.  On the whole the experience up to this point
is very polished and professional.  Logging into the default desktop
environment (Gnome2) only serves to reinforce this point.  The combination
of Gnome2, Metacity, a complete set of matching, well desinged icons, a
subtle but attractive Red Hat backdrop and Red Hat's BlueCurve theme give a
instant visual appeal.

Red Hat 8.0's "start" menu (marked by a tasteful Red Hat icon - nice, but
counter-intuitive methinks) is organised by function (nothing than unusual
there) - however, each application is not listed by name, but rather a
single application is listed for each task and is listed by a description of
that task.  Mozilla for example is listed as "Internet->Web Browser" and no
other web browser appears.  I think most people on this list can see obvious
disadvantages to this setup.  I for one wouldn't particularly want to use
Evolution as my default mail client.  This of course is not beyond our
control - it's a trivial matter to add a new menu item for your favoured
program in each area.  Obviously this setup is not aimed at the experienced
LINUX user.  

One of the big problems I come across when trying to sell non-geeks on the
idea of LINUX is that they complain that it's not as easy as Windows.
People are so used to Windows that they seem blind to the fact that
following a menu to "Ximain Evolution" is no more difficult than following a
menu to "Microsoft Outlook".  The Red Hat 8.0 menu structure means that new
users (and crucially "suits" evaluating the platform) don't have to make
that cognitive leap - everything is spelt out clearly for them.

Other user-friendly distributions tend to lean towards KDE on the desktop,
and this has generally been a wise move.  KDE seems to provide a more
co-ordinated environment out-of-the-box than Gnome ever has - Konqueror,
KOffice, KMail, etc. just fit together seamlessly.  Red Hat's Gnome based
offerings have always looked and felt slightly disjointed by comparison.
Red Hat 8.0 breaks that mould and shows that with the right choice of
applications and some careful setup Gnome2 can provide a better desktop
experience than even KDE.  OpenOffice.org fits in well with Evolution and
Mozilla, copy and pastes work properly between all the applications and,
with Red Hat's BlueCurve theme unifying the presentation of all applications
this really looks like a single suite of office tools rather than a
collection of seperately developed applications.

4 - System Setup
----------------

Red Hat 8.0 backs up it's very pretty desktop environment with some very
good graphical tools to control every aspect of the system setup and even
provides some coherent front ends for a number of server daemons.  This is
all very nice and it means that about 80% of the functionality the average
business user needs can be configured and controlled without ever once
needing to see a command line.  All this means that Red Hat 8.0 makes a very
good drop in replacement for windows.

So what's the catch?  Well, once again the experienced UNIX/LINUX user is
going to feel horribly uncomfortable when they find themselves in some very
strange waters where /etc should be.  The price you pay for all those GUI
configuration tools is measured in terms of very strange configuration files
and the risk of loosing setup information as GUI tools overwrite files
changed by hand.

5 - Platform / Performance
--------------------------
Unusually for a Red Hat distibution the spec here is pretty cutting edge.
Gnome2 and gcc3.2 result in not only a prettier desktop, but a more
responsive one as well.  There is a noticable improvement in performance
over Red Hat 7.3 and graphical file browsing really shows the difference.
I've always found Nautilus to be unbearably slow on my PIII 550mhz machine,
but here (after an initial delay the first time it is used) it zips along at
a decent pace and you only rarely feel that you're going faster than the
machine wants to.

6 - Conclusion
--------------

I think Red Hat 8.0 achieves exactly what it set out to.  As a "drop in"
replacement for Windows it excels - if you're prime use for a computer is
word processing, web surfing, e-mail reading, MP3 playing, web designing,
spreadsheet maintaining and maybe the odd small file/print/web/database
server then Red Hat 8.0 is ideal.  What this represents is a LINUX OS for
people who know nothing about LINUX - in my mind it slots into the same
market segment as Mac OS X, and while it can't claim to be quite as
"together" as OS X, it does boast a much lower price and much more frugal
hardware requirements.  What Red Hat 8.0 is not is a LINUX geeks paradise.  

Ultimately I can sum it up thus: I have now put Red Hat 8.0 on my sisters PC
and given it to two complete newbies - all of these people are very happy
with it and have had no trouble using it for all of their daily need.  My
own machine, well, it's moved back to Gentoo (a brand, spanking new 1.4
build) ultimately it's a more comfortable environment for me.

Where Red Hat 8.0 could help us all out is as the death nell for all those
old complaints windows users made about LINUX.  Red Hat is and will be what
the majority of businesses users think LINUX is.  At last they are going to
see a LINUX that will match Windows in those trivial areas that are so
important to the average office decision maker - I look forward to a day
very soon when the question will no longer be "is LINUX ready for the
desktop" but "how can Windows retain it's business in the face of LINUX on
the desktop" instead.

For the rest of us "power" LINUX users there's always the Debians, Gentoos
and Slackwares of the world to make sure that the power of UNIX is never
lost under a sea of pretty UI's.

-- 
GJT
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk




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