[Cumbria] CUMBRIA LUG -- Red Hat cp SuSE

[Ken Hough]

Dave,

Thanks for the Red Hat v8.0 CDs. I've installed them and had a play. Got 
to say, I prefer SuSE 8.0
I'm not ungrateful for the CDs -- far from it. It's good to try 
alternatives.
Thought you might like to read about my observations, as follows:

Installation on an AMD K6II 500 MHz PC went OK, reckognising the PCI 
NE2000 type ethernet card
and SoundBlaster 5.1 card. I opted to use LILO rather than Grub as I'm 
familier with the former.

Red Hat doesn't give much choice as to alternative file formats. eg does 
not offer Reiserfs, only ext3.

After installation, had a hell of a job finding how to install more 
software from the Red Hat Cds.
Eventually discovered how to by looking in /usr/share/doc/redhat*. ie 
should use command
'redhat-config-packages', but there doesn't seem to be any icon or menu 
item to lead to this.
Have now created an icon for this on the root desktop.

SuSE has entries for the YAST management programme(s) from the desktop 
menu (obviously only available to root).

'redhat-config-packages' can be crashed. I've done this a few times now.

Doesn't seem to be a 'search' option in 'redhat-config-packages' as in 
YAST under Suse Linux -- a serious omission???
Overall, I find YAST easier and more functional than the Red Hat equiv. 
Also, it doesn't seem to crash!

Don't seem to be any lightweight text editors on the Red Hat CDs such as 
Pico, Joe or Jed.

Kdevelop (rated as probably the best Prog dev IDE) is not included on 
the CDs, but is with Mandrake download version and with SuSE.

I'm not keen on the Red Hat default KDE setup and there seems to be the 
odd wobbly / bug. Even so, I still
prefare KDE to Gnome.

Will carry on playing to become familier and maybe get a fairer comparison.

Meanwhile am still using my 'work horse' for most stuff as now -- Athlon 
XP1600+ / SuSE v8.0 with a 19 inch high res monitor at approx 1200 x 1000
-- now that's how to use KDE!

Many thanks

Ken Hough