[cumbria_lug] Initial Red Hat 9 impressions...

[Michael Saunders]

Lo all,

Anyone else tried RH 9 then? What do you make of it? I installed it
this afternoon (massively hung over from Ulverston's Carnival
yesterday) and here are my rambling thoughts:

# Text install defaults to runlevel 5, it seems. Bit crazy... Had to
run "firstboot" by hand, but it wouldn't want to start in runlevel 3,
so had to hand-edit the Python src.

# Smart, clean little config tools. RH have done a solid job with
these, and good to see the ncurses alternatives still around.

# Slow bootup - should be easier for users to disable GPM, kudzu,
xinetd etc. instead of delving into the runlevel service editor.

# Every single RPM has been built with debug symbols enabled! Default
flags: "optflags: i386 -O2 -g -march=i386 -mcpu=i686". Not only will
that give a small but important performance hit and eat up more disk
space, the GCC man pages state that it's daft to optimise AND debug
because things won't turn out as expected. I mean, this is bizarre...

# GNOME 2.2 is polished and slick, but unfortunately, the more I use
of it, the more it seems poorly-executed. Can't disable the ugly
minimise animation for Metacity; no wireframe mode (essential with
networked X); main menu does not support alphabet-key navigation ala
KDE, IceWM and even Windows since 95 (infinitely quicker than reaching
for the mouse or jumping around with the cursor keys); taskbar is
laughably bad (latest app window not always placed furthermost right);
pager tooltips don't disappear when clicking; and a big, undocmented
and unnecessary XML conf database.

Looking at bug reports for many of the glaring errors, it appears that
Havoc P won't add features (despite even requests by Sun!), because
somehow he knows more than users about what they want. It's a bit
worrying and sad to see in the free software community, but then
again, if Red Hat and Sun have a big change in policy and go with KDE,
GNOME is royally screwed. Shame, as there's a lot of cool stuff in
there, but I'll stick with IceWM for now and recommend KDE to
newcomers...

Anyway, all things considered it has the usual RH spit-shine and
usability, and seems reasonably robust from a few hours of playing
around. Very sluggish though, and the limitations and flaws in the
default desktop will not even impress WinXP refugees - someone trying
to convert will find an equally slow, glitchy and restricted desktop.
Software freedom doesn't matter to a lot of people, nor do they pay a
great deal of attention to security, so the only incentive left is
price. Aaaaaaarck.

I'll stick with RH 7.3 for now and wait for Sarge to become Stable.  
It's just too much hassle to clear out all the cruft from RH 9 to get
what I need, and though that's just my problem, looking around on
newsgroups and forums shows a fair few people trying RH9 as their
first Linux and being confronted by the problems listed above. Still,
I respect RH as a company, and the work they do, and look forward to
their Personal Desktop distro. RH 9 is clearly a "good" distro but
doesn't always represent the svelte and rock-solid OS we like to
advocate - their QA and quick security errata are superb though.

Right, that's filled up a good 10 mins - this Lasagne should be ready.

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk