[sclug] Re: RedHat 8.0

[Tony Sumner]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 09:17:45PM +0000, Scott RIxon wrote:

> I was going to try RedHat 8 but I think I will stay with this 
> (Gentoo) for now! 

I've just upgraded from RH 7.1 to RH 8.0 and I found some good things
and some bad. It failed to configure X properly, claiming that my
video card has only 256k RAM, so X could not start. I wrote to Red Hat
support about this and while I was waiting for a reply tried
configuring it. The Release Notes said that Xconfigurator has been
replaced by redhat-config-xfree86 so I ran that and got some
improvement but eventually edited /etc/XF86Config by hand, setting
VideoRAM to 1024 and also getting the S3 driver. Why did it give me
the vga driver when it already knew I had the S3 chipset?  On Monday
the reply arrived, suggesting that I run Xconfigurator (!).

The other thing wrong is that I can get a Virtual console with CTRL-ALT-Fx
but I can't get back; ALT-F7 leaves X running but shows only a black
screen. I am asking support about that. The documentation says nothing
about how this is implemented and there is no 'Virtual' in the index.

The Release Notes say that Netscape is dropped in favour of Mozilla.
Fair enough; Navigator has developed a habit of saying 'Document Done'
showing a blank screen and going into a coma. Mozilla doesn't do that
but there are other differences. There is no obvious way of merging
your Netscape bookmarks with Mozilla's and you have to edit
~/.netscape/bookmarks.html and ~/.mozilla/user/*/bookmarks.html
manually, even though both files say 'Do not edit'. Mozilla does not
let you save a web page in postscript with 'Save as' but you can get
the same effect with 'Print' and then 'Print to file'. No great bother
but something else to think about.

Version 8.0 no longer includes Star Office, which Sun have now put a
price on, but it does have OpenOffice which is really nice. Also whereas
StarOffice would take an age to load, with OpenOffice you can load the 
parts separately. 

KDE 3 is OK I suppose if you like that kind of thing. I'd use it more
if I knew how to control the colours. Mutt expects me to read red on blue
and slrn is impossible in an xterm window so I run both these in a 
virtual console. Oh, and if you set the font in Konsole to 'large'
the letters are spaced out and the layout goes haywire. 

I guess that's enough comment

Tony Sumner