[Sussex] Red Hat 8.0

[Tony Dart]

On Monday, October 28, 2002, at 03:07 PM, Geoff Teale wrote:

> Afternoon all,
>
> As promised here's a brief rundown of Red Hat 8.0.

<snip> - Couple of points
No mention of interoperability - absolutely crucial for a business 
machine rather than standalone home use. I've loaded RH8 but find there 
are dhcp problems. The machine doesn't appear to start the SAMBA NMB 
service - did you find this to be the case?

I couldn't install it normally on a 64 MB machine, soo I used the text 
install - much slower but worked. I suspect problems with the RAMdisk. 
AFAICT the apps run OK - had one crash loading a help file in the 
Network Configure utility.

I like the idea of having just one app available for most tasks - for a 
standard work PC this is much easier to look after.

There are a few places in the install and other places where the advice 
given (such as in setting up the network) differs from the actual 
prompts that appear on the screen. Usually this is not serious (eg the 
Network Configuration help tells you to choose an option and then press 
the button labelled Next - the buttons are labelled Back and Forward!) 
but someone setting up for the first time might find this a little 
disconcerting.

Tried gcc briefly - Clara OCR gave a number of preprocessor warnings but 
completed the make install with an executable image. There had been no 
such messages with RH7.3.

As someone who buys PCs and services for a living I am not convinced 
this version can replace Windows. 2 major issues - the lack of access to 
network resources, and the need for a fast machine with a lot of memory. 
Bit puzzled why this should be so - Windows runs OK for basic office 
work  in 64 MB - why the bloat on RH8? 7.3 seemed faster too. Maybe RH9?

Certainly agree with you Geoff that OS X is a lot nicer - soon as I've 
transferred all my data over I can abandon Windows at home for good 
(apart from the WinNT  CD duplicator!)

Tony