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The first thing you will note is that Red Hat has decided to move away from the x.x numbering of their products, now they've moved directly from Red Hat 8.0 to Red Hat Linux 9 ending the 7.1,7.2,7.3,8.0 releases of times past, sure there was a 8.1 beta called Phoebe but that was all it was, a beta.

Is this certain? In the past they just used major version increases when there was binary incompatibilities, and minor ones, if there wasn't. So it could be that they added some kernel/glibc/gcc patch, that made it binary incompatible with 8.0. Doesn't mean that there won't be 9.1,9.2,..

Yes, it is certain. Look our Red Hat vertical ad as well, coming directly from Red Hat and look at their web site too. Refer to our previous story about this:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3110

what's up with that first link

Yep, just what I thougt they would release. And before I go on, yes I have tested this in beta. This is 8.0 with a little polish and package updates. Nothing really new or exciting, no innovation, still not giving KDE its proper respect, still no multimedia support outa the box, still no mozilla plugin support outa the box, no equivalent to Mandrakes control center or SuSEs YaST, no improvement on rpm and dependency hell. Someone please explain to me how this pos rates a 9.0 and not an 8.0+ or 8.1 tops.

I think its perfectly obvious that RH 9 is totally outclassed by Mandrake 9.1 and SuSE 8.2. And most definately by Gentoo 1.4 and Slackware 9 for the enthusiast crowd.

It is not *certain*.

Yes, they have gone to version 9 this time, as you can see from their site and the banner ads, but this doesnt mean they have "moved away" from the x.x method of numbering their releases, as the original poster rightly explained.

No, when I said "certain" I meant for 9.0. Yes, it can or not be 9.1, we don't know. I was only talking about 9.0.

Do other distributions provide MP3 support?

If so, why is it that only RedHat have removed it?

If it is illegal, and bound up in patent issues, how are other distributions still supporting it without getting into trouble?

--
Dreamweaver Templates
http://www.dynamicexpression.com/
--

I don't use mp3's much, but since my cd player died I've found myself wanting to encode my cd's so I can listen to them.

Is there any substantial reason why I'de want to encode my cd's to mp3 instead of ogg format?

Thanks!

I dont see how it can be illegal....otherwise we wouldnt see it in EVERY other distro, as well as Windows and OSX.

Niall C. Brady,
"Show Desktop Button" was available in the latest Phoebe, under "Add to Panel"/"Utility"/"Show Desktop Button"

did they remove it or you have not noticed it ?

>Do other distributions provide MP3 support?

Mandrake does.

>If so, why is it that only RedHat have removed it?

Because they are the most well known ones, they are bigger in US, so they could get sued easier than a company in France for example.

>If it is illegal, and bound up in patent issues, how are other distributions still supporting it without getting into trouble?

It is Red Hat simply choosing be more responsible about it. They are now a big company, so they can't mess around with potential threats for lawsuits. So they deal with it that way. Personally, I would like to see them licensing mp3 usage.

I'm confused....what is he reviewing? Have isos been released, or does he have a prerelease?

He has the ISOs before they get uploaded to the mirrors. He got early access to the final version (golden master) for days now. As I did with Mandrake Linux 9.1.

I am also totally confused.
Niall, can you clarify how did you get hold of RHL 9 ?

yes i know that, but Phoebe was never released as a finished product, it was freely downloadble in all it's beta forms however.... I wrote this article to compare Red Hat 8.0 and Red Hat 9, not Phoebe (rh8.1).

I hope that clarifys things for you

cheers

niall/anyweb

So when are iso's supposed to be released? Do we have to wait till april 6th or whatever it was when the box hits the store?

Great review, Niall! Thank God they changed the menus from the Start button! And, Lord Have Mercy, support for i845!!! I've been so mad - all I've been able to install on i845 (besides Windows) is Xandros without sound. Finally!!

niall/anyweb,

I was under the impression that the phoebe releases (after some bugfixes) became the Redhat 9 release....

>Niall, can you clarify how did you get hold of RHL 9 ?

We can't always talk about our sources my friend. But why are you "confused"? This is a publication, and publications work TOGETHER with the companies to ensure copies for reviews. It is of no surprise, it always happens this way. ;-)

thanks Jay

by the way its Red Hat 9 not 9.0 ;-)

the point releases are gone now

cheers

niall

I'm just curious what's the logical step for the name from Psyche to Shrike.
AFAIK, Shrike is the villain in sci-fi novel Hyperion series.

well, I've been using pheobe 3 for awhile now and it rocks. I can't wait for RH 9 to come out. add in apt with freshrpms.net, and it's a piece of cake to add anything you may need, including dvd support, mp3 stuff etc.

I have a question, though, for niall: what version of nautilus made it in? 2.2.1 or 2.2.2? Thanks.

That would sure make it easier to get copies than having to hit every download site trying to find an available connection. Oh well, guess I'll have to fight to find a good ftp site on the 7th of April

but the author doesn't seem to understand that root and user accounts have different mozilla profiles. Installing plugins as root won't allow you to run these plugins as a user. This actually goes for everything. This isn't a bug in redhat or mozilla. I just think the reviewer should be a little more educated on how linux works before posting "problems" he has.

P.S. I wish they would have just installed moz 1.3 as default. Does anyone know if the 8.x rpms on mozilla.org will work with redhat 9? If not I hope moz will post new ones soon.

the nautilus version is 2.2.1

cheers

niall

I bet he was trying to install the plugin for ALL users by doing it as root. It should be the way to handle it. If I have multiple users on a machine, everyone shouldnt have to install their version of the plugin. Better to do it once for all users.

i do realise,

however, you cannot install the JVM as normal user you have to login as root,

correct me if i'm wrong

have a look here for more info in relation to why i log in as root to do it

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1890&page=7

scroll down to the plugins section

cheers

niall

This is just a thought I had since most major linux distros are making a desktop push. RH should consider packaging their subscription or store bought version of 9 with mplayer, xine, xmms, and all the appropriate plugins and license the technology accordingly. Then release what we have here with no support for the free FTP servers. Seems like a good compromise to me.

Im sure this authors job is safe. Now that we've cleared that up perhaps we can get back to the OS discussion, which is what these posts are for. If you have a problem with the author, email him. Spare the rest of us. Hopefully these msgs will be moderated out as they should. :-)

Which is better in your opinion Red Hat 9 or Mandrake 9.1?
Also, does Red Hat 9 have NTFS read support in this version?

Does redhat is using the new RendR function in XFRee? And if so that does mean i can right-click screen and change resolution the fly? If thy did not add that, it would be DAMN stupid

ISOs will be available to RedHat Network customers on 3/31 and to the general public on 4/7. CDs will be available in stores on 4/7.

Hi,

I just noticed the many links to freshrpms.net. Some of them are probably broken by now (I've released gxine 0.3.2 for example), which is the reason why the prefered way of linking is to http://freshrpms.net/rpm/packagename as explained on the website.
Also, for the latest Phoebe beta (rpm 4.2), I've made an apt package available, which is pre-configured to fetch the freshrpms.net 8.0 packages, so although it won't be able to automatically install dependencies from the main distribution, it'll still take care of all dependencies "inside" freshrpms.net packages. It can be found here on http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/redhat/testing/phoebe/ and probably works with Red Hat Linux 9.

Also, I still don't understand why so many people tell to go to my website for most of the packages, but to gurulabs for the xmms-mp3 one... freshrpms.net has got it too, and available through apt and yum! ;-)

Cheers,
Matthias

Regardin the configuring of your network, why reboot when the directions told you to restart networking? it woudl have been much better for the review if you did that. That way it could be demonstrated that it worked as advertised, instead of perpetuating the broken reboot mentality.

Does RH offer the new crystal icons for KDE or you are stuck with the old ones as in the screenshot?

If it weren't for your website, I would not use RH. Your apt repository makes RH as easy to maintain as Gentoo or Debian. Thanks a million! On a slightly off-topic note, could you built the dxr3 plugin with your xine package? Anyways, for any user of RH that isn't aware of freshrpms.net I suggest they take a look - it will make their life much easier.

hi Matthias

the xine links in my article to freshrpms.net worked as and from yesterday (or perhaps the day before), is there any chance you could 'leave' them there for the benefit of users wanting to install xine in Red Hat 9? much appreciated if you could. If not is there some way we can update this so people reading the article and wanting to update xine can be forwarded to a page with the packages as i describe linked correctly

i appreciate your help
cheers niall

I think the reason for the move to no longer do point releases, is because almost all boxen are connected to broadband now and all you need to do is run apt-get (or Red Hat's up2date) to upgrade to the newest packages and bug fixes. Why would one download iso's again for that?

"It still doesn't have an Outlook mail type equivalent, which is a shame for Windows to Linux users, however Evolution is a very good email application."

Um Evolution IS and Outlook equivalent.

"Nothing with the quality of Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop but they are professional applications, GIMP is included and I used it to capture many of the screenshots."

Last time I checked Windows didn't come with PaintshopPro or Photoshop. What's your point? You can run those via Wine if you want.

"There are no apparent icons for network strength or for that matter connectivity on the taskbar (as you would see on a windows taskbar), so I'm left with using an x-term logged in as 'su' to check my internet connection status via command line tools like ifup eth1, ping host and ifconfig, and as simple as that is to some, it's not for everyone."

Right click the panel and add the wireless applet. Meh, do more research.

"CUPS is now the default printing software and looks relatively simple and actually strikingly like the Windows Print Manager equivalent, I don't have a working printer so I can't really comment on its' effectiveness."

Cups is FAR more advanced then windows print manager. Again do some research and find out why.

Linux isn't windows and never will be. If your looking for what your running now but simply on linux your barking up the wrong tree. Why even bother with linux at that point? Just stick with Windows. These reviews which say X linux product doesn't act EXACTLY like it does on Windows are retarded. Again I'll say it. LINUX ISN'T WINDOWS AND NEVER WILL BE. Once you stop trying to make linux into windows you might finally start enjoying yourself. Until then it will never live up to your biased and tainted views of what Windows, Um I mean Linux, should act like.

Neither Mandrake nor Red Hat.... IMHO SuSE is much better if we are talking about that kind of distro (easy to install, easy to use and versatile), because its much more debugged and worked.
I don't think Mandrake is a serious distro, and probably Red Hat yes, but not as SuSE.
Despite of that I prefer Debian, Gentoo & Slackware.

Anyone ever notice how Eugenia sometimes posts

"This new version of this program is available on this ftp. There isn't any news on any sites that this new version came out, but its there on the ftp, and we're reporting it as news."

I'm not trying to imply anything, but its odd.

is running into a lot of problems that can be fixed simply by installing apt-rpm (mp3 support, dvd support, etc.). Now the problem with the mozilla plugins probably has to with the fact that RedHat most likely compiled mozilla with gcc-3.2 ~ 3.4 with the 2.3~ glibc packaged with redhat. This has produced some rather annoying side effects with regards to plugins (you will notice that on mozilla's web site you will have to use the blackdown java jre to get java support because of a conflict with sun's jre and the glibc version mozilla is compiled against). The reviewer complains about power management support... blame microsoft for a poorly documented and poorly implemented standard called ACPI. Most new machines (esp. ones from dell) implement this hardware instead of traditional APM hardware. The latest kernel releases have updated modules for ACPI, however I have noticed some problems when it comes to reading your battery on most dells. For the most part, the reviewer comes off as relative newbie and thats not a bad thing considering we want more converts to linux and the n00bs need to be aware of these issues.

>I'm not trying to imply anything, but its odd.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. Red Hat is *fully aware* of this review (and the other one that we will be posting in a few days) and the reviews of the golden master were pre-agreed with them anyway. Same goes for the Mandrake review as well.

"Nothing with the ease of use or functionality of Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop is included, but there are some applications. GIMP is included and I used it to capture many of the screenshots."

Hell, Gimp has more functionality that paint shop pro. And on a well configured linux machine, it is much easier to use. I even know people who think gimp for windows is better that paint shop pro, although it is not as good as the linux version there.

A short list of relevant packages and versions included would've been helpful (i.e., which Gnome, Apache and PHP versions are packaged with?)

This version will let you upgrade from an earlier distribution. Has anybody had any experiences with this process, particularly an "upgrade" installation from 8.0 to Phoebe?

While it would be much more convenient if RedHat included the MP3 and Xine stuff, I can't fault them for not including it. They are currently the most visible Linux company and the patent/royalty issues are definitely real. Other distributions may one day regret including these libraries. From a business perspective, it is probably the right decision (especially since RedHat cares more about the business desktop than the home desktop).

It is advised to use -U instead of -i in general.

I'm also wondering about the RandR features. Is there a control panel to adjust resolution on the fly?

Also is there an improved firewall configuration tool... the one in Redhat 8 wasn't good.

>> Is there a control panel to adjust resolution on the fly?

That will probably be in Gnome 2.4

For now you'll have to use the 'xrandr' cli tool.

Searching the internet is far easier and more integrated with Konqueror. For Google searches, simply type gg:$BLAHBLAH. It's very flexible and has many presets. Plus, it remembers your previous search requests.

Really, there's no reason for Red Hat to not include the support. If pressured, they could (gasp!) buy the license for it. Really, calling yourself a desktop focused company and not having MP3 is quite ridiculous.

It looks like there is no simple way to retrofit MP3 capability for KDE. This means no audiocd:// capability nor playback through native KDE apps. We really need a reliable 3rd party source for KDE RPMs. I'm not arguing that they do not have legitimate reasons, but objectively speaking Red Hat's KDE RPMs are crippled.

If there is something I am missing, please let me know. I mean something other than "use Gnome".

(This is largely speculation)

1.) MP3's aren't there because of potential licensing/patent issues. This is not RedHat's fault, but the fault of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's licensing. Use Ogg. Besides being an open format, it sounds better at comparable file sizes.

2.) DVD support isn't there because without the DeCSS libraries, DVD decoding is a pain under Xine (you need to get real CSS keys) and distributing any DeCSS code will get them into hot water under the DMCA in the USA

3.) NVidia drivers aren't there because they're not free (freedom) drivers. Just like how there's not any of the Shockwave stuff. It's free (beer), not free (freedom). And, this is the way it should be, which is why I stay away from NVidia cards - they don't want to be nice to the community, I won't be nice to their pocketbooks.

Of course, as a RedHat 8 user, I think about upgrading as well. I have gone through all the multimedia and fonts stuff and it works just fine now. So, if I use the upgrade function, will that changes be preserved or do I have to do all this again. Also, does it preserve my Wine installation ?

Additionally, what happens if I allready got Mozilla 1.3 rpm packages installed to be able to use latest Galeon (1.2.9) ?

Thanks for an answer

George

George,

If you update now you'll have big problems with wine. I'm sure that will all get fixed in short order after 9 is released...

Check out KDE for RedHat at Sourceforge. Their RPMS for KDE are quite nice in comparison. http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

I would like to echo the comments of others. Thank you, Matthias for your freshrpms site. You indeed have made it very easy to update RH. Your work is *greatly* appreciated.

As someone previously pointed out, RedHat 7.0 was also called "RedHat Linux 7." Apparently it has something to do with companies not liking products with a ".0" at the end...

Why do people here think that

a) what's made available to OSNews is available the public

b) our versions of Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1 are not official

c) they're entitled to software the second it is declared final (for free, of course)

Do you folks realize that every software company freezes their development for days, if not weeks or months, before release? They provide it to sites like this specifically FOR these early reviews to generate excitement. This is the final version of RH9 and Eugenia's review is the final version of Mdk9.1. Sheesh.

I noticed the note about installing java plugins into the browser etc. I've had good sucess downloading the IBM JRE from the Advanced Server 2.1 SRPMS and building it against RH 8.0. Then add the rpm to your apt repository for even easier managment.

Is that Red Hat Update Applet is Red !!
http://img.osnews.com/img/3119/rh3.png
They even did'nt release it and got to do an update

Hi!

I have a Toshiba laptop (S1800-804) and the TFT is detected, along with sync rates.

Just to let you know...

"Wine seems to have taken a nose dive"

If you check on www.winehq.com in their news section you will find the answer under issues 155 and 156. The new pthread implementation in the 2.5 kernel branch is to blame. Red Hat backported the changes.

Apparently WINE will be broken on many of the coming distributions. There are a few workarounds that work for some and not others but until the WINE development team resolves the problem, the WINE project is stuck not working out of the box so to speak.

Mozilla seems easier. Just type whatever you want and press [Down] [Enter]

Try it yourself. Start mozilla and select:
Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet search

Choose "google" as search engine. If you don't like the sidebar, uncheck it.


Voila!

There was never a Red Hat 8.1 never. phoebe was 8.0.92-94 for the respective three beta releases. never 8.1 Why do people not understand that. MP3 support XMMS has the rights for free distribution of the mp3 codec but no one else does. sorenson the company that owns the mp3 patent changed the wording to the licenceing of it which made it possible that Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSe could be sued for patant fees for every single install of software with the MP3 plugin weather it was paid for or not. just beacuse they do sell some of them. Why the jump to 9 and not 8.1? there were changes to the kernel threads and glibc that has broken alot of things. wine currently will not work, as will a few other programs.

Mozilla and plugins. I think you will find that the Red Hat mozilla build is compiled with gcc 3.2 which has broken compatibility with certain plugins compiled with gcc 2.x series blackdown have a java build compiled under gcc 3.2 and sun are rumored to be releasing one soon by compiling with gcc 3.2 mozillia is faster i havent found any other plugins that wont work with by gcc 3.2 build of 1.3 but have heard that real player doesnt work. i have flash, acrobat, java all working.

The reasoning behind not supplying the NVidia drivers is and always has been that they are propietory in format if Red Hat did supply them they would be expected to provide support. how can they be expected to provide support for code they have never seen? they dont know how it will interact with the kernel. From my experience with NVidia drivers it wasnt great it was ok but not great. i would get hard lockups when my machine had been on for around 24 hours. very regular pretty much every morning my box was hard locked up. I now run ATI hardware I have open soucre 3d acceleration, and no lockups

Xine and mplayer are a very tricky legal minefield. the open souce decss ppackeges to decrypt dvds are in a very tricky legal situation. Red Hat is best to not include them to ensure they will be here toomoorow, should the movie studios decide to sue over it Red Hat would most likely fold . They are not a huge company, the biggest distro yes but not that big.

1) So much for the user-visible changes. What about the nuts-and-bolts differences between RH8.0 and RH9? I understand 9 is now kernel-2.6 ready (ie. modutils updated). What about Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) support? What differences/enhancements does the RH9 kernel have that stock kernel-2.4.20 doesn't?

2) While I agree with RedHat's decision not to include MP3 support, I wish that they would: a) visibly push for the use of OGG in both encoding and decoding; and, b) have some kind of document detailing the process of adding MP3 support

3) Once people have installed RH9, I would recommend upgrading nautilus to 2.2.2 as it has some speed enhancements that are quite significant

Instead of all this:
rpm -ivh alsa-lib-0.9.2-fr1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh aalib-1.4rc5-fr1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libfame-0.9.0-fr1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh flac-1.1.0-fr1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh xvidcore-0.9.0-fr3.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh xine-lib-1.0.0-fr0.beta8.2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh xine-0.9.19-fr1.i386.rpm

Why not this:
rpm -Uvh *

I just think the first method makes it look more complicated than it is.

Redhat have included NPTL in the kernel, and as far as i know many other patches.

Those Bluecurve shots look like a modded KDE.

First of all it is in the Human Nature to be unsatisfied or to complain about everything. Why do you people complain about Red Hat Linux? You don't like it? Don't use it. Personally I'm a Slackware user, I've tryed all the major distros out there and I've liked this the most. Besides Linux I use FreeBSD and BeOS (1.1 Dev. Edition). It's like those retards who complain about package management in slackware or that it is to hard to use. And for those who compare Linux with Windows: Stop comparing it and get a decent OS BOOK and start reading about the fundamental difrences in both of them. Finaly, it is a good thing that we have big commercial distros, they keep the balance in the software world. And something else:RH Linux is still freely avaible unlike other distros, like SuSE (only FTP install), so take it as it comes or don't use it. It's just stupid to comment and complain about it. Have you people tryed CRUX? If you did you'll notice that Slackware is bloated compared to CRUX LoL!. They will probably never bring a distro out on everybodies taste. And if you are a newbie and hate RedHat then try Mandrake. Finally everybody will notice that this distros are bloated and in some ways they waste your time more or less than Slack or Debian does. And finaly, Red Hat for instance slows down the learning process...
So as a conclussion: Why bother with Linux or Red Hat Linux when you dislike it and wan't something easy to use? All brand-name PC-s come whith that Windowze stuff preinstalled...use it!

>b) our versions of Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1 are not official

Look at Mandrakes websites. It's official! :-)

I suggest you re-read Adam's comment. You misunderstood what he was trying to say.

>I suggest you re-read Adam's comment. You misunderstood what he was trying to say.


Yes, you're right. Sorry for that :O

btw: Thanks for the nice reviews ;-)

In GNOME:
Add to panel -> Internet -> Wireless Link Monitor

Won't use it in my laptop. No NVidia Drivers and, no, I won't look for them in the internet. Windows XP can show my 1600x1200 without me having to install the video drivers from the CD that came with the computer when I got it. Graphics are slow without real nvidia drivers, it's true, but at least there are graphics.

Okay, some key points:

Photoshop IS NOT easy to use compared to Gimp. It takes 10x as much knowledge and work to do just about anything. That said, Photoshop IS more powerful, but for everyday image manipulation I use Gimp every time.

up2date DOES download NEW or UPDATED versions of RPMs, it does NOT *only* update security issues. Unless Red Hat has changed this, and I do not imagine that they have.

Your preferred *window manager* is "the default Gnome Bluecurve theme". Are you a total moron or did you just say your favorite WM is a theme?

Yes, I'll put a lot of faith in THIS braindead and useless review of Red Hat 9.0. Get a freaking clue.

"World Exclusive: Mandrake Linux 9.1 Review", "Red Hat Linux 9 - World's First Look at Shrike". Nice, but for both the world knew how they will be from the betas. How about a "World's First Look at SuSE 8.2" before 3rd April? Is that possible?

>How about a "World's First Look at SuSE 8.2" before 3rd April? Is that possible?

I can ask SuSE. But my husband will hate me for spending one more intensive week away from him...

tell me if it's got POSIX ACL support built in yet?

Tanks,

--J(K)

RedHat has generic Nvidia drivers. Like their generic Windows counterparts, these built-in drivers do not support hardware-accelerated OpenGL. But your laptop should work just fine with the generic 'nv' driver.

I was just wondering if any grades are available for ReadHat, to compare it to the ones that ended the Mandrake review.
And naturally im hoping for a Redhat/Suse/Mandrake comparison shortly, with a total comparison on all the keyelements of a linuxdistro. Anyone have time for that?

No mention of behind-the-scenes technological improvements; merely slavering quips over optical chewing-gum. Author mistakenly states that the "Update" option is new. Poorly-written and packed with grammatical errors.

Most crucially, though: Red Hat is the distro big corps are looking at. It will be deployed on servers and workstations, so why use a mostly Linux-ignorant "writer" to review it? Leave him to retch up musings on Gentoo and Mandrake on his blog somewhere; OSNews deserves proper, professional articles.

Otherwise Eugenia, keep up the good work.

rpm -Uhv *.rpm

will work through whatever dependancies exist between all rpms in your current directory.

rpm -e gcc.rpm kdelibs.rpm blah.rpm

This will remove all the rpms you append after the -e.

Now to install mplayer and xine grab all the rpms you want into a new folder, cd into that folder and run rpm -Uhv *.rpm. Then download all the dependencies it asks for into that folder and run the command again.

If you run into problems try --force for conflicts or --nodeps for dependencies.

Now about this release of RedHat. If RedHat wants to listen to their marketting department more than the sys admins support their stuff in the field. Then fine. I can go back to using slackware, debian and gentoo. And recommend Mandrake for anyone else. When RedHat wants my support they can go back to a logical and rational method of working with their community instead of treating us beta testers like outsiders.

Thanks, but no thanks.

It's always so nice to see people at their very worst, acting as if they are all-knowing, calling each other names, quibbling over trivialities, bias against non-native speakers of English - oh what a wonderful world!

Why don't you people sit down, shut up and wait for the Red Hat 9 iso's. Until that happens, Naill is the only one who knows what he's talking about. And, by the way, his review was very well written and organized. One would think that people would be appreciative that someone would go to the trouble of giving us an insight into what we cannot see yet. But noooooooooooooo, what a foolish thought that would be :-)

>>>Photoshop IS NOT easy to use compared to Gimp. It takes 10x as much knowledge and work to do just about anything. That said, Photoshop IS more powerful, but for everyday image manipulation I use Gimp every time.

I'm in total agreement with you.

What kills me is the number of people not qualified to use photoshop (i'd go as far to say they are NOT qualified to even TALK about it), then those same people clammor about gimp not being a replacement.

whatever (tune them out like bad radio station)

I see many complaints regarding this particular authors writing style, percieved lack of understanding of this particular product. How many of you could write a better review of the product and suchh in-depth review. If you say the author's job wasn't up to scratch, does anyone want to write up a review of RH9.0?

I'm waiting until I can afford VirtualPC for my Windows machine. I don't mind running multiple OSes, provided I don't have to dual boot to do it. I've enjoyed VPC5 on my Mac and the demo of VPC for Windows is excellent as well. Of course, if and when that day comes, it'd probably be a good idea to max out my RAM so that I can run Windows and guest OSes all at once and still run everything smoothly!

But it's nice to see Redhat advancing, and I hope FreeBSD 5.x is worth it's salt because I'd like to run it under VPC on my PC too!

just my $0.02

Bluecurve is a collection of themes and artwork (freedesktop.org-compliant icon theme, GTK1/2 themes, KDE style/color scheme, kwin theme, metacity theme, etc.). It is not a desktop environment, it is not a window manager, it does not polish your car or bring about world peace. The name "Bluecurve" is a registered trademark of Red Hat, acquired in the purchase of some other company at some point in the past and repurposed to brand the lovely icons and widgets and other fiddly bits of artwork designed by Garrett LeSage. The artwork in the themes is GPL'd, and goes by the name of Wonderland when distributed by persons other than Red Hat.

KDE as usual in RedHat looks like a Gnome build gone wrong.

Good to see RedHat are doing what they do best. Crippling KDE.

To answer your question about RedHat learning to recognize laptops, I recently had an issue with RH 8.0 on my Toshiba laptop. I had purchased the box and was entitled to support. When I contacted support, they said, "sorry, we don't support laptops."

There's your answer.

For my part, until they DO finally wise up and realize that many businesspeople use laptops heavily, I'll have to choose a different distribution (I'm using Mandrake at present).

> I can ask SuSE. But my husband will hate me for spending one more intensive week away from him...

What with this about you leaving OSNews Eugenia. Your posting more stuff than ever lately.?

I was backed off for months now only writing newsbits and not many big articles, I didn't do as much, exactly as I wrote back in december that I would do.

But this month (up to April 10th really) I am really needed here, as all these releases are happening at the same time (including OS/2 and QNX releases).

Using X as root? http://img.osnews.com/img/3119/rh3.png

:P

It should be noted that Red Hat 9.0 does not pro-actively asks the user to create user accounts during installation, so it is pretty much the same way as Lindows does the installation.
So, Nial simply might not got around on creating the users yet when he was creating these screenshots.

The review was great, very detailed and in my mind, confirmed my suspicions that this release will be a huge disappointment. Is Redhat trying to start a new trend of going to full releases (8 - 9) without a very noticeable improvement? I can’t think of any other software (much less an OS) that does this.

I’m still scratching my head as to how they plan to seriously compete in the desktop market. Right now there are so many key pieces of the desktop puzzle missing, with no sign of being fixed (mp3, a good video player, easy (easier) networking etc. etc.). It seems that, after some through research on my part, everyone is jumping the gun on recommending Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows or OSX.

I’d only recommend any version of Linux (RH9 included) to either a very casual computer user who only did email and web browsing or to someone who really wanted to get under the hood and spend a lot of time tinkering. Anyone in between (which is probably the great majority of computer users), I feel, will find Redhat 8 (and from the looks of it 9 also) disappointing and frustrating.

My opinions of Linux on the server side are quite the opposite.

>I’m still scratching my head as to how they plan to seriously compete in the desktop market.

They are going after the corporate desktop, not the common desktop market. But yes, I agree with you overall, a lot of pieces are missing. And Red Hat knows that, trust me. But it ain't easy "fixing" the whole Linux-platform issue which consists of many-many pieces of software... It is a huge job...

"I’m still scratching my head as to how they plan to seriously compete in the desktop market."

No, no, no, no! I can't tell you how many times I've read this and statements like it, like those complaining that there is no mp3 support, or that "key pieces of the desktop puzzle" are missing.

Look, the premise of your statement, that RH wants to 'seriously compete in the desktop market' is WRONG! RH has said that it does NOT want to compete in the desktop market. They are not competing with Mandrake, SuSE, Lycoris, Xandros etc.

RH has said, time and time again, that they *only* thing they care about is the _corporate_ desktop (and servers of course). Corporate desktops don't need mp3 support. They don't need realplayer. They don't need nvidia drivers since the default open source "nv" driver works just fine in 2D.

Don't you see? RH couldn't care less if someone complains that flash isn't included. That's not their market! As far as RH is concerned there are no "key pieces" missing.

So, as far as their market is concerned, they are right on the money.

I stand corrected. Now that I go to their site, I see that there is no mention of Redhat being a solution for the home user, in fact, and this may be new as I don't remember it being so prevalent before, the word Enterprise is everywhere.

I think that part of the reason I (and others) come away with the notion that it IS intended for the desktop is because of reviews like this (and admittedly confusing the claims of other Linux distributions with those Redhat makes), which focus largely on its multimedia capabilities and typical desktop applications for the home user.

I am, however, still wondering how it is that they can justify going from 8-9 without more noticeable improvements. The only explanation I can come up with is that they are breaking the traditions of virtually all other software companies (theirs included) and starting a new trend.

For reasons why the move from 8.0 to 9, read Mike Harris' post to the beta mailing list (most notably because of the NPTL kernel threading changes that break compatibility).

https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phoebe-list/2003-March/004919.h...

So, while on the surface 9 seems very similar to 8.0, under the hood there are *major* changes that do indeed substantiate the version change.

Sorry, it wasn't Mike Harris, it was Matt Wilson. They both post to the list frequently, I forget who says what.

When are distro makers going to wake up? The "enthusiast" crowd is maxed out, you won't get new Linux users catering to the tweakers.

You want Linux to be truly a viable option? Then I will tell you what needs doing *now* in all new distros;

* Dump SWAT and develop a decent networking environment tool for LANs that *will* use SMB. Yes it needs to be GUI. SAMBA is a tweaker's dream, but totally unusable by the average PC user.

* make an autoUNmount that WORKS for CDROMs. How bloody stupid that I can't unmount+eject by pressing the eject button - even windows 95 could do that!

* Dump RPMs. They are dependency hell! Installs of binaries should be like Mozilla and include everything you need in one file. Look at the overly complicated install of Xine in the article to see how stupid it is, and that was an easy one!

* And the biggie - how the hell can Redhat have 6 CDs and yet NOT have MP3 support, NOT have video support, NOT have NVIDIA support (clearly the most common chipsets in new PCs), NOT have Java, NOT have shockwave, NOT have common TTF fonts. What do they bloody have on them then?? 6CDs and they can't provide what 90% of *users* would consider critical software.

Less critical: fix the fonts for pete's sake! Even with truetype fonts installed they still look like crap compared to Windows.

The simple fact is Linux is not even close to mainstream at this stage, and those things that badly need work are not being done.

You can whine and moan about how *configurable* Linux is, but unless it's at least as functional OOTB then windows will not stick with it. And for every windows user who tries it and says "too hard" there will be 5 more who say, "oh well, I wont bother with it then either".

Note: I've used RH since V5 professionally, and it's frustrating to see that they are still focusing on areas that don't need desperately fixing, and ignoring the things that have been hopeless from day 1.

I see many complaints regarding this particular authors writing style, percieved lack of understanding of this pa