[oclug] RedHat 8.0

[Mike Carignan]

Michael P. Soulier wrote:

>    Can you say, "buggy as hell?" dhclient refuses to work, I had to grab a
>copy of dhcpcd from RedHat 7.3. The upgrade sucked completely so I blew away
>what I had an installed from scratch. Their mods to Gnome are nice on the
>eyes, I'll admit, but the damn thing just doesn't work! I had to logout and
>back in once because something had died and no programs were opening, at all.
>No error messages, just nothing happens. Not good...
>
I was running the RedHat beta (null) prior to 8.0 and it ran very 
smoothly, I was *very* impressed with it.  Since installing 8.0 I've had 
some odd issues.  At first rpm would randomly lock up until I 
reinstalled again (I never did an upgrade, I did a complete reinstall 
each time).  Now it's running very slow, with things as simple as song 
changes on xmms being delayed about half a second which never happened 
on any other distro I've run or even the beta release for this version 
of redhat.  The dhclient worked fine out of the box for me though.

The only thing that has kept me using it so long is how nice it looks. 
 It's got an extremely attractive desktop and everything like file 
associations, anti-aliased fonts etc. are set up for me already!  It 
ships as a very attractive system which means I don't have to play 
around installing truetype fonts or finding a nice theme etc.

Despite this however, I will very soon be switching my desktop back away 
from redhat, as the speed issues are really annoying and I don't 
understand how it could have changed so drastically from the beta 
release to their final unless I somehow messed the install up...  I'm 
also having some wierd issues with the compiler it ships with, which is 
strange since I also didn't have any issues with the version of gcc they 
had with the beta (I'm not sure if they did a drastic version change or 
not with it, I didn't take the time to look into that).  Gentoo looks 
like it might be fun to get up and running despite the pain of 
 compiling the whole thing from source, heh.

>    My review? It's no windows killer. With WinXP and Mac OS X around, I think
>anyone offering Linux on the desktop and for home use is going to have to do a
>lot better.
>
>  
>
I don't think it's really geared towards home use.  It would make for a 
very nice office workstation where you have a system administrator to 
set everything up for you and away you go, but defenitely not for the 
average home user.  I believe one of the developers even said that he 
feels it's much more geared towards office use than home use in a recent 
interview.