Hi,
I had recently installed RH 8.0 on my home machine (P-II 336 with 160MB
RAM). This was a fresh install (Though I had 7.3 previously, i had to
overwrite it because of a lot of small problems that kept cropping up).
Initial impression of RH8 - Very Good.
Lot of work has gone into the GUI. The new look GUI looks clean, with neat
icons. The programs are arranged
into neat logical groups. Another good thing probably is the integrated
interface provided both in GNOME and KDE. This is due to BLUECURVE,
RedHat's UI initiative. The menus appear in the same order and sport the
same captions in both. "CD Player" in Gnome starts GnoCD while in KDE, it
starts KonCD.
Another cause for cheer is the integrated administration tools that come
under the redhat-admin-* and redhat-config-* banners. The old commands
still work though! Configuring
the system is now an easy task even for beginners. Just click at the right
tool in the menu and ur into it. No need to remember "printtool" for
configuring ur printer etc. However, Iam still a great fan of yast2. RH
will have to pull up its socks to match yast2 in terms of pure ease of use
and its functionality.
The package manager has also been integrated now. The packages are grouped
logically into
different categories and easy hints come up to say what each package does.
On the downside, though, your flexibility for choosing individual packages
is now gone. You select a group, and thats it. All the *requisite*
packages for that group will be installed. This shows up during the
installation itself, where you dont have to worry about cryptic package
names. Package selection at installation is now a peaceful affair, however
managing individual packages cannot be done from the GUI. The RPM command
line is there, though!
On the flipside, the full installation is a Whopping 4.5 GB!! After having
installed all these packages, the system ought to be slow, and it is! But
I found it a bit faster than the RHL 7.3 that was previously installed on
the same machine. I have not checked the package manager that much. I am
not sure how adding new packages would be. If they had an easy way of
automatically downloading and installing packeages to resolve dependencies
(like in woody), it would be nice. Have to check it out though.
Legacy sound card configuration seems to be a problem. My Yamaha OPL-SAX3
sound card wasnt properly detected, both by RH's new Sound Card
configurator program, and also by sndconfig(!surprise!). Had to manually
change
/etc/modules.conf to load the correct driver for the sound card. Also, MP3
support has been pulled out of XMMS due to some vague copyright reason! :(
One can download the MPG123 plugin for XMMS to play MP3's though!! Also,
Netscape is gone, Mozilla is in (good news for some!). Evolution is in,
along with a whole lot of goodies like gaim, galeon etc. No wonder the
full install takes so much space!
Final verdict:
Slick, fast GUI, more *non-geek* oriented. Could appeal to general junta.
Good set of administration tools, but yet to match up with the rest.
Package management leaves much to be desired (A package policy on the
lines of Debian is in the works???). Otherwise good old linux kernel with
the latest releases of all other goodies to go along with it, slickly
packaged! Are we seeing Linux slowly going the way of Windows?
Anyway, GO FOR IT!!
-Srivathsan
On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Sanjay Chigurupati wrote:
Hi,
has anyone tried out RH 8. Just looking for reviews
and also the cds or a copy of the cds.
thx,
sanjay
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