Not liking RH 8.0 yet.

[RudeCat7]

O.k., so I can look past the XPish looks, but I'm concerned that they didn't put a terminal icon in the taskbar (at the bottom). I know where it is, but isn't it weird that they hid it in the panel->system tools->terminal? It is a key feature of Linux. And is there only one? I'm just asking cuz Suse has 7 shells to choose from.

The most important thing is speed. Something must be wrong with my install. The terminal, and other things take way too long to start (10 seconds..) and in Mozilla for example, if I resize the window, the graphics hesitate for a bit.

I just want to know if anybody has any ideas.

system: 1.1ghz Thunderbird, 128mb sdram, 10 gig hard drive, Geforce2 Ti, MSI k7t turbo2 MOBO
    :confused:  

And where is FDISK? I looked in the
/bin and /usr/bin.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: RudeCat7 ]

[Bazoukas]

I must say that what turns me off with RH8 is the XPish look.
  Last thing I wanna see, is in general the Linux community immitating Windos, even if it comes to just looks.

 As for your problem. Beats me. I had the same thing happen to me with Mandrake and only a reinstall fixed it.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by RudeCat7:
O.k., so I can look past the XPish looks, but I'm concerned that they didn't put a terminal icon in the taskbar (at the bottom). I know where it is, but isn't it weird that they hid it in the panel->system tools->terminal? It is a key feature of Linux. And is there only one? I'm just asking cuz Suse has 7 shells to choose from.

Sounds like you are having the same first reaction I did (mine was much worse actually). Just right click on the panel at the bottom select "Add to Panel" and add any of the ICONS from the menu. It was the very first thing I did. And I find the one that they have as the default on the menu to be the best in this particular version of RedHat (my opinion). But konsole and xterm are also installed, just not listed on the menu by default. You can of course modify the menu to your liking.

After having calmed down myself I believe this is a good move by RedHat to streamline and limit the applications on the default menu. I can see how n00bs are overwhelmed by having so much stuff by default. You and I and anyone else who have two brain cells to rub together can easily figure out how to add menu and panel items to taste.

 

quote:The most important thing is speed. Something must be wrong with my install. The terminal, and other things take way too long to start (10 seconds..) and in Mozilla for example, if I resize the window, the graphics hesitate for a bit.

I found it to be slightly more sluggish than RedHat 7.3 on my Laptop w/64MB but it screams on my Athlon with 512MB. In fact I am amazed at how much faster it is than previous versions, for everything including OpenOffice and Mozilla which always seemed a little sluggish on older versions of RedHat for me. Of course being compiled with gcc 3.2 probably had something to do with the speed increase.

 

quote:
And where is FDISK? I looked in the
/bin and /usr/bin.

It's right where it's been in every release of RedHat I have ever used. In "/sbin" which isn't in normal user's PATH by default nor ever has. It will be in root's PATH, but only if you do a "su -" rather than an "su". Also has always been that way. You can either modify your PATH or give the full path when you run it "/sbin/fdisk".

Hope this helps..

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by bazoukas:
I must say that what turns me off with RH8 is the XPish look.

I wouldn't know. I have yet to see a copy. I've avoided it like the plague and never intend to touch it (seriously).

However, in Linux you have a choice. You don't have to use the default theme, or even the default window manager. If you want something different you can use WindowMaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment, Openlook, Lesstiff, twm, fvwm, etc, etc.

I personally believe it is smart to set up the default desktop to be as much like the one that currently claims to have 97% of the desktops. People would feel more comfortable when coming from the dark side. Then they can switch desktops if they like at a later time. I would like to see that 97% drop down to at least 95% and this is one way to help that along. But that's just my opinion.

[shuiend]

i dont like the look of RH 8 either b/c of gnome and KDE looking the same mostly. i also right now do not have wireless working in it so i have not really bothered using it all to much. did u guys do a fresh install of it or upgrade from 7.3. i was curious about that b.c i did a fresh install on an extra HD and was wondering if i did upgrade if it would keep all my settings?

[KernelPanic]

I didnt like RH8.0 untile this morning. I got wine to work!!
This is the only distro where I have actually got wine to work.

I have also had less problems with it than I have with mandrake, but saying that I havnt tried Mandrake 9.0 yet. Personally I like Slackware best because it gives you pure hell whenever you want to do something which for some reason I like    It's kina old skool.
But I think I might start reccomending RH to linux virgins in the same way I recommend mandrake.

[RudeCat7]

O.k. Now that I know that FDISK is still there, I can continue. I will do a reinstall to see if the speed problem goes away. If not, what tips do you have that could speed it up? I will configure the desktop effects to the minimum setting to start with.    


EDIT: The reinstall fixed the delay issue.

Ooops, desktop effects setting was 7.3  

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: RudeCat7 ]

[Master of Reality]

i found rh8.0 to be faster than RH7.3 on my 200MHz 80MB RAM machine. I will try not to put it on my main machine. But it might go ne beside RH7.3.
The only reason i have RedHat on my main machine is because i cant get Slackware to install properly on it though.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: The Master of Reality / Bob ]

[choasforages]

hehehe, its version of gnome2 is quicker then my custome compiled version. finally, redhat got its head out of its ass when it came to the compiler, go gcc 3.2 and on that note, i kinda like the look. it looks better then xp, way slicker. like the xp gui is fucking gawdy, and bluecurve looks sharp nicly. when i do lfs 4.0, im going to try to use the bluecurve theme. and also i like the gtk 2.0nss of it. as for what i can do to it. i had to put my

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
in a different place, and i havn't install support for my keyboard. i did get the printer to work. though personally, i don't see why kde istn' the defualt gui. it is sooo much better designed then gnome.

however, is gtk2 aggressivly multi threaded. cuase im thinking about doing an smp workstation for myself

[voidmain]

KDE has never been the default desktop on RedHat (although that is all I used on the last several releases of RedHat). I believe RedHat and Gnome have major ties developer wise, don't remember the exact history although I believe it's high up on the food chain.

And if I remember correctly, that is one of the sole reasons for the coming of Mandrake and one of the reasons it had gotten so popular. Mandrake took the RedHat distro which was always touted as a Server OS (until the release of 8.0) and put KDE on as the default desktop, dummied down some things and called it a desktop OS.

KDE in my opinion has always been far superior to Gnome (at least one step ahead of it). I still believe that to be true, however, I really do like this new Gnome setup of RedHat's. It seems they cut a lot of the garbage out, made everything pretty simple and refined. Very nice for new users. And heck, even I like it.

Is gtk/gnome multithreaded? I would say the individual components are not but I don't believe multithreading would benefit gnome itself all that much. Gnome itself is made up of several programs so in a way it is multithreaded. Everything you launch runs under a separate process so each process would have a chance of running on a different processor. For the gnome apps themselves I don't believe gtk itself is responsible for multithreading. I believe that would be the responsibility of the application and  the programmer would code multithreading into the application if deemed necessary/beneficial. But then I'm not a gtk programmer so maybe some gtk/qt experts here could answer that question a little better than I.

Now back to RedHat. Like I said before I usually don't rave over *.0 releases. This one was an exception. But like every *.0 release I have found a couple of bugs (far fewer than I expected to find by now). One of them has to do with RPM. I installed a couple of 3rd party RPMs today and then whenever I tried to do any rpm command that would touch the RPM database the "rpm" command would just hang. Had to "kill -9" it to stop it. Couldn't do any other "rpm" commands from that point on.

Thankfully bugzilla saved me on the RPM problem though. Seems someone else has run across this issue. Just had to delete the "/var/lib/rpm/__db*" files and it was back to normal. In fact after doing that I tried to install the same RPM that caused the problem and it worked. Dunno.

A second problem really isn't a bug but just the general problems that are caused by making a serious jump in compiler versions. I find that many of the packages out there are tailored to the 2.9.x compiler and some have to be slightly rewritten/modified to work with the 3.2 compiler. That is one of the reasons I usually stay away from the *.0 releases. Things from *.1 on up are usually bug fixes from the *.0 level with no major modifications to the compiler for certain. Starting at *.1 means most applications will have already been updated to be compatible with the new compiler.

The *.0 versions usually give you a chance to find the bugs, and then make sure those bugs are fixed in the *.1 version before you use it productionally. *.0 version are more for familiarity in my case. One thing I found odd is that there was no drastic jump in kernel version from 7.3. In fact it's the same kernel with only RedHad specific changes. No complaint here though. I like the 2.4.18 kernel and several distros use it. Oh well, too much info for one post...

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Calum]

pardon my ignorance, but it is possible to have several versions of the same compiler installed, isn't it? i seem to remember installing both gcc 2.96 and 3.0 when i installed mandrake, but if a particular program needs one or the other, does it know where to find it? i have had some problems recently with some installations failing due to my not being able to convince a program that all the dependencies are actually installed on my machine.

Re: KDE vs GNOME, GNOME for some reason after all these years does seem to be a bit behind KDE, and of course it originally was playing catchup to KDE as it was basically a KDE clone, making a free software version of the K desktop. I support the concept of GNOME for that reason alone however i can't get my copy of it to run properly on my machin, it keeps buggerring with the mouse and so on. I still like nautilus and galeon better than konqueror though (although nautilus and konqueror both seem to be rife with mysterious program crashes, maybe it's my hardware. maybe it's because my copies of the software are a year old, who knows?

[choasforages]

i like the fact that kde is written in c++. i mean, the way kde is tightly intergrated with itself, its gotta be making microsoft jealous. and i think that cd burning on a desktop os, should not require root, and i think calls to cdrecord should be built into nautilus, just as a precaution to counter winxp built in cd recording, except this would actally be decent

[KernelPanic]

quote:Originally posted by void main:

And if I remember correctly, that is one of the sole reasons for the coming of Mandrake and one of the reasons it had gotten so popular. Mandrake took the RedHat distro which was always touted as a Server OS (until the release of 8.0) and put KDE on as the default desktop, dummied down some things and called it a desktop OS.

You remember rightly.
I think the reason they (RedHat) never favoured KDE was because they didn't like the licence of qt.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by choasforages:
and i think that cd burning on a desktop os, should not require root

It doesn't require root if you set the permissions properly.