Redhat 8.0 Feedback
 

Hello All,

I'm curious to see what's the general feeling regarding the new RH 8.0? How do you feel about the new desktop.... general likes/dislikes??

I downloaded the iso's last night and I'm looking forward to installing it this evening!

--Keith

I tried out the Red Hat Null beta for about a week. In that time I could not get up2date working at all, even though it showed I had tons of updates to add. Even so, yesterday I went out and bought my first linux distribution :D.

I went ahead and did a fresh install, and up2date was working now. Only problem I have is Red Hat does not come default with Pico it would seem. I dis-liked the new "simplification" of the menu's though. Ok on 7.2 (the first Red Hat I ever tried), you had Internet and other folders in your menu. Now they have Internet with maybe three programs listed in it. Then if you scroll down there is a folder called "Extras" that has another folder inside it that is called "Internet" now I ask what is the point of that? It somewhat confused me at first when I could not find Gaim under Internet :rolleyes:

Overall I liked this distro but I imagine there are patches and bugfixes for this distro seeing as they seemed to change quite a bit this time around.

I don't like the fact that still if you choose to do a "CUSTOM" install a lot of packages that most people won't need at all are installed ... AND you can't deselect those. In previous versions of RH rdate, rdist, etc could be deselected and looks like from that release it's not possible (without using a kickstart installation). What I did to get a as-clean-as-possible system is did a manual install with nothing selected (so just the base system), checked using rpm -qa | more which packages should not be installed imho and created a kickstart file out of that information and reinstalled the box.

Also the "interactive"-problem that is known already in the NULL Beta is still not fixed. It worked flawlessly in RH < 7.2, but since 7.3 it's broken :mad:


Oh well I'll just stick to my new kickstart file for install stuff, etc now ... :D

all you would need is checkmark that box for select individual packages

It still gives you a lil more choice than previous versions of Red Hat

well i checked that box ... but I had to go through textinstall since I have no mouse on that test box. I think in the graphical install (in flat view mode) I could deselect as good as almost everything ... that kinda sucks then I think!

Pretty Smooth
 

Well the install went pretty smooth... my sound card doesn't work but it has yet to ever work after a default RH install. Bluecurve is interesting... after a bit of customization, I finally have KDE looking pretty good. Hey, does anyone know how to eliminate all this double clicking... I feel like I'm back in windows again. I really do like the add/remove package feature, makes thing much more manageable. I'll keep you posted as I investigate further.

--Keith

I donwload RH 8.0 and installed it on my computer. I like it somewhat. I didn;t like the Gnome desktop and the menus that I couldn;t figure out how to edit, so I compiled Gnome 2.1 and installed it on top of Redhat Gnome. Still have a lot of files that I don't think does much of anything.

Redhat 8 Thoughts
 

Overall, Redhat 8 is VERY nice. I have no problems installing... almost everything worked fine out from the start. All my hardware (including printer, sound card, CD-burner, and modem) were detected fine. Fonts look great except in Mozilla (and even those are ok).

I really like the Bluecurve look... it's simple yet elegant. It's nice that things like Evolution (and the RedHat tools) look nice on my KDE desktop. I actually prefer the GNOME 2 look. Nautilus is pretty (and just as fast as Konqueror now). That being said, there is no Show Desktop button (to minimize) all windows in GNOME. This the main reason I use KDE.

I have had a few problems with KDE. The KDE screensavers don't work for some reason (the screen just goes black instead). I've also had some font problems in Konsole. There are threads for both of these issues in the forum.

OpenOffice.org seems to work fine and imported my Office 97 documents perfectly (nothing fancy, just my resume ect). It does take about 15 sec to load though. Once opened it's fast on my Athlon 1100. Nvidia drivers installed fine using the instructions from an article on OSNews. No crashes or hangs. I haven't tried buring a CD (that's next).

Overall I'm impressed.

I like RH 8.0, including what they did to Gnome and moved around in the menus. Like everyone else, I have to relearn where programs are nested at, but that isn't difficult and a small price for the clean look and feel you now have. OpenOffice is great--it reads and writes MS Office files, making it easy to move between my Linux computer at home and the Windows one my employer insists I use.

I'm in the group that just bought the CDROMs--I didn't want the download problems that many are having. It installed the first time and has fun flawlessly ever since. That was an easy $39!

Put the disks in and install it. From what I've seen in these threads, nobody is on the fence post--people either love it or they hate it. See which group you're in.

Im still kickin the dirt and spitin but I supose its ok it seems faster on my low budget P/C my mouse centering problem (Integrated Trident video) is now fixed I missed GNorpm so I installed from a 7.3 so its back :0) i give it a 6 out of 10 I really loved 7.3 but you have to roll with the changes

I'm disapointed with redhat 8. My cheap generic soundcard which was configured perfectly (automatically) under 7.3 was not detected, the screensavers don't work, i've not been able to configure my printer, and bluecurve is terrible in my opinion. Thank god you can change it.

I read somewhere that you should always wait for a x.1 release so all the bugs are worked out. Should have listened. . .

I love It
 

I Love redhat 8.0.

Its the easiest install ever. I love the fonts and the overall look and feel. Everything works first time.
I have been dabbling in Redhat since version 5.2, and have considered deploying it as a desktop OS in our Company many times in the past (We already Use Linux servers, but that's a completely different thing) . However, I have always felt that it was not quite ready until now. Redhat 8.0 is very close to what I would consider useable by the average employees where I work.

A couple of things bugged me, however. What has happened to pico + pine ? And why is the terminal button taken off the taskbar by default ? And why do you get so many games when you choose 'Workstation' install. Anyway, these are very minor complaints. Also, if you install RH8.0 on an existing Win XP system, it will trash your MBR, and WinXP won't be able to boot.

I Think Bluecurve is a great. Having Zillions of Desktop Managers and Window Managers to choose from is confusing for many prospective Linux Users. No doubt it upsets many of the KDE or Gnome purists out there, but it may be just what is needed to attract more people to Linux, and that's a good thing.

Just my $0.02 worth ..

I read an amusing quote from one of the designers of Bluecurve. I don't remember where I saw it so I'm paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of:

"If you default to KDE the Gnome people are pissed off, if you default to Gnome the KDE people are pissed off, so we combined the two and pissed everybody off"

Not true. I just installed RH 8 dual boot with my XP pro, and they both work just fine. :D