RedHat 8

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The installation of Red Hat 8 is similar to the previous versions. While Anaconda, the RH installer, was updated to support AA and GTK+ 2 resulting in a more spiffy look, little has been changed to the installer itself. One of the changes is that now you have to click "Advanced" to tell LILO or GRUB to only install themselves to the / partition and not on the MBR (I usually use the BeOS "bootman" bootloader), the option is not right up there as it used to be. Other than that, the installation went very smoothly; it only took less than 30 minutes with my 52-max CD-ROM I have here on this AthlonXP 1600+, 768 MB Ram (KM266 VIA Apollo PRO chipset, Asus GeForce2MX-400 AGP card and on board S3 SavagePRO, Yamaha YMF-754 and VIA VT8233 sound cards, RealTek 8139 onboard NIC). The OS rebooted and I loaded it into text mode, and from there I loaded X-Free.

As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven't seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is "Sans") are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920x1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. I think it should have been part of the font panel under preferences. Anyway, in no time I was up and running with Verdana as my main font on the Gnome2 desktop. I think Verdana and the rest of the web fonts I installed, render very nicely in this distribution (X Server included is 4.2.0)

A nice surprise is OpenOffice.org's looks in this desktop. Red Hat made some good work to make sure that OOo looks good, with full AA support on its menus, even when you try to type something on a document. Too bad that OOo does not recognize the TTF fonts I installed on my ~/.fonts dir, though. Other GTK+ application can't see them either, eg. gedit, while other can (eg. Gnome2 Terminal). This is an incosintency issue and, in my opinion, it should be fixed.

For the package management, Red Hat has created a nice to use "Package Management" application that will let you install/remove software from the RH8 CDs. I couldn't find a way to actually make this manager to see other "sources", for example rpmfind.net, but it is nice when you right-click on an RPM file it will load the "Install Package" application and take care of the installation. I installed a number of RPMs created for Null (there were no dependancy issues), so I don't know how this installer behaves in the case there are dependancy issues. I downloaded an RPM (the "Downloader for X" application) created for RH 7.3, and it also installed and worked perfectly.

you can find a number of apps, FTP clients, KDevelop, Emacs, File-Roller, Gaim, Galeon, Gnumeric, lots of puzzle games, preferences for the http server, NFS, Services, hardware information, X11 resolution/monitor panel, Internet wizard with support for wireless, modems, nics, ADSL, ISDN etc. However, there are other things missing, equally important. I couldn't find a samba configuration tool coming from Red Hat, no visual way to change your sound card from a list, and no visual way to change your monitor's refresh rate or printers.

Also, there is no Java installed. No Macromedia Flash or Real Player either. And that brings me in the multimedia offerings of this distro. Or its lack there of. Red Hat 8 has to be the poorest multimedia-ready distro by default that I ever ran (except Gentoo of course, which comes with virtually nothing by default :). So, there are no movie players on Psyche (except the limited Kaboodle which is not even installed by default). None. No XINE, no VLC, no XMovie, no NoATun, no nothing. Because of the licensing issue of mp3 (which exists for YEARS for the SAME price, but for some reason people seem to think that this is a 'new thing'), Red Hat decided to not include mp3 libraries on their OS. This is their liberty. On another XMMS issue, it refuses to play online playlists, like my favorite one [http://www.digitallyimported.com/mp3/eurodance128k_firewall.pls] (works on Lycoris, doesn't work either on Xandros).

There are good things in Psyche, don't get me wrong. GCC 3.2 rocks; all the binaries are really fast, the system feels fast, and by modifying the services to load on boot, will make your booting even faster (dunno why Red Hat decided to load things like wireless and PCMCIA daemons on this PC though - I don't have any such hardware). The default blue background image is pretty good too. WindowMaker, is the fastest between Gnome2 and KDE 3 and it works great too. The system is very stable too so far, except for the problems I describe later about the graphics driver. The filesystem used is ext3 while the kernel used is 2.4.18 (yes, it would have been nice to get some of 2.4.19's goodies, but hey, Red Hat's kernels are always kinda modified and patched with special patches for stability and they get a long time testing - which is a good thing).

On the downside of things, my mouse was not recognized to have a wheel mouse and after changing its type via the mouse system panel… I am not the only one [https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/limbo-list/2002-September/006806.html] with the problem. It seems that Red Hat does not enable wheel operations for all mice. Mandrake and Lycoris recognized the mouse with no problems though.

First of all, there was no resolution available to pick above 1600x1200. This baby, a high-end SGI Trinitron 24" monitor, I got here can do up to 2048x1440, but I wanted to set it up for the much more "conservative" 1920x1200 at 90 Hz. The X preference panel does not let you pick VESA resolutions except the very standard ones, and to make things even worse, you can't pick the refresh rate you want. I hand-edited the XF86Config file, I double checked the monitor's sync info, and then added the 1920x1200 res to the confing file. Restarted X, and I was indeed at 1920x1200. But it wouldn't go more than 73 Hz, even if both the monitor and this graphics card can do more than 90 Hz for that specific res! I tried everything, I created a modeline via XTiming [http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl], nothing! It wouldn't go more than 73 Hz. I downloaded nVidia's official drivers, and install them successfully (I had 3D and all now). I reloaded X, and again, even nVidia's drivers X wouldn't let the refresh to go up to 73 Hz. To make the long story short, I had to email Andy Ritger …