Red Hat's Bluecurve (was: Red Hat 8.0 is 'official')

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, at 7:54pm, steveo at syslang.net wrote:
> Guys ...

  First off: Could you please trim quoted text before posting?  You quoted
my *entire message* in your reply, even though you really were not even
replying to my message's subject matter at all.  :)

> I just did an upgrade of my system here at home to 8.0 and boy do I regret
> it. Absolutely nothing works and I have no idea why.

  Well, as a matter of policy, I avoid putting major new software releases
into production without a fair bit of testing first.  That goes doubly-so
for Red Hat, who as a rule need a few months to sort out the bugs in their
major releases.  :-/

> My iptables firewall is no longer functional 

  Any idea why not?  IPTABLES should not have changed.

> I tried to build a kernel and I'm getting syntax errors as well as a ton
> of new warnings associated with the new gcc ...

  The Linux kernel does a lot of funky things.  These range from workarounds
for quirks and bugs in particular releases of GCC, to things that should
never have worked in the first place.  In its defense, something as large
and low-level as the Linux kernel will almost certainly have to do some of
that, but it does mean that kernels tend to have very specific requirements
for the compilers they work with.

  Combine that with the fact that one of the major goals in the GCC 3.x
series is to improve error checking.  This has caused a lot of software that
compiled "just fine" with older versions of GCC to stop working with GCC 3.x
and later, because the new GCC catches bugs that the older versions let by.

  The practical upshot is, when you upgrade to a new release of GCC, chances
are many things will break.  Red Hat has done a *huge* amount of work to fix
a number of breakages in the Linux kernel, but it often takes awhile for
those fixes to filter back to the mainline Linus kernel.

> And the Bluecurve thing? I'm having a hard time trying to figure out just
> how dumb you have to be to like it. Push the browser button and you get
> mozilla, but there's nothing to tell you that you'd get mozilla if you
> push it. :-(

  I understand that this is intentional.  Red Hat is trying to abstract the
actual programs out of their UI.  The average corporate user probably thinks
the Internet is powered by a big blue 'e'.  They would have zero chance of
recognizing a red dinosaur head as a web browser.  Again, Red Hat's target
market is corporate IT -- you can expect to see more and more of this from
them.  If you, like many, dislike this direction, I would advise you to
switch distributions.  I keep hearing good things about SuSE and Mandrake.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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