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

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Sat, 2002-10-05 at 19:54, steveo at syslang.net wrote:

[snip]

> Guys, 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.

  Absolutely nothing?  Could you elaborate a bit?  I upgraded my desktop
and have very few problems.  In fact, I'll list them here, keeping in
mind that I'm only listing the problems, not the good stuff about 8.0. 
Overall, I've got to say that this the best dot-oh release from Red
Hat.  It even rivals .2 or .3 releases.

> I consider 
> myself to be pretty good at this too. So after 3 hours of fucking around, 
> I gave up and went for a reload. It sort of works now in a very crippled 
> state. My iptables firewall is no longer functional and I have a band-aid 
> one set up using their lokkit util. 

  Again, I've got to wonder what you're doing.  My relatively non-trival
iptables worked without a single change.

> 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; so bad that I can barely figure out what's going on.

  Um, I've been building kernels since I upgraded.  I've had one problem
(that only has to do with building kernel *rpms* and for which I have a
workaround) and have no such problems.  Details please, maybe someone on
this list can help.

> And the 
> Bluecurve thing? I'm having a hard time trying to figure out just how dumb 
> you have to be to like it.

  Here, I'm afraid, I somewhat agree.  The new window manager for Gnome
2.0, metacity, is basically crippling for me.  But it wasn't too much
effort to switch back to sawfish (still included in 8.0) and pick a
theme that suites my taste better (there aren't that many --
http://themes.freshmeat.net shows 17 for gtk+2 and over 400 for gtk+ --
but that's more a Gnome 2.0 issue than a Red Hat 8.0 specific issue).
  HOWEVER...keep in mind that more dumb people pay for free software
than smart people ;-).

> Push the browser button and you get mozilla, 
> but there's nothing to tell you that you'd get mozilla if you push it. :-(

  And most dumb (and even some smart) users, don't care.  They just want
to browse the net.

> That's all for now. I have to go off and be frantic.

  I also wasn't pleased with the lack of mp3 support.  (I *do* however
thoroughly respect the decision and will migrate completely to ogg
vorbis when I can.)
  I had severe problems with my nasty Intel 440GX based systems that
basically boil don't to the dolts at Intel who refuse to share
programming information for the APIC on this board.  These were on my
two servers, but not my desktop which upgraded flawlessly.  My servers
are each now basically an 8.0 system with a 7.3 errata kernel.  I'm
working on it, but I blame Intel for that one, not Red Hat.
  When upgrading, I think from 7.1 to 7.2 (whenever the bump to Gnome
1.4 took place...I forgot), there was a little druid that popped up that
migrated my gnome setup to the new format.  This time, I had to redo all
my settings, including adding all my launchers to the panel.  Annoying,
yes, but I suspect this to be a generic Gnome 2.0 issue.
  I also changed the icons of evolution, mozilla, and gaim back to the
originals -- just a preference.
  It's now impossible to have the Gnome panel(s) be anything but
always-on-top.  Experiment: add a menu panel on the top of the screen,
launch a gnome-terminal, select View->Full Screen in the gnome-terminal
and now try to minimize it.  You have to delete the menu panel first. 
Ugh!  Again, I think this is a generic Gnome 2.0 issue that will be
fixed in Gnome 2.2.
  Other than that, I really like it.  I like that OpenOffice.org is
included.  The default font looks much cleaner, and is used in almost
all applications.  (Some Gnome 1.x apps have that have yet to be ported
might not use the same font.)  Up arrow now works in bash even when
using vi editing mode (though I recommend removing or renaming
/etc/inputrc as it seems to mess things up -- at least for me.)  All my
hardware works (save the stupid Intel-ism described above).
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets