Fun with RH 8

[Randy Edwards]

    I recently decided it's time to check out the competition and get up to 
speed on RH and Gnome, so I downloaded and installed RH 8 on a laptop and am 
convinced I'll try to use that as my primary laptop for a month or so.

    Overall, I'm impressed by RH 8.  I like their install better than Mandrake 
9's -- it just seems more logical and better laid out.  I did run into a SNAFU 
with my Dell laptop -- RH didn't detect the display and X would load, and 
everything seemed normal; but I discovered that clicking on Next on the "type 
of install" (workstation, server, etc.) screen wouldn't work right.  The 
screen looked fine but it wouldn't work until I put the system into 1024x768 
mode.  That was an odd one that took me quite a few reboots to figure out.

    The Blue-whatever theme seems nice, though for the life of me I don't know 
why RH abandoned Mozilla and OpenOffice's default icons.  That's just dumb.  I 
understand the logic of wanting generic icons, but com'on, Mozilla and 
OpenOffice are "brands" that are just as important to the free software 
movement as RH is.  The icons RH used in their place are non-standard and just 
plain looking.

    I did like the menu's icons -- they're XP looking enough to seem "new" but 
colorful and defined enough to be practical (though let's face it: the "Trash" 
icon looks like a Dixie cup and reminds me I've got to brush my teeth:-).  The 
desktop item that's humorous is the layout of Gnome's menus -- the guys who 
thought that up were smoking something really strong!  Overall, however, the 
desktop is nice and gives a polished feel.

    One thing that baffles me is the way the system configuration is spread 
out over 397 different dialogs.  I'm trying to resist just jumping to a shell 
(which isn't on the main menu!:-( and going to /etc.  So I'm playing with all 
these dialogs to configure NFS and other things.  Good grief, the layout is 
simply bizarre.  KDE's style of having everything in the Control Center, 
linuxconf's layout, or even Windows' layout seems logical by comparison.  To 
me, the admin/config dialogs, like the entire menu layout, need to be ordered 
in some logical fashion in a really bad way.

    And speaking of linuxconf, it didn't install by default, but I didn't see 
it on the CDs either -- is it still around or has it been dropped?

    One thing I do like about Bluewave (or whatever it's called) is that the 
window widgets are a decent size.  RH 7.x's default Gnome widgets were so tiny 
that I had to spend way too much concentration maneuvering my mouse to make 
sure it was on top of the widget.  That's one minor -- but nice -- 
improvement.  I see that as RH 8's main strength: lots of little but common 
sense improvements.  I was impressed by that, less so by what I saw in Gnome. 
  It's been a while since I've used Gnome, and I was surprised it hasn't 
matured more and it seems rough in comparison to KDE.

    But an important question: Under KDE (I'm trying not to use RH 8's KDE so 
I can surprise myself with it in a few weeks) I use the "laptop" widget set. 
This puts the "X" on the upper lefthand corner of the window and leaves the 
maximize/minimize widgets on the righthand side.  This is just the way GUI 
computers ought to be!  How anyone can aim at the maximize button and not hit 
the "X" is beyond me...  So the question is, how/where can I get a widget set 
or theme for Gnome that will accomplish this critical computing requirement?

-- 
  Regards, | There's no such thing as "Intellectual 'Property'".  All ideas
  .        | are owned by the public and are in the public domain.  The
  Randy    | creator of an idea is granted a temporary monopoly called a
           | copyright (or a patent) before the idea returns to the public.