Red Hat 9.0 ("Shrike") First Impressions
Well, a cow-orker is expressing an interest in Linux.
He's got precisely no experience in UNIX-type operating systems, so we need a system that's going to go from zero to hero with the least amount of pain.
So I thought "Red Hat's the way to go" for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he's heard of it. Brand familiarity is important-ish when you're trying to advocate something. Two, it's a superslick installer. We need to get that out of the way and get on with the business of Linux.
OK, so I download the three ISO images from [link|http://www.mirror.ac.uk|http://www.mirror.ac.uk] (pulling a steady 220KB a second - *gloat*) and burned me some disks.
I've just vaped Windows XP on my home machine and claimed the space on the Big Fast Disk for Debian, so that's freed up a 10G disk.
polonius, my home desktop, is an Athlon 1800XP+ on a Gigabyte 7ZXE mobo, 512MB RAM, VIA Apollo Pro chipset, Creative Labs SBLive!, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200, 3Com 3c05B NIC. In other words, there's precisely NO unusual hardware in there.
This box has successfully taken installs of Debian, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 with no drama.
OK, so we boot off the first CD. We whack <RETURN> for a graphical installation.
Choose language and keyboard, and then we come to the disk partitioning.
Now, I don't want to let the installer do it automatically because I've got a precious Debian installation on /dev/hda - however, I can zap the contents of /dev/hdb, so I choose the Disk Druid method.
I scroll down the list of partitions and select /dev/hdb1 (intending to delete it) and note how it's nice that when you select a partition in the list, it's highlighted in the graphical representation above. A good little bit of interface design, there, that's probably stopped much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I double-click it, delete it, and return to the main interface. And wait. And wait. And wait.
I kill the whole shooting match and start over. This is safe, because Disk Druid doesn't commit your changes until you click "Next", at which point it goes off deleting partitions and making filesystems.
Well, that's the theory.
I went around this loop a couple of times, only to have the graphical installer hang on me every time I performed an operation.
At this point, I abandoned all hope of using the graphical installer and used the text one - which is the old familiar interface that's essentially unchanged since Red Hat 5.2 ("Apollo"). It's simple, it's basic, and it works.
I chose a "Workstation" installation, which gets you your desktop plus a pile of admin tools. I suspect the "Desktop" installation is a tiny bit bare for the likes of me.
OK, first boot [aside: there was some jiggery pokery here with bootloaders that I shan't bore you with, because most people don't dual-boot two flavours of Linux] and everything's working. There's a nice "first run" wizard that walks you through setting up a regular user, registering with and performing your first Red Hat Update, etc. All my hardware had been detected and worked.
One point that I was impressed with in the installation was the use of plain English explanations, button labels, and icon captions. At any point during the graphical installation you can click a button and read the release notes. Good idea.
RHU worked *really well*. I was surprised, as a common complaint is that the servers are either inaccessible or really slow. I maxed out my pipe as it downloaded about 40MB of update packages.
OK, The very nice GDM screen gives way to a very nice GNOME2 splash screen gives way to a very nice GNOME desktop. All the graphical polish that debuted with RH8 is here in RH9 in spades. Bluecurve has had a slight remix, the title bars being slightly shinier than in previous incarnations. It's still unmistakeably Red Hat Linux looking at you, though.
The application set is reasonable - OpenOffice.org installed by default, Evolution is the default mail client, Mozilla the default web browser - although Galeon is also present.
I like the menu - for each submenu, it has the front-running applications and then a "More <foo> applications" submenu. This reduces clutter.
There's a little accessory that runs on your panel and tells you when there are "criticial updates".
XFree86 4.3 is used, which means nice colourful cursors and the ability to change desktop resolution on the fly. The display prefs dialog is excellent - you pick your resolution and colour depth and refresh rate, and bingo. It Just Works. A functional fontconfig setup meant that I was able to download the Vera fonts, copy the local.conf to /etc/fonts, dump the fonts into ~/.fonts, and they were instantly there.
Which leads me nicely to the next point. Evolution and GAIM are the GTK1.2 editions. Now, Evolution 1.3, which is ported to GTK2 and takes full advantage of fontconfig, is a beta product. GAIM 0.60, however, is not. I would have liked to have seen the initial application set of RH9 be fully fontconfig enabled - and that means GTK2 or QT3.
There's a bunch of nice tools for diddling with your system settings, adding and removing software (although, for one coming from Debian, the selection of software available was tragically small). Red Hat have done a lot to integrate it all together.
This is an ideal desktop operating system for someone coming from Windows.
It's also an ideal desktop operating system for someone who doesn't know computers at all.
It's incredibly claustrophobic. It's alien. I downloaded the nVidia drivers from [link|http://www.nvidia.com|http://www.nvidia.com] and installed them. Restarting GDM, I spent about five minutes cursing about "stupid bloody /etc/rc.d/init.d/blah bollocks" when I remembered "telinit 3 && telinit 5". There's no "apt-get" tool. I can't find out how to get the "Add/remove software" tool to look at an internet source, rather than the CDs. The graphical installer hangs on my machine.
In short, it's still Red Hat Linux.
If you'd never seen any Debian-based distribution, you'd be impressed. For sheer desktop polish, it's head and shoulders above everything else. Mandrake tries too hard. SuSE is a bit dour. Red Hat has visual class.
What this thing would look like a year down the line, I don't care to guess. The fact remains that for an experienced user, Debian Linux is the PC operating system of choice, and that's the end of that.
