Re: RedHat 8

[Frank Roberts - SOTL <sotl155360@earthlink.net>]

On Wednesday 23 October 2002 16:31, Paul Krause wrote:
> 4 for and 1 against. You really slammed it. Can I inquire as to why you
>  like suse?
 
Sorry but being pro Suse was not the intended meaning. In fact that is the 
very inverse of intent.

For Suse
The best set of programs
Against Suse 
The most screwed up configuration program possible.
As I said when I got my first Suse distribution back in the 5.3 days "It is a 
very good European distribution - - - and it should stay in Europe." Major 
point to this is I could not then configure ppp correctly. Well I acquired 
Suse 8.1 and guess what I still can not configure the modem correctly. Also 
it seems that they left kppp out and used some of their weird setup programs 
again. 
Another point setting up my scanner on Suse is so complicated that the whole 
linux club gave up in total complete flustration. By comarsion settion it up 
on RH is a 2 minute command line exercise if you know what you are doing; I 
do not.

For Mandrake 7
I like it but the versions I had were 2 distributions behind times. I got them 
free at our linux club to test.
It seems like a very nice distribution but at the time I thought RH was headed 
in the right direction - that was when RH came out with 7.2.
It looks loke this is where I am heades unless RH strightens itself out. Since 
none of the distributions bring anything major program improvements to the 
part at this time this decision will probable be at least a year into the 
future meaning after the 2.5 core, KDE 3.1 etc.

Why do I trash RH 8.0 so much? 
Well it is because of my expectations.
I expected 8.0 to simply correct the bad parts of RH 7.3 which I think is 
approaching a very decent distribution. 
I did not expect RH to go bonkers and trash KDE.
In general I like the KDE GUI on which I utilize what I feel is the best 
selection of KDE and the Gnome programs.

By correct I mean the following.
Correct the printer problems. When the printer works it it works great in B&W 
but not color. It is a color HP Deskjet. But! If for some reason you have a 
bad print file it will spit out reams of paper and is impossible to reset 
from the GUI. You must go to command line and remember the correct commands.

There is a major set up problems with my HP 6100 scanners. Not a clue what the 
problem all I know is it is a scanner recognition problem. The scanner is an 
HP 6100. RH says it is an HP 2464 or some such.

There is setup problems with XCDRoast. I have this one working.
 
As for the people who like RH I am willing to bet that they also like the 
Gnome GUI.

On this I am willing to make a guess that the real problem is the licensing 
agreement KDE uses and the fact that American industry is so fed up with MS 
and their licensing agreements that RH is removing all vestages of 
commercialization from RH as fast as possible. That being said I find it 
strange that RH used Mozelle which is 95% Netscape which is owned now by AOL. 
I know about the change in licensing for Mozelle but there are probable a 
number of court cases there if push comes to shove. What I suspect the 
situation there is that the equivalent browser, email, et in Gnome are not up 
to Mozelle level yet. If that is true then one should suspect that when they 
are at that level Mozelle will depart. I note this in particular because 
Netscape in my MS box has a nasty habit of reporting in to Net Central 
Command (now part of AOL). Point is I utterly hate programs that utilizes 
large amounts of band width to down load a bunch of commercial crap and which 
one has the suspicion that is being used as a Trojan Horse to scan and report 
which programs are legally on a computer. 

How does this interlate with  RH 8.0?
Well I think it is all related by attitudes on licensing agreements and that 
that attitude is what the real problem with RH 8.0 distribution really is.

Thanks
Frank




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