so, i installed redhat 6.0 tonight on a laptop for a cow-orker, and have to say i'm fairly impressed. the install hit a fairly major snafu but i'm not convinced i got the right bootdisks, so i won't blame anyone other than me---but be sure you have a serviceable rescue floppy (the one in the rh6 tree wouldnt boot on this machine) handy in case lilo self destructs on you as well--something funky went down during bootloader install. as someone who has never used gnome, it's pretty cool and complete..and E is pretty polished here...slow on a p233 but thats mostly the fault of the video chipset (neomagic) as i hear it. E/gnome start up by default and are pretty slick...the default menus are reasonable and complete and changing your window manager is quite a snap... i did have to poke at the docs to discover "switchdesk" which allows you to bounce between kde/gnome/anotherlevel, and checked out kde...seems functional and even kinda keen, but wow its a wee bit ugly (entirely subjectively speaking, i had no usage problems tho!) but maybe changing the look/feel like i did with gnome would help that...probably in fact. several annoying bugs in rh5.2+updates were fixed, including better working Xconfigurator/sndconfig/netcfg, a fontserver is running by default, and you can setup nis during the install. the installed "mosteverything" OS (same as i do with 5.2--remove most of the docs, leave everything else) is huge--~950M---a lot of that is gnome/kde which are both setup and included (yay rh for including kde after troll agreed to change qt's license), but also some new packages...X11amp/mpg123 occur to me as obvious examples, E, an actual recent version of AS (unfortunately the gnome-compliant patches were days too late to make this release so the docs dont mention it as a gnome-capable option as well as it not being as shipped--i bet we see an update for it tho), and glibc2.1 (and of course a 2.2 kernel---2.2.5 and it's sweet smooth sailing) an interesting feature which i've yet to poke at is a large 5.2-compat suite...libraries, and compilers. apparently glibc2.1 introduces some compatibility issues...the 5.2compat stuff is all /usr/bin/i386-glibc20-linux-gcc and such. this will probably be a win on work machines when we upgrade if there are really severe compat problems with older binaries (which again i've yet to test heavily...some rpm's built under 5.x installed ok and the bins work fine...but thats hardly exhaustive testing). at any rate, this install is MUCHO more functional (== less broken for a major version change...altho except for X it doesn't feel so much like a major rev as 4.2->5.0 did...i guess the kernel rev and glibc2.1 + gnome-by-default warrants it, to some degree) than 5.0 was and i'm overall quite happy with it. i'd definitely recommend it to your newbie friends as it will configure and start itself up in X if you ask it to during the install, and kde/gnome are smooth and copable with for newbies. of course if you have a thing against redhat (which is your prerogative) then you won't like this install much better than the previous ones-- it's still linuxconf based and relies heavily on mastery of rpm to be an effective sysadmin. but hey, i like it. so go suck on that =) and, btw, josef...gnome 1.0.4, E .15.5 and steady memory usage over the 4 hours i was heavily using it and tweaking it. sure, X was 25M, but it was 25M from the get-go. feels almost like irix (where X is usually the biggest process...sometimes using up to 100M [30M real mem]...) enlightenment+gnome is hungry. (cpu and ram). joe bob sez check it out. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Send administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
