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Original post by Null and Void
I downloaded it from the BitTorrent link they posted on Slashdot when it was released. I haven''t installed it yet though. I''ll give it a try on a spare HDD I have sitting on my desk after I finish playing with the new NVidia drivers (so far: 2D performance is still worse than the 3xxx series, but random 2D corruption seems to have been fixed, and there are lots of new extensions to play with).

Update:
Okay, I''ve installed Red Hat 9 now (I''m writing this in Red Hat 9). The install process wouldn''t let me use the graphical mode since (as it kind-of explained) I was installing from my HDD. Once the files were copied the first boot configuration was graphical though. The installer detected all of my hardware just fine (monitor, video card, sound card, CD-R, network, USB, mouse, et cetera).

Overall, it looks like they''ve changed very little since 8.0 (I didn''t try 8.1), in the default Gnome realm at least. They upgraded a lot of packages, tweaked BlueCurve''s colors and icons a small amount (Qt applications looks a little less BlueCurve-like for some reason; they removed some of the KDE changes some people were complaining about too), and modified their menu organization, and that''s about all I notice immediately. That said, there''s very little that I would have wanted them to change anyway (e.g., their default PDF viewer bothers me).

I''ve read there''s a lot of nice little lower-level administration changes in 9, but I don''t really use Red Hat much (I like Debian far too much). Put simply: I like it, but if you didn''t like 8.x there''s very little to make you like 9, but there''s a chance.



[edited by - Null and Void on April 2, 2003 7:01:49 PM]

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Didn''t you see the shadow around your mouse cursor? They added alot of eye candy like that. They also use Anti-Aliassed fonts as a default now. They modified the way Nautilus and Konqueror react to certain things like typing fonts:// in a Konqueror window sends you to the fonts directory, samba:// takes you to your samba mounts and some little things like that. Those are the main changes that they did. Or at least, those were the one discussed at the last LUG meeting I assisted last thursday. We didn''t mess around profusely with it but those were the things we saw...

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[Cyberdrek | the last true sorcerer | Spirit Mage - mutedfaith.com][ Administrator TheLinuxForum.tk]

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Original post by Cyberdrek
Didn''t you see the shadow around your mouse cursor?

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Yes, I did notice them taking advantage of the new mouse cursor theming in XFree 4.3, but forgot to mention it .

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Original post by Cyberdrek
They also use Anti-Aliassed fonts as a default now.

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I thought they used them as a default before too? I can''t really remember though .

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Original post by Cyberdrek
They modified the way Nautilus and Konqueror react to certain things like typing fonts:// in a Konqueror window sends you to the fonts directory, samba:// takes you to your samba mounts and some little things like that.

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In Nautilus, at least, fonts:// and smb:// already did that with the appropriate VFS plug-ins (like I have it setup in Debian); but, again, I can''t remember if Red Hat 8.x did that, so maybe it counts as a new thing . I''m not sure how exactly Konqueror goes about it normally, or in Red Hat, since I didn''t give their KDE setup a try.

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Original post by cyanide
thank you Mr. Null and Void :-) that was a big and nice review indeed.. I guess i can now gather enough motivation to give it a go on my home PC atleast.. I've never used APT but it does sound interesting. I was searching for the redhat addon you mentioned and guess I need to start downloading the APT-RPM to get the feel of it too

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Just a thought from someone who's tried apt-rpm already, it's good but it's far less powerfull than the real Debian apt-get( for now at least ). Don't get me wrong, it does the job perfectly but still needs more work. Oh and if you want to try something nice, once you have apt-rpm installed, apt-rpm install synaptic.
This will download and install a neat package manager.

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[Cyberdrek | the last true sorcerer | Spirit Mage - mutedfaith.com][ Administrator TheLinuxForum.tk]

[edited by - cyberdrek on April 14, 2003 4:08:27 PM]

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Original post by Null and Void
Yes, I did notice them taking advantage of the new mouse cursor theming in XFree 4.3, but forgot to mention it .

I thought they used them as a default before too? I can't really remember though .

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One thing I can tell you is that I too don't personally like the way it works. I also hate that Bluecurve theme( personal opinion ) but that can be changed, overall, it acts roughly the same as version 7.3 which runs my servers( +/- 20 ) at work. But with a bit more eye candy which can be nice or bad depending on the user's prefs. I don't like too much fluff myself but that's how it goes.

As for konqueror, I don't think it handled the fonts:// and samba:// thing before. I'm not sure either but that's been pointed out by one of the presenter at the last LUG meeting I assisted. That's why I brought it up.

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[Cyberdrek | the last true sorcerer | Spirit Mage - mutedfaith.com][ Administrator TheLinuxForum.tk]

[edited by - cyberdrek on April 14, 2003 3:33:14 PM]

Im surprised to see people prefering Mandrake 9.1 over Redhat 9. I first installed Mandrake 9.1 recently. The install was really good, but it quickly went downhill from there. The font rendering were generally horrible compared to Redhat 8. The font wizard that supposedly would import my windows fonts didnt work(it claimed it had done its job, but it lied! . Beside i really missed the Bluecurve theme, which i find excellent(pleasent to look at without being flashy and bloated).
What finally broke the camels back(or however the saying goes was that i couldnt get the GTK version of Eclipse to run, and the Motif version acted weird. So i gave up and installed Redhat 9, which i found very pleasent and professional, no font problems(no font wizard either, but manual install is quite easy), no problems running my programs, and i could download nvidia drivers right away.

I see people mentioning Gentoo, which i have on my laptop. I think its a brilliant distro, but it does require alot of time to install and setup.