My opinion on RedHat 8 - 08 Oct 2002, by sorial

I believe I've given RedHat 8 a fair shake now after having it for 2 days. I wouldn't normally say that, but my experience with Linux is such that I think I know what I'm looking for in most cases.

RedHat 8's new "BlueCurve" window manager seems to me to be nothing more than a graphically tweaked version of Sawfish, the wm they used in version 7.3. I fail to see any KDE integration, and surely enough when I look at the package list after install, KDE packages aren't installed. Qt libs are installed however, so I may have to hold out certainty until after I look into the wm a bit more. Addendum: BlueCurve is an attempt at making a static look and feel to multiple window managers, currently Gnome's wm of choice Sawfish, and KDE. While the look and feel is fairly nice, I find myself missing the individuality of each window manager instead of reveling in the same-ness of BlueCurve.

In all, BlueCurve is pretty and handles reasonably well, and will probably be quite simple for newbies to handle, granted they know a thing or two about computers to begin with. Special tools are available to set up networking, sound, desktop variables, and a number of other things useful to those who don't know what files to examine for the real settings.

The bad news about BlueCurve is that it's just as bloated and slow as its Sawfish predecessor (of course that's because it IS Sawfish), or the KDE desktop (it IS KDE). Bloated.. slow.. isn't that why many of us left the Windows world? Anyway, a quick installation of xfce (which I must say made me happy, since their available .rpm installed cleanly with no dependency issues on my workstation-installed Redhat 8 system) and I'm speedy again.

Another item of note is that RedHat 8 doesn't support mp3 format any longer. Its switched completely to ogg vorbis. While this isn't a bad thing, it isn't good that there is no functionality to convert your mp3s to ogg, nor is there any method by which to play your mp3s if you don't care to convert. The fix can be found at xmms.org, where they've pointed users to an mpg123 plugin made for xmms so you can play your mp3s. Another fix, and the one that I used, is to install the real mpg123 (full version) and use it and sox to create wav files that can then be converted to ogg format. I'll include the script I use to do that at the bottom of this article for anyone that's interested. It's *much* faster than using dBpowerAMP in Windows, which is the first mp3->ogg converter I ran across (though dBpowerAMP is quite a nice program, it's just a wee bit slow for me).

There are a few rather neat utilities included with RedHat 8 that I hadn't seen before (though I imagine I would have seen them if I'd been running a more application-rich distro like Mandrake), such as the traceroute program you can find in BlueCurve's application menu. You have to be root to run it, which confused me at first, until I saw the output. It's not a regular traceroute. Try it, it's neat.