[TriLUG] A published review of the latest ver. of Red Hat's distribution--from lockergnome' Penguin Shell newsletter

[al johson]

I'm getting a bit antsy, waiting for the review Zaurus. Aside from wanting
to put it through its paces, I'm running a week behind the expected date to
begin the review in Penguin Shell. Fortunately, the request for reader Red
Hat reviews produced a bounty of email. Some was very positive, some was
something less. This week, I'll feature two of these reviews - written by
Penguin Shell readers - to provide a rounded view of the latest release from
North Carolina.
Today's review is provided by reader Frank Merenda. Frank's a Java developer
with an interesting set of needs and expectations for Red Hat 9. He's also
posted further details on his blog. The entry specifically addresses
updating the kernel for java development.

Now, I'll get out of the way and let Frank share his experience with Red Hat
9.


A quick background, I've been running Red Hat 9 since the second day it was
available. I use it all day at work as a Java developer, so I push the
machine hard, running a database, app server (JBoss), IDE, compiler and
other random nonsense all at the same time.
The first thing I noticed is that the fonts are really incredible.
Everything looks great. Mozilla is version 1.2.1, not version 1.3, so I
updated that immediately. My laptop (IBM Thinkpad A31) had everything
configured correctly right out of the box. The new version of XFree86 also
has several improved drivers, including the one for my chipset (Radeon
7500). I updated my machine from Red Hat 8.0, and two other co-workers also
did the update. All the updates ran perfectly. I also have installed Red Hat
9 on two other machines cleanly, and they also installed perfectly. I
suggest that everyone also installs apt-get for Red Hat 9 (here) as there
are already several updates available. The other option is to use up2date,
which also works really well.

The new threading model works well for non-java applications. Since I do
java development all day, I had to use the fixes listed on the release notes
(here). They did not work, and I tried every combination I could, but my
machine still thrashed badly while running my normal development stuff. So I
had to download the latest stable kernel (2.4.20), recompile and install it.
After that, everything worked perfectly again, and my machine is back to
it's former speedy self. :) All the developers here are now installing the
standard kernel as a part of the normal install/upgrade to Red Hat 9.

On a related note, I am going to be subscribing to the Red Hat network, as
well as purchase the retail version of Red Hat 9 (from Red Hat directly) to
support the company. I really value their distribution, and really enjoy
working on my system. It's up to individual users if they are going to
support the corporation or not, but everyone here where I work that uses Red
Hat does, in fact, support the company momentarily, even though it is
completely optional. I'd much rather pay the $30 for the Red Hat
distribution than be locked into a different operating system that does not
fit my needs nearly as well as GNU/Linux does. And I personally prefer the
Red Hat and Mandrake distributions, but, of course, this is the choice of
the individual users.

I hope this mini-review helped out! Thanks for the penguin shell, and keep
up the great work!


Thanks, Frank.
I'll see you here on Thursday with part two of the reader Red Hat reviews.


See You at Gnomedex,
Tony Steidler-Dennison
==========
Tony is the editor of the Lockergnome Penguin Shell newsletter. They don't
mind being quoted because they actually have links you can click to email
articles to other individuals.---Al Johnson.