RedHat 8.1 RC2 Comments

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Ok, rolled the RH 8.1RC2 install last night, started working with it this morning.

It's not abysmal, but there are some definite gripes.  This feedback should be
going to RedHat's bugzilla address if I had it, but for now I thought I'd share
it with you.

1) The distinction between "Desktop" and "Workstation" is inadequate for a
reasonable person new to this install to choose.  I think I wanted workstation,
I took desktop with some add-ins.

2) The "add user" script failed on startup.  No clue why, I was able to add a
user later.

3) The (GUI) system configuration tools are not arranged in a logical order yet.
 This was a major gripe on 8.0, and was supposed to be better.  It's still a
matter of exploring three or four different paths and trying to guess where
things might logically be.

3a) This inclues the "Control Center" in the "Preferences" folder, which
launches another instance of the "Preferences" folder.

4) Related to this, although Samba-Client was installed, and although there are
prominent tools all over the place to configure Samba-based services, Samba was
not installed, hence no way to configure or start Samba (from the GUI).

4a) I thought "This is what Jason Clinton was talking about": there's a very
prominent "authentication" icon that allows you to choose SMB/Windows
authentication as well as NMB and others.  However, since as stated above Samba
wasn't installed or started, it didn't work.  This feature should check for a
working, started SMBD configuration before proceeding.  That's supposed to be a
part of what "wizards" do, check for necessary precursors.

4b) Ditto SMB printers, although you at least get an error message.

5) A similar problem: there is a "login photo chooser", which allows you to
chose an icon for your ID in the GDM login page.  However, this complains that
this feature is not enabled in the GDM Control Center - a utility that is
nowhere to be found.

6) The package manager does not offer any view except by category, with the
option to choose "Details" on any category.  In other words, if you want to know
if Samba or Swat are installed, you have to guess what category they're supposed
to be in.  Having been through the categories on installation, I knew that I
hadn't found either.  

(I solved this by going to a machine with a working Swat setup and doing rpm -qa
| grep swat, then back to the workstation and doing up2date samba-swat.  This
got the Samba package installed too.)

7) General Gripe: I don't know if this is Gnome or RedHat, but you can't tell if
you've actually launched an icon or not when you think you've clicked or
double-clicked it.  There's no change in the cursor or anything to let you know
it's loading, if it doesn't thrash the disk you have no clue.  This is a place
to borrow from Windows: always indicate if something is happening.  Don't assume
that the system you're running on is so fast that it will be obvious.  (This is
likely the result of allowing developers to have state-of-the-art hardware for
testing, instead of relegating them to 64MByte PII 400's with 15" screens.)

That's all I have time to explore this morning.  Things do feel a little crisper
and more efficient, although some programs still feel like they're running on
TCP/IP via carrier pigeon.

---------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through tarcanfel's horde/imp system