[vox-tech] What's in RedHat 8.0

[Bill Broadley]

I just installed redhat-8.0 on a couple machines, most notable
a rather cranky Dell Inspiron 8000.

Under redhat-7.X wireless was painful, APM didn't work, 3d didn't work,
printing sucked (to an HP deskjet 990), I don't think sound worked.

I installed redhat-8.0 today, a shocking number of things "just worked":
* Wireless worked great, only had to click on "managed" instead of ad-hoc
  and it works if I just turn on the machine and login.
* Sound just worked (didn't have to do any config at all)
* 2d required some tweaking of the config file
* 3d "just worked", this dell has a M4 mobility, chromium works at 50 fps or
  so.
* fonts are beautiful, anti-aliasing as well as sub-pixel positioning
* DPI settings allow for changing the size of menu's, icons, window titles
  and the like (very handy)
* global/easy to set font size settings
* Integrated office, so you can literally click on excel, word, even power
  point files.
* Nicely centralized config files, KDE/QT and Gnome/GTK preferences/themes
  etc are centralized.
* RPM seems greatly improved, adding packages now test for generalized
  dependencies.  I.e. printer server could be lprng, or cups, mailserver
  can be sendmail or postfix.  Tools to switch to/from CUPS/postfix and
  similar are provided.
* Gcc-3.2 and it's new c++ standard ABI is a pretty big improvement, porting
  c++ across platforms should be much easier.
* Interactive response seems quite nice, I'm guessing it's some tweaks to
  the IDE interface, or the kernel.
* HP Laserjet 5MP hooked up via parallel "just worked" it notified me
  of the presense of the printer, and it's type (Laserjet 5MP) on boot,
  and printing just worked.
* HP desktop 990 hooked up via USB was noticed on hotplug, I believe
  Zach had to select which driver to use (there are more then one for
  the 990).  Printed out a nice looking color test page
* A compact flash adapter via USB "just worked":
	scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
	  Vendor: SanDisk   Model: ImageMate CF-SD1  Rev: 0100
	  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
	WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
	USB Mass Storage device found at 2
	USB Mass Storage support registered.
	Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
	SCSI device sda: 15680 512-byte hdwr sectors (8 MB)
	sda: Write Protect is off

RH8 is very nice package, doesn't really "look" like what I consider
the average linux box.  Definite shades of OSX in the look/feel, alpha
channel blending etc.  I find the default bluecurve or whatever it's
called a rather nice theme/login window/desktop.

All in all I'd consider it one of the bigger improvements I've seen in
a redhat release, definitely a surprisingly big step towards are user
friendly/consistent desktop, I'm sure OEM's will like redhat's install
then do the locality/timezone/network config stuff on first boot (ala 
windows).	 

-- 
Bill Broadley
Mathematics
UC Davis