Red Hat Linux 7.2 review

by , 31 October, 2001

I installed Red Hat Linux 7.2 today. On Halloween. And no ordinary Halloween either, because tonight is also a full-moon.

Naturally, for the first install I went for everything on the two installation CDs. That's 1,107 packages, totalling 2,882Mb. (And no, that's not a typo.)

The Graphical Installer

The first obvious thing I wanted to examine with a fine-tooth comb was the graphical installer. (After an initial look-see I always go with the text installer because it gets the job done quicker, but some prefer the graphical installer, and it's important for beginners.)

So what do I think? Most nice. A more modern, more professional look, the default option of the great-looking Grub as bootloader, and a superb new automatic partitioning option, makes the installer, Anaconda, something to behold. The Microsoft Windows installers look positively boring and featureless compared with this sumptuous contender.

But it wouldn't be a decent review without some decent criticism so here goes:

Whilst the packages install, you're treated to blatent Red Hat advertising. Which is fine. Something... anything, whilst you eagerly await install completion, is welcome. But instead of the previous red and black text on a white background there's now an, "in your face", block red and black background and size 50 fonts. Come on guys, a little subtlety, please!

Also for some strange reason Red Hat has decided to keep progress bars with a one pixel white border surrounding it, but a two pixel border at the bottom. It's petty of me to mention it, but with the installer coming ever near perfection, I can't help but feel no one's got round to fixing it.

GNOME

Great looking, but what have the GNOME developers done to GNOME! Everything you've come to like about this desktop environment has either been changed or killed off. And not for the better I can tell you. Back when I run Mandrake 8.0 for a spell on my 128Mb AMD K6-2 300 I was completely put off GNOME because Nautilus (I assume) made it crawl at a shambolic pace. Prior to that I was a devout GNOME advocate, but was as good as forced to convert to KDE. And since then I haven't looked back.

KDE

From the mouths of South Park children, "Dude, this is totally sweet." KDE's been upgraded from Red Hat 7.1's 2.1.1 to 2.2.10. Beginning with the new 'Desktop Settings Wizard', KDE's a joy to use, and eye candy abundant. If your system can handle it, and even if it can't, you simply must activate the anti-aliased fonts. Web sites have never looked so good as they do in Konqueror, the now king of all browsers on any operating system, in my humble opinion, with it's anti-aliased fonts, great looking forms, and exceptional rendering. KMail, updated from 1.2 to 1.3.1, again as with everything in KDE, looks fantastic with the anti-aliased fonts, and has many new features, including an improved address book and better filtering. Also KOffice has been updated from 1.0 to 1.1.

Applications

Most applications have had a bit of an upgrade, with things like Netscape Communicator going from 4.76 to 4.78, Mozilla making a big leap from 0.7 to 0.9.2.1, Glade going from 0.5.9 to 0.6.2, Pan from 0.9.5 to 0.9.7, and XMMS from 1.2.4 to 1.2.5. Non-movers include The GIMP, and xpdf. Thankfully the kernel has made a significant jump, from 2.4.2-2 to 2.4.7-10, fixing too many bugs and security holes to bear thinking about.

Conclusion

A point one increase in version numbers is clearly a sign much from Red Hat is yet to come. A jump from 7.1 to 7.2 may not sound like much but believe me, it is. With its superior default ext3 journaling filesystem instead of its previous ext2, its best ever installer, plenty of upgrades and a few newcomers, the new Grub bootloader, and improved USB support thanks to the 2.4.7 kernel, Red Hat 7.2 comes recommended.

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