[ale] RH8.0: first impressions

[Joe]

Transam <transam at verysecurelinux.com> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 05:28:29PM -0700, Joe wrote:
> > Got the ISOs, burnt them, blew Slack 8.1 off of my laptop and fired up the
> > Anaconda installer.
> 
> Why not repartition so that you can have both, each in a separate partition?

Teeny, tiny disk (4G). I've ordered a 20G so I can install multiple
distros and evaluate them. (My first Linux install was on a 120MB drive,
which seemed bloody enormous at the time... But that was before there
were "distributions".)

Essentially what I'm doing at the moment is cruising through a bunch
of free OS offerings and asking the question, "How long does it take
to get this OS set up and working the way I want it?" (in a
worsktation/desktop configuration). I've been happy with Slackware for
a long time, but I have pretty much ignored everything else, so I want
to do a flyover of the larger Linux/open-source OS scene.  Among other
things, I'm looking for something to recommend to newbies. (I know
you all have your opinions; I want to form my own :-)

> I'm very happy with Slackware 8.1 on my ThinkPad.  Works great, blindingly
> fast, no crashes.

Likewise here. (And I still rely on Slack for the important stuff - fileserver,
DNS, etc, on my server boxen.)

> > The good:
> 
> > - Very simple install.
> > - Very nice looking screens all over the place.
> > - Detected and set up the video, display, mouse, and kbd correctly, first try.
> 
> And this was different than Slackware 8.1 how?  All of this was trivial for
> me (except X).

The entire RH8.0 install happens in side of an X-looking graphical
environment. I do like the Slack curses-based installer, which is easy
to use and lets you make the choices you want. But there's no denying
that the RH8 installer is prettier, and dead simple - it makes all the
complicated decisions for you :-) It also made setting up X far easier
than I've ever seen before. In fact, I don't think I had to do fire a
single neuron of my own in order to configure X properly; it "just
worked".

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka
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