Pigs Do Fly After All

Red Hat 8.0 is actually quite reasonable, both in terms of out-of-the-box functionality (it comes with OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla), but it has some stupidly irritating things, like the umpteen slightly different ways of installing fonts that are then detected by different applications.

In other words, a mess. Either way, I confirmed in half an hour that Gnome is simpler and “cleaner” than KDE and that apt continues to work perfectly on Red Hat.

(a random number of hours of sleep after the above and BrunoRodrigues’s comments)

I’ve already hammered a few things (installed my portable pack of TrueType fonts and other knick-knacks), ran apt-get on a couple of essential bits and started getting irritated by the fact that Mozilla and Evolution don’t have (complete) anti-aliasing - because you just need to install the original Mozilla 1.1 to get anti-aliasing on pages - not even at gunpoint, and they continue to have a different look and feel.

That, and the profusion of more or less idiotic cut and paste variants depending on which widget set you’re in, etc. Long live the Mac. But that’s never going to change in Unix.

Yes, yes, I could use the Bleeding Edge versions. I could use Debian and spend the whole weekend in a CAM orgy. But with Red Hat and the heroes who got apt working with RPMs, I have a usable machine to my taste in minutes.

And, believe it or not, with a graphical environment that has moved from “Barely Passing” to “Good” in terms of consistency. BlueCurve is, in fact, very well done.

http://t.deviantart.com/thumb?type=300W&file=large/photography/photomisc/Balls_of_reflection.jpg&radius=5.1&opacity=0.6&xoff=2&yoff=3&color=ffffff&foobar=jpg
Balls of reflection by igal-alexander

The Red Hat 8.0 saga continues. I’m a seriously picky guy about some things - especially usability, something that modern Geeks, despite the gigabytes and gigabytes of ergonomic information (and, it must be said frankly, good taste) generated by the folks at Apple and luminaries like Bruce Tognazzini, continue to ignore.

It’s not just cut and paste, or the way hotkeys are defined, or the six varieties of slightly different drop boxes I encounter opening just three applications. It’s the fact that all of this continues to feel a bit patched up in general.

I, who understand (perhaps unfortunately too much) about Wireless LANs and have already gotten (definitely too) used to configuring things by hand, had zero trouble sticking a wireless card in the laptop, editing one file and having a network in 5 minutes:

rcarmo@localhost rcarmo$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
  DEVICE=eth0
  ONBOOT=yes
  BOOTPROTO=dhcp
  MODE=Managed
  RATE=Auto
  KEY="moof"   # applied creativity
  ESSID=MIMOSA # the milk of champions

Find me a panel to do this in Red Hat 8.0, and I’ll give you a prize. At least PPP now works decently, without requiring palmistry, pacts with the Devil or a pet Geek. At least (believe it or not) this time they got the network card driver right, and power management works well.

Time needed to configure a wireless network in Windows XP: Zero to fifteen seconds, depending on your network. Time needed on Mac: two minutes admiring the sensual glide of the windows and the bouncy icon telling us we’re connected. But with Red Hat you get the feeling that, despite having rounded the windows, there are still many rough edges to smooth.

Think of the Mac as a perfect sphere with a flattened base so the user doesn’t roll it away. Microsoft, though still unconsciously trying to imitate a sphere, has turned Windows into a sort of corporate bibelot: A metallic dodecahedron that rolls well enough, but only if given a good push. Otherwise, it’s solid and reasonably adaptable.

But Red Hat as a personal desktop still looks like a cube with rounded corners. It’s solid, has the essential corners rounded (comes with basic Office tools, an excellent browser and, believe it or not, integrated support for Palm), but it doesn’t roll.

And the same principle applies to mundane things like accessing a network drive. Yes, you just put smb://server/share in a text field, but while Mac can talk to everything, Red Hat continues to require us to change Windows servers to accept cleartext passwords¹.

(At least Nautilus is much more efficient than Konqueror at browsing remote disks)

Managing photos is simple, but the XP experience (with the excellent Picture Preview and decent thumbnail support) continues to be better than Mac² or Red Hat.

What ruins everything, in my view, are the very, very basic things that still don’t work. On both Windows and Mac, there are two or three ways to insert a MemoryStick into the machine: PCMCIA, built-in readers or USB.

And, on both Windows and Mac, the results are always the same: Another disk appears. On the desktop or in My Computer, depending on the version and the flavour, but it simply just appears.

No file editing required. No need to even check syslog to see how (or, in the worst case, whether) the device was recognised. No need to read animal entrails, compile offerings to the Holy GNU or (even if we felt like it) sacrifice a Geek at the altar.

And Mac OS X is already Unix, and there are mountains of ways to do this in a “normal” Linux that could have been included.

Otherwise, the experience for a “normal” user is recommendable. Think of it as going to an ethnic restaurant: there are things that look odd, taste more or less fine, and we have trouble remembering the names afterwards.

As long, of course, as we’re lucky enough not to get one of those inedible appetisers.

The Parable of the Languages - the next Geek who tries to “sell” me their favourite programming language will get this link. Hours and hours of guaranteed fun on Slashdot.

ROTFL! - don’t miss the whale sequence parody, essential for any fan of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams).

I’m starting to get genuinely annoyed by the fact that I can’t simply plug in a USB storage device (I have loads of flash cards and MemorySticks to organise, as well as a 120GB USB disk) and have a simple icon appear on the desktop.

Damn it.

While I’m at it, useful results from my research:

• Nautilus File Manager Scripts
• Apotheke - CVS view
• http://art.gnome.org - themes and visual knick-knacks.

I’ll do this on the Mac.