Software Review - Red Hat 6.0

How I got my first box

The copy came quick enough, there was 2 cds in paper covers, one was the actual RH6.0 the other was a disk labelled "Contributed RPMS" it's a mug coaster at the moment. So eagerly I popped the thing into my cd-rom and set the BIOS so that it booted off my cd and it dropped me into the usual Red Hat setup program, so far so good and it properly inited my cdrom, great! So long burned iso images.

<advice>Just a word of advice, the simplest _easiest_ most painless way of installing Red Hat or any Linux distribution for that matter is to boot the thing off a cd, don't try to be cute and use the ftp/http install since it involves weird things to tweak with the network and never never ever install it off a harddisk, I had bad experiences with it so trust me.</advice>

After the first few screens it will bring you to the most dreaded part of any Linux installation (at least for most)... it's called Disk Druid, basically here you've got to partition your harddisk, I'll rather think of it as removing some virus from a company in Redmond, Washington. Okay, if you have an exisiting Windows installation on your machine and you like most people want to keep it, you have better got PartitionMagic 4.0 installed, now PartitionMagic is not included in Red Hat 6.0 so you have to find your own copy, though I read that it's available with Caldera OpenLinux 2.1 (another Linux distribution), there's something called fips which resizes partitions like PartitionMagic but with a commandline interface and it's free, but I've never tried it. Linux needs something from 400meg to 1200meg, I have a partition of 600meg, doesn't let me do everything but good enough. Now some cynists might think why the hell does Linux need so much space, it's just an OS! Erm, well, when you install Red Hat 6.0 you don't just install the OS, it's got drivers, Windowing System, Applications (spreadsheet, word processor, drawing program both for photos & vector art) and so much more, that's why it's so big. Of course if you think that I'm a fool, then maybe you should just install the bare minimal and it'll end up in 1 1.44mb floppy, it's still Linux but sans applications and other "useless" stuff. My machine was Linux-enabled before so I didn't have to do any disk geometric neomancery.

Followed the onscreen setup program, it's time to select which packages (also called RPMS in Red Hat), and selected whatever I felt like, hmm, a couple of things that I'll recommend that you select during installation.

• Kernel Sources (I'm a hardcore kernel guy, I love to recompile my kernels)
• GNOME or KDE (I prefer the former, more on that)
• Enlightenment (All other Window Managers are pussies compared to this)

Selecting the video card was a breeze because it detected my machine's video chipset and but as for networking not so smooth, because I had a PCMCIA ethernet card so when asked whether I wanted to config network I had to say no, but for those home users with a normal PCI/ISA ethernet card be sure to say yes.

After everything is chosen, the program will simply format whatever partitions it needs and spool the data files off from the CD. In the end you'll even get an option to choose whether you will like Red Hat to boot into a graphical enviornment (just like Windows, though I can't think of why anyone would want to do such an anti-thetical thing). When done it'll just reboot.

After rebooting, assuming you chose to boot with LILO in the MBR, you'll be presented with a weird command line saying "LILO: _" well most of you won't know what to type and after a couple of seconds it will just drop you into the Linux boot sequence. When done you'll get the login prompt. You're half way done.

How RH6.0 compares with the older versions of Red Hat is that the setup program is slightly improved, you get to choose your packages in a nice tree list instead of the old menu system. Everything else is below the hood I guess.

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What's GNOME, KDE & enlightenment?

With the new Red Hat 6.0, we are given the choice of a couple of desktop managers (GNOME or KDE) as well as a couple of window managers (enlightenment, afterstep, fvwm). Hmm, firstly what are desktop managers? From a Win9x point of view, it's the program that controls the look of your desktop, including all the icons on the desktop + start button + widgets (such as scrollbars, editboxes). Whereas windows managers control how new windows come onto screen, the parts of a window which is not controlled by the program such as title bar, resize sections. So why does Linux make it so complicated? Well, it's all in the name of choice, with Win9x you only get one look, yeah you can customize the colors and the background but that's just that. With enlightenment and GNOME you can make all kinds of unbelievable themes for your desktop.

Here a screenshot of my own, no this is not a Mac, this is Linux. There are cynics who think that Linux does not have any applications for general use, well they're wrong, if you get the full Red Hat 6.0 version it comes with a personal edition of WordPerfect 8.0 and Star Office 5.0 (I personally prefer the former, never quite got used to Word after all these years), and just to allay your fears the standard Red Hat distribution comes with a couple of functional GUI text editors and a spreadsheet, and even has a WinAmp clone.

I have been using enlightenment for a long while and I've loved it ever since, it is possible the prettiest window manager you'll ever get, installing Linux just to get cool desktops are worth it. Evidently there are some people with very strong feelings as to whether you should just GNOME or KDE (people seem more benevolent towards choice of window managers though). Some say that GNOME is too new to be useful, others say KDE is not truly free software. What I recommend is that you should try either, KDE seems more matured to me, but for some reason because I started early on the GTK/GNOME/enlightenment path (welcome to the dark side) I still stuck with it. Be forewarned that some applications can run only within KDE or GNOME. (Actually I lied as long as you have the appropriate Qt or GTK libraries respectively you can run in any desktop manager).

Justifications Try emulating these screen shots in Windows... :)

Your own Trekkie desktop	Who says you can't have radical menu bars	You can even change how things like edit boxes & scroll bars look like. It looks like a Mac, I can't afford a Mac that's why I can only pretend to look like I'm having a Mac.	And sometimes having background picts on your applications might be cool.

All themes can be found at www.themes.org.

Running the box

Logging in gave me a normal command line shell, nothing else feels strange, everything is how Linux should be quick, silent and doesn't go blue when it likes to. Performance feels fine, a tweaking tip for newer systems with those fancy UDMA harddisks, which is to turn on 32bit IO and DMA. Kids don't try it at home, unless you're supervised.

Sighted from www.linux.com, run the commands as root, replace all /dev/hda with the Linux's drive's name.
Sets 32 bit IO & DMA:

hdparm -c 1 /dev/hda
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

Tests how fast IO is

hdparm -t   /dev/hda

Finally, commits it into stone

hdparm -k 1 /dev/hda

The OS feels fast, which is normal for Linux (if everything is configed properly). Nothing seems to screw up, using the Red Hat supplied admin tools I didn't have to change a single line of text to get it going, though for more hard core stuff like below you'll still have to do it the true way.

Now a few snide comments about Red Hat 6.0...

Irritation Number 1 - Redmond Tactics

LILO (Linux Boot Loader) by defaults starts your system into Linux, now most Microserfs like you and me don't want that, we'll rather want LILO to start by default into Windows, then only if you choose will start Linux. Here's how your /etc/lilo.conf should look like, if your partitions are set up like mine, if I'm talking Greek then maybe you should RTFM :

---

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
# prompt
timeout=50
other=/dev/hda1
        label=Win98
        table=/dev/hda
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-15
        label=Linux
        # 1024x768x16bits
        # vga = 791
        root=/dev/hda5
        read-only

---

/etc/lilo.conf

Remember to run

/sbin/lilo

when you're done editing the file.

Irritation Number 2 - Big-boned fonts

If you haven't read the news yet, all the new 2.2 kernels (included in Red Hat 6.0) allows anyone with a reasonably new graphics card (something that supports VESA 2.0 onboard) to have command line screens of up to whatever your graphics card and monitor can drive at, currently I'm starting at a command line screen that is 1024x768x16bits, meaning that it's not just 80x25 chars but much much more, err, how many I don't know it's just a lot more. Any person should run their command line at the highest most comfortable resolution, you can have so much more character screen real estate. If it's Greek again, RTFM.

But the only problem is the 2.2 kernel does not come with this support out of the box (if you want everything to work out of the box, buy a PalmPilot). Good news is you can tweak it, bad news is you've got to recompile your kernel, I hope you've got the kernel sources I recommended just now. How you do compile your kernel goes something like this :
Log in as root first.

cd /usr/src/linux

Run the kernel menu config, make sure you have the ncurses package install

make menuconfig
and you'll be thrown into something like this  
    

    From there go find "Console drivers", turn on "Support for frame buffer devices 
    (EXPERIMENTAL)" and check "VESA VGA graphics console" and "Advanced Low Level 
    driver options" and check everything under the last option. When you are done 
    tweaking with the rest of the stuff (assuming you know what you are doing) 
    just Exit and Save. Then type this to recompile your kernel : 

make dep && make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install

If everything compiles fine, the kernel should be at /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage copy it into your /boot directory as something like vmlinuz-2.2.5-FB, add an entry under LILO for the new kernel, under the new kernel's entry add something like vga = 791 (see example above, I commented the line in the example) this tells the system to open the frame buffer (or commandline screen) at 1024x768x16bits & then rerun /sbin/lilo to update everything and reboot. If everything is fine, you'll get to see a penguin graphic when you boot up into glorious 1024x768 character mode. If you screwed up anywhere, check this out http://www.tahallah.demon.co.uk/programming/Framebuffer-HOWTO-1.0pre6.html.

Irritation Number 3 - Midget fonts

So hopefully you've got hard core commandlines going at 1024x768 or higher. The next most irritating thing on the list is the fonts in X Windows are _too_ small, especially Netscape, they are like 6 points or something, now there's a simple but not out of the box way to fix this, as well as to give yourself back that familiar Windows look (I know of people who suffer withdrawal from not seeing Times New Roman for a couple of minutes in Linux), it's to run a TrueType-capable X Font Server. Basically what it is, is it enables you to use your TrueType fonts from Windows in Linux (Arial is a personal favourite of mine). Check out the xfsft at http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft

Concluding comments about the box

Hmm, if you clear these three _minor_ problems then your Linux box should be working very fine. Why I didn't say much about the Red Hat 6.0 system and instead concentrated on tweaking tips is that it works pretty well out of the box already. Imagine if this was a Win98 review, what do you expect me to say? It works out of the box and it's not much different from Win95 just that I had to pay a couple of hundreds to get it. Hmm... anyway, that's not the point. Red Hat 6.0 is probably the first serious revision that is prime time capable, the older versions still required the hacker in me to get going. If you are curious about Linux and aren't afraid to read (I'm serious on the latter) then try out RH6.0 it's a great and slick piece of software. Stable too. I don't think I'll rate it since it's meaningless, there's not much competition out there is it?
 

 

Send your salutations and admirations to edward@hardwarezone.com, if you've got Linux questions don't email me go to slashdot.org, freashmeat.net, www.linux.com, www.linuxresource.com, RTFM, don't come and bother me.
 

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Last updated March 07, 1999.