[CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

Today, I upgraded to RH 8.0.

It's a little too early to tell how big a mistake that was.

Does anyone have any experience getting a RH8.0 system to a usable state?
By that I mean, undoing the whole bluecurve thing? I'm curious how much of
this brain-dead GUI is RedHat, and how much is new Gnome stuff. I can't
even tell which window manager I'm running, or find a place to change it.
It appears the whole thing has been dumbed down (and it behaves a lot more
like Windoze too.) I mean, I can't even set up focus/raise management,
except to specify whether I get focus by clicking or just entering a
window. Raise always goes with focus. The Gnome control center is just too
minimal.

Whose idea was this anyway?! ;-)

I'm gonna try the KDE interface.

But the larger question is, how much work will it be to get rid of RH's
gunk, and do an "off the shelf" Gnome and/or KDE setup? I do not relish
the thought of uninstalling all the RPMs, and replacing them with
"un-hatted" versions. Nor, for that matter, schlepping through endless
files looking for all the RH-isms and fixing them.

Does anyone have a fairly new non-RH Gnome environment installed? And does
it suffer from the same paucity of configurability?

As long as I'm ranting, my old reliable (since RH 5.1) chat/ppp script no
longer works either. It hangs up the modem (end result, obviously not
cause) right after (AFAICT) authenticaton. Here's a log snippet:

pppd[890]: Using interface ppp0
pppd[890]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/modem
/etc/hotplug/net.agent: assuming ppp0 is already up
pppd[890]: Hangup (SIGHUP)
pppd[1043]: Modem hangup
pppd[1043]: Connection terminated.
/etc/hotplug/net.agent: NET unregister event not supported

If I could just get this one thing fixed, I'd be happily living with Fvwm
and no Gnome desktop, but right now, the only way that dialup works is
using RH's dialer gizmo.

Oh, the other strange thing is now I have apps using both Gtk and Gtk2
themes. Very non-unified, which is what I thought the whole Bluecurve
thingy was about. ;-)

Well, since I'm ranting away, anyone know how to disable the
"/dev/hdd=ide-scsi" in Grub? I removed that from the Grub config window
when installing, but it still loads up the scsi modules at boot, but there
aren't any lines in my grub.conf which would seem to be calling for that.
Yeah, I know, I gotta RTFM, but at the moment, I'm overwhelmed with how
badly this whole thing sucks.

Cheerio.
jed

-- 
I wouldn't even think about bribing a rottweiler with a steak that
didn't weigh more than I do. -- Jason Earl