[CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0

[Jed S. Baer]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003 12:56:42 -0700
"Chris N. Brown" <chris.brown at sybase.com> wrote:

> On Sunday 02 March 2003 03:06 pm, Jed S. Baer's keyboard spoke thus:
> >
> >
> [MASSIVE HUGE SNIP]
> >
> >
> 
> I'm not sure if the original question about de-idioting RedHat 8 was
> ever answered before this thread turned into a deb/gentoo/mandrake vs
> RedHat thread, but I remember back when RH8 was originally released,
> there was quite a bit of discussion on the Bluecurve interface in the
> press.  The last thing that I ever read about it was basically either
> you loved it or you hated it (and it looks like you hate it).
> 
> Now, having said that (and Jed, you indicated that you might be willing
> to use the kde interface with RedHat 8), I suggest checking out the
> following site:
> 
> http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

I'll check it out. Thanks. But I am reluctant to throw another package
management scheme into the mix right now.

> There are some very simple instructions there about getting KDE (in this
> case, 3.0.5a) installed on RedHat 8 using Apt of all things.  I did this
> on my redHat 7.3 system and it works very very well, and certainly keeps
> me from going into dependency-hell that RPM can cause.  Additionally,
> using this site to install KDE will give you back some of the things
> that RedHat 8 took away (like MP3 and MPEG support, etc).  Also,
> kdenetwork package will install kppp, which I find a very easy to use
> PPP interface.  I'e use it to dial into our internal network as well as
> to use my ricochet modem :-)

Well, my _real_ choice, at this point, would be to run Fvwm under Gnome.
The Fvwm site has instructions on that, and Fvwm is moving towards greater
Gnome compliance as well. I've been grepping around for the config file
which holds the WM settings, but haven't found it yet. I will eventually
try a vanilla Sawfish RPM, in the hopes that the depleted focus settings
are yet another bluecurvism.

One thing which surprised me, since I thought metacity was just a window
manager, I removed it (and later discovered that I was using sawfish after
all). I also removed the gnome-games and kde-games packages. Following
that, the Gnome panel crashes.

I have a workaround for the dialup stuff, but it still bugs me that my old
chat script gets killed by something. The RH dialing thing works (using
wvdial underneath it all), and my old hangup script still works, and two
seem to co-exist reasonably well.

For the masochistic, a friend sent me this link on how to edit your menus
under RH8.0
  http://www.bluethingy.com/linux/rh8menu.html

KDE under bluecurve is better than Gnome, but it still suffers from many
of the same problems.

And to think, my main motivation for upgrading was to see if sane would
work better under a newer kernel.

Redhat pushed this thing out the door before it was ready. They should
have done a 7.x, with Gnome1.4 (or whatever the the latest non-Gnome2
release was).

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