RH 8.0 woes

[Lynn David Newton]

  Phil> Wow, after reading the last thread I'm really
  Phil> glad I didn't install my copy of RH8.0 yet.

Everyone should be aware that I'm an adventuresome
sort, usually willing to plunge fearlessly into new OS
releases. The reality of the present situation is that
I don't really want to throw flames at either Red Hat
or its present distribution. My point is that the
number of problems I've encountered has been been an
order of magnitude greater than I'm accustomed to
having to deal with, and it's put a dent in my ability
to get some work done.

Yesterday I wrote mail to a close hacker friend of mine
in Ohio summarizing my recent problems, for no purpose
other than to vent and summarize it in my own head.
(This fellow dislikes Linux, runs only FreeBSD, and
also has one Mac OS X system among the 15 or so that
are a part of his security consulting business.) 

For your amusement I've included a modified version of
what I sent him below, which anyone who is still
considering RH 8.0 might want to consult as a bullet
list. Here 'tis.

o When I first logged in after the upgrade, my entire
  GUI environment had been replaced. (I more-or-less
  expected this.) It's still GNOME. Now it's GNOME 2,
  the full-length animated feature.

o The few default launchers on the main panel were all
  office stuff: the OpenOffice word processor,
  spreadsheet, and presentation software. Like I really
  need that. BTW, the default "text editor" was set to
  openoffice. Yeah, right. Glad I discovered that
  early. (I did install openoffice and dumped
  staroffice. My experience with openoffice so far is:
  start it; click through obligatory startup noise;
  convince it I really don't want to use this thing for
  email, and that I don't have any sort of address book
  that it can use (I use BBDB + VM in XEmacs), it
  didn't crash (as it did when I tried to install it in
  September); went typety-type, typety-type in the WP
  window; said yep it works; exited; blew away
  staroffice using rm -rf.

o I'm apparently no longer running sawfish, but
  something else, which I now know to be something
  called metacity. I didn't realize that would be the
  case before I started. I'd assumed that GNOME and
  sawfish would be forever linked.

o Certain applets I make use of regularly are no longer
  even on the system. One is a superior screen and
  window shot grabber. There is another they've
  captured from KDE, but I don't like it nearly as
  much.

o I produced drawer panels on the main panel. The
  system changes the order of the items I put in them
  between logins. I kid you not. Figure that one out!

o GnomeICU (ICQ), which I use daily in work, fails with
  a missing library error. Apparently there is no
  workaround. (I telecommute for a company in Oregon.)
  My boss is not pleased. He wants me to use Trillian,
  but that runs only on Windows. I explained to him
  that an instant messaging utility that runs only on a
  virtual machine running in a window in the remotest
  corner of my multiple workspace desktop is the same
  as having no IM, and that email would be faster.

o Apparently the upgrade rewrote my XF86config file so
  now I have caps lock on again. My xmodmap file is
  essentially unfunctional. I do have a Super key, but
  no Hyper key. Some of my XEmacs key bindings are
  missing. There is no multi-key at the moment. I spent
  at least two long evenings getting that all figured
  out back in March. What sort of operating system
  randomly remaps the keyboard every distribution?

o I tried building the new version of XEmacs. configure
  told me I can no longer compile binaries on the
  system. (An untrue statement.) The actual problem
  turned out to be that it saw that I have Wine on the
  system (which I do not use), so thought I wanted
  Windows support, but was missing a library.
  Configuring with --with-msw=no fixed that.

o After I got configure to work, the compile got a
  segmentation fault in the final phase of dumping. I
  reconfigured again using --pdump, but that introduces
  other problems. But the latest version of XEmacs is
  now up and running. (I went from 21.4.0 to 21.4.10.)

o In the process of resolving that one I discovered
  that I had run the root file system to 100% full. I
  am able to reduce it only to 96%. (Not to mention
  that I need about four times as much memory.) I don't
  know what new stuff got stuck in / that is eating up
  my space.

o I should be running apache 2, but am actually running
  apache 1.whatever. (That's my fault, not RH's. I just
  need to take the time to reconfigure the server
  config file.)

o Acrobat reader is behaving weird. Maybe that's
  nothing new.

o The terminal windows suck big-time: gnome-terminal,
  konsole, and xterm aren't behaving as they ought to.
  Eterm won't even start because of a missing sharable
  library. (libImlib.so.1) I've tweaked a few things
  and now can start konsole windows using a front end
  script. (I'm sure there's nothing wrong with any of
  them, except maybe Eterm, but the various X
  resources, options, and hot keys I'd configured
  through the previous version are no longer, so I've
  been living with uuuugly black on white with dead
  stoopid tiny and unreadable fonts.)

o gnuserv wouldn't start, and I couldn't figure out why
  not. (I have all the EDITOR variables set to
  gnuclient.) I finally got that one, though.

o A minilauncher I used to have in my toolbar, in which
  I could pack a bunch of mini-icon launchers, no
  longer exists. The word on that one is: Sorry,
  Charlie.

o The mail notification / time applet I've used for
  years no longer exists, and there is no suitable
  substitute I've found. Sorry, Charlie.

o The Mozilla that comes up is 1.01, whereas I have
  been running 1.1 for a month or two. I thought I had
  deselected Mozilla, but it's there anyhow. I think
  what happened was that with one or more of the extra
  packages I'd selected there was a dependency that
  called for Mozilla, and I selected the option to
  install dependencies. I dropped my own script in
  /usr/bin/mozilla, and now that works.

o I can't start mysql. Still true. Don't know why.

o I couldn't start VMware. Needed to recompile a module
  for the kernel. (Fortunately, that one worked. I use
  XP these days mainly to keep my timesheet using Excel
  and sometimes to use IE to compare Web rendering.)

o Having done that, when I try to mount the samba
  resource off my virtual machine, I get a message
  saying smbmnt must be installed suid root for direct
  user mounts by non-root. It *was* okay. Had to chmod
  to fix that back to what it was.

o I can't start sound. Need new modules for that, too.
  Still unresolved. Have to go to the OSS Web site for
  that.

o XMMS is delivered without MP3 support. (I knew that
  in advance. There is a downloadable MP3 support
  plugin module I haven't gotten yet.) Idealistic
  rantings about Oog Vorbis notwithstanding, I have
  professional need to create and play MP3 files.

o When I try to start the NTP time daemon, it can't
  connect to any of the two or three time servers I've
  tried. I don't know why. I think it may have fixed
  itself in the last reboot. I haven't checked yet.

o In XEmacs, whenever I press the control key, the
  cursor goes from solid to hollow. When I release it
  without doing something a little animated graphic
  rectangle appears, spins, and disappears. (!) (No
  harm done.) In fact, that happens in a terminal
  window, too. I suspect it's related to my XF86config
  file. I could do without the little spectacle. No
  idea why that happens.

o Apparently this new window manager does not provide a
  way to add to or to customize menus. What foresight.

o I can't produce tear-off menus, which I like and
  occasionally use. Or used to. Sorry Charlie.

o Support for keyboard shortcuts is quite limited. They
  do have a neat and simple way of setting them, but
  there is a set and too-short number of functions that
  can be bound to keys. For instance there is no way to
  assign shell commands to keys. One that I have is a
  key that runs "gnuclient -f new-frame", so I can
  switch to another workspace and pop a frame open on
  my running xemacs. I also like to have a hot key that
  will pop up a terminal window. When I first booted
  the system after the upgrade I had to search for
  menus for five minutes just to find a way to run a
  command.

o The behavior of some of the window functions has
  proven to be bizarre. I have hot keys that map
  control + a keypad number to switch to various
  workspaces. I find that control + the first key I
  press does not do it. It serves like a prefix, saying
  "Here comes a hot key". When I press it again, it
  does its thing. Then a little miniwindow map pops up
  that will scroll around as I press buttons to switch
  workspaces. But the change is not made until I
  physically let go of the control key. That's just too
  weird, and an outstanding annoyance. Don't need that
  feature, thanks anyhow. Sorry, Charlie. Got it
  anyhow.

There are several other issues I haven't even
mentioned.

I did this upgrade because: (a) I made a dumb mistake
when installing perl 5.8, and wiped out the 5.6.1 perl
modules library, which caused a lot of things to break.
Some things worked, but I couldn't ever restore it
completely. I couldn't even run perl -MCPAN -e shell. I
think the upgrade fixed things. (At least I can run the
CPAN shell.) (b) I want to be able to mount the CDs in
my digital camera using USB. I now have a much later
kernel, and am hoping that this will work. So far that
still hasn't worked either.

This is the kind of system upheaval that if I'd know it
would be this disruptive I would have considered going
to a whole new distro, like maybe Debian. I don't mind
different, but different has got to be better.
Otherwise, what's the point?

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ