RH 8.0 woes

[Lynn David Newton]

Over the weekend I "upgraded" my system from RH 7.2 to
8.0. I can't remember, in 19 years of Unix system
experience, seeing so many things break as a result of
an upgrade. I won't bore the list with a litany of
details; suffice it to say it's been an interesting
weekend.

I no longer trust RH, and will likely start from
scratch with a different distro and s the next time I
feel a need to change my OS.

Some of the changes were dismaying to see, since they
effectively removed functionality that I use upon which
I have depended for some time. I have no objections to
"different". I'm adventurous, and know that different
can be good. But different should also be better.

Lest I get off on a rant here, let me get to the point
of this message, which is to seek information.

o I'm using the new GNOME Blue{whatever}, and am
  willing to give it a fair try, since I'll have to
  live with it for a while. I'm more than merely
  disappointed to see that it apparently no longer uses
  sawfish as its window manager. Why not? Whatever the
  beast is that replaces it (and I can't even figure
  out what that is) is wimpy. I particularly hate the
  weak support for keyboard bindings.

o Several applets that I formerly used frequently no
  longer exist at all. Significant cases in point:

  - gnomeicu no longer works at all. Ironically, the
    distro contains an updated version, but evidently
    the shared library used to run it no longer exists,
    i.e., must have been removed from the system. When
    I try to start it from a command line (which I
    don't expect to work, because it's an applet), I
    get this:

    $ gnomeicu: error while loading shared libraries: libpanel_applet.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    I need an IRQ client available all day long in my
    daily work, because I telecommute. I suppose I
    could go to licq, but I hate it.

  - The wonderful little utility that used to exist for
    making screenshots under GNOME is no longer there.
    There is an adequate but inferior replacement,
    captured, I believe, from KDE. Why did they replace
    that? I want it back. I use it daily. Or used to.

  - The time and mail notification applet I used to use
    is gone. There's a butt-ugly plain text time and
    date gizmo, but no mail notification program I have
    been able to locate. I could revert to using xbiff
    from years ago, but I certainly don't want to.

That's enough complaining for one message. If anyone
can provide any guidance concerning any of these
matters, it will be much appreciated.

--
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ
   ... just another Linux hacker trying to get some
   work done ..