RH9 status check

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

Red Hat got off to a bit of a rocky start with a badly planned early
release of RH9 to RHN subscribers that led to a huge traffic jam. After
that initial crush and scores of mirrors opened up a couple of weeks
ago, access improved.

I did a fresh install on my IBM laptop while installed in its docking
station. Hardware detection worked perfectly, except for the generic LCD
monitor. A video glitch that caused multiple images on the screen turned
out to be my mistaken interpretation of ROM vs RAM video memory. Once I
reset to 16M everything was perfect.

RH9 picked up everything in the docking station, including a Symbios
SCSI host adapter and a new 80G (!) 9mm notebook hard drive (/dev/hde)
with my tarball backups of RH8.0. I don't do dual-boot installations any
more, preferring to swap out hard drives instead. It's easier.

I did an "everything" custom install, followed by removal of all
international aspell-* dictionaries and kde-i18n-* packages. I'd already
purchased RHN support ($60/yr), so configuring up2date was simple. There
have been a surprising number of errata updates: 29 to date.

My good friends at VMware have released v4 which is supposed to work
with the RH9's new POSIX threads. I just downloaded the upgrade last
night. I'll let you know.

Mozilla 1.2.1 with popup suppression support comes with RH9. I'd like to
upgrade to a RH version of v1.3 with anti-aliased fonts. I'm working to
make v1.3 the recommended standard browser in the AF.

I like the new CUPS/GIMP printer setup. For the first time I can print
high-res color images on my Epson 980N under Linux.

RH9 picks up another new toy of mine: a Sony 256M USB2 "MicroVault"
thumb drive as a vfat /dev/sda. This is a great way to transfer fairly
large amounts of stuff between my Win2K and RH9 hard drives.

The only thing I haven't gotten to work with RH9 yet is my Sharp Zaurus
SL-5600 Linux-based PDA. I'm hoping Steve has already figured out how to
access the cradle for syncing.

--Doc


-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.