LrngTheHardWay
04-06-2003, 07:23 AM
After 'getting and burning the ISOs on Friday afternoon, I got busy about installing RH9 on one of my kids' computers on Friday evening.
I decided to see how much one could expect from an upgrade installation of RH7.3 to RH9.0, though I counted on ultimately ditching all partitions and doing a clean install after doing the unadvisable.
Upgrade installation: 1771MB, 567 packages, 1h:05m:17s.
Still under the time it took for a clean install of W98SE on the same machine.
As expected, from the get-go the installation was a bit flakey--especially in the area of the xserver performance. I saw lots of raggedness in the horizontal sweep--vertical lines tended to tear and jump around a bit. Fonts sucked the big one.
Anaconda and kudzu picked up on the hardware correctly, and configured decent performance--except for the AC'97 Sound support, which was non-existent.
The system came up without obvious user access to OpenOffice.org applications, which had to be added manually. All user files were intact.
After a few login-logouts and power cyclings, it became evident that there were some issues with start-up and shut-down. These finally culminated in a detached inode and a fsck session.
After attaching the wayward inode to lost+found, a reboot revealed that the code in that region belonged to the xserver.
At that point, I cut my time short on the experiment and fdisk-ed the drive for a clean install.
Time to get to bed.
SATURDAY EVENING
Clean installation: 2216MB, 591 packages, 29m:52s.
Not bad. Certainly less than I expected on a system with a Mitsumi 12/24 CAV CD-ROM drive; and waaay under the fastest clean installs I've seen for win-anything.
I installed both Gnome & KDE and went whole-hog on much of the editing/productivity apps.
The system comes up with Gnome as the default DM--ugh! Though Gnome *is* more stable in this iteration of RH (as well as slower), I still prefer the cleaner appearance of K.
AC'97 support seems solidly there....though I'm still a CreativeLabs fan. There are some decent sound themes to choose from.
All desired apps were where I expected to see them; and user accounts were created, K was selected as the default DM, and desktop prefs were toyed with a bit.
Logout-login.
Back in as a user, and under K, and I got busy about getting rid of the cartoon-ey face of Bluecurve, and boosting the Virtual Desktop (workspace) count to my normal 12.
Some functions aren't where I'm intuitively used to finding them, but they really aren't that far away, so the learning-curve is fairly flat.
Fonts are *much* better in 9 than I've seen in previous releases of RH, and all the xserver weirdness that I saw in the upgrade installation is gone.
Operation is crisp in response to user input, and start-up/shut-down is fast and without incident.
As far as perceived speed goes, I don't see much difference between 7.3 and 9.0 on this machine (if anything, it *might* be a tad bit faster), and both are quicker than any Win-whatever installation I've had the misfortune to run (Yes, including XP Pro).
This particular machine is shallow on memory, at 192MB, and it's only a 533MHz Celeron HP chassis. Swap utilization stays at zero with a variety of applications running (Mozilla, GIMP, XMMS). Ripping CDs to .ogg does dig into the swap partition a little bit, but nothing worth mentioning at this point.
I think I'll be putting this release through more paces on Sunday to see just how it falls out on the numbers, but I really don't have any thing bad to say about it at all--probably a lot of good in the end run.
If you're looking for a ready for prime-time Linux distro for the home user, this one is probably the best choice out of the pack. It's certainly worthy of the corporate desktop at this point.
Give it due consideration for either purpose.
I decided to see how much one could expect from an upgrade installation of RH7.3 to RH9.0, though I counted on ultimately ditching all partitions and doing a clean install after doing the unadvisable.
Upgrade installation: 1771MB, 567 packages, 1h:05m:17s.
Still under the time it took for a clean install of W98SE on the same machine.
As expected, from the get-go the installation was a bit flakey--especially in the area of the xserver performance. I saw lots of raggedness in the horizontal sweep--vertical lines tended to tear and jump around a bit. Fonts sucked the big one.
Anaconda and kudzu picked up on the hardware correctly, and configured decent performance--except for the AC'97 Sound support, which was non-existent.
The system came up without obvious user access to OpenOffice.org applications, which had to be added manually. All user files were intact.
After a few login-logouts and power cyclings, it became evident that there were some issues with start-up and shut-down. These finally culminated in a detached inode and a fsck session.
After attaching the wayward inode to lost+found, a reboot revealed that the code in that region belonged to the xserver.
At that point, I cut my time short on the experiment and fdisk-ed the drive for a clean install.
Time to get to bed.
SATURDAY EVENING
Clean installation: 2216MB, 591 packages, 29m:52s.
Not bad. Certainly less than I expected on a system with a Mitsumi 12/24 CAV CD-ROM drive; and waaay under the fastest clean installs I've seen for win-anything.
I installed both Gnome & KDE and went whole-hog on much of the editing/productivity apps.
The system comes up with Gnome as the default DM--ugh! Though Gnome *is* more stable in this iteration of RH (as well as slower), I still prefer the cleaner appearance of K.
AC'97 support seems solidly there....though I'm still a CreativeLabs fan. There are some decent sound themes to choose from.
All desired apps were where I expected to see them; and user accounts were created, K was selected as the default DM, and desktop prefs were toyed with a bit.
Logout-login.
Back in as a user, and under K, and I got busy about getting rid of the cartoon-ey face of Bluecurve, and boosting the Virtual Desktop (workspace) count to my normal 12.
Some functions aren't where I'm intuitively used to finding them, but they really aren't that far away, so the learning-curve is fairly flat.
Fonts are *much* better in 9 than I've seen in previous releases of RH, and all the xserver weirdness that I saw in the upgrade installation is gone.
Operation is crisp in response to user input, and start-up/shut-down is fast and without incident.
As far as perceived speed goes, I don't see much difference between 7.3 and 9.0 on this machine (if anything, it *might* be a tad bit faster), and both are quicker than any Win-whatever installation I've had the misfortune to run (Yes, including XP Pro).
This particular machine is shallow on memory, at 192MB, and it's only a 533MHz Celeron HP chassis. Swap utilization stays at zero with a variety of applications running (Mozilla, GIMP, XMMS). Ripping CDs to .ogg does dig into the swap partition a little bit, but nothing worth mentioning at this point.
I think I'll be putting this release through more paces on Sunday to see just how it falls out on the numbers, but I really don't have any thing bad to say about it at all--probably a lot of good in the end run.
If you're looking for a ready for prime-time Linux distro for the home user, this one is probably the best choice out of the pack. It's certainly worthy of the corporate desktop at this point.
Give it due consideration for either purpose.