I was quite thrilled when I downloaded RH9 on the 7th. I said to a friend of mine that it was basically Phoebe with the bugs fixed. Before I start complaining, I have to admit two things. First, I really love all the added toys and the quite obvious improvement in performance. I also have to admit that I haven't submitted any of these to Bugzilla yet. I'm a little nervous about posting Bugzilla stuff when I don't have enough information. Plus, forums seem to be like a food processor for bugs. (Mmm, that last sentence reminds me of foodhandling services at a gas station.) Everyone attacks the bug with great expertise before handing it off to higher powers. Prelink When I was using RedHat 8, I spied in the release notes a command to run to try out prelinking; something like /usr/sbin/prelink --all --conserve-memory. I tried it, got a few errors, and everything continued to work fine. Nothing crashed, no quirks, no missing libraries, etc. It was slow, though. In fact, it took about three times as long to start Mozilla. I did the same on another RedHat 8 system with the same results. (Sorry, I never tried it in 8.1.) I tried the same thing in RedHat 9, and still got the same errors. (Please forgive my ignorance. The error had something to do with, um, PIC compliance? and stuff refused to link to it.) In 9, however, I have problems. Programs (specifically browsers and IM's) freeze and crash more often than in Windows. I end up killing X when it happens, but allowing it to log back in doesn't clean it up. I have to restart. (Hope that info helps.) (Off topic, and probably not RedHat's fault, the Konqueror browser, when viewing files in list mode, crashes when an expand-list plus is clicked three times before it expands the list.) Another bug showed up, and I'm not yet sure if it's related. When I boot, it finishes starting atd (I always to an "Everything" install, then I trim out what I don't use from the services.) and then it stalls. I press ctrl-alt-del, and let it reboot. If I go into interactive mode and say yes to everything, it works just fine. Samba On the server, I used the same smb.conf file I have always used. It's a tiny file (our home and business have tiny needs) that basically allows printing to one printer, read-only access to a share, and read-write access to another share (which just so happens to be physically inside the read-only share). I've never had any trouble out of it, even using RH 8.1, but in RH 9, for some reason, the read-write share acts as read-only. I made a new share in another folder with read-write ability, and it works just fine. Is Samba any different between 8.1 and 9? Probably what I'll end up doing is making another patchwork setup. (Unlike many others I hear from on the internet, I *love* RPM.) I'll install 9, then RPM the Samba stuff from 8.1. (Much easier than installing 8.1 and moving specific stuff up to 9, since version mismatches show up all over the place.) (My shared folder is vfat. I don't need file modes, permissions, etc. in my shared folders, so I have it set up that if I log into Win98, WinXP, lo even Novell or Win3.11 (with a few mods, of course), the network is still up. Xscreensaver Why oh why does that damned list keep jumping to the top? Here's the annoyance: Start xscreensaver-demo (preferences->screensaver), don't click anything except the scrollbar, and scroll down in the list. Click something, and you're automagically teleported to the top of the list. (It truly is just an annoyance. By the way, obsessive compulsives around the world thank RedHat immensely for starting GNOME with the panel icons all nicely squished together!) Of course, don't knock yourselves out. It's just a twitch. ALSA One of the reasons I was tickled pink about getting RH9 was that it supported the newest VIA VT8233 onboard AC'97 sound chips. 8.1 also did. 8.0 detected the chips, claimed to install support for them, and then wouldn't load the modules. (I tried playing around with the kernel configuration and rebuilding the kernel but to no avail. I even tried downloading and installing an updated ALSA, and even dumping the RH8.1 ALSA stuff into 8.0, but there are so many incompatibilities that I would be best off just installing 8.1.) 9 installed, and when it played the test sound, I heard the glorious sound from the left speaker, then the right, then both...but with a crackle. I was worried, but it turned out to be a bad chip. The real problem showed up with no eSound support. Initially, I didn't mind, since I was underwhelmed with eSound, but later I discovered how many things needed eSound. Further, for whatever reason, some programs suck up a ton of CPU when playing sound through these chips. (Freecraft made to run on an ARTS enabled SDL is a good example.) Of course, calls to eSound end up with many processes trying to send sound through it, and then simply pile up. eSound would have been smarter to timeout early instead of never. 8.1 didn't have this problem. Mozilla! (This one's easily identifiable as RH and *not* Mozilla.) Lastly, and most aggrivatingly, Mozilla's broke. Well, sorta. Many types of links, especially ones I would click to download, do nothing. Even shift-clicking and right-clicking and choosing "save link target" do nothing at all. Oddly ,moving the /usr/lib/mozilla-1.2.1 folder aside and installing Mozilla from tarball source still produced the same results. Even more oddly, Galeon, which relies upon Mozilla's existance and functionality, works just fine. Initially, the workaround would be to just use Galeon (I prefer it anyway), but some programs automatically open Mozilla when opening URLs. Netscape works fine, but it's really not as well integrated into RH as Mozilla. SMBMOUNT / MOUNT -T SMB Three out of four times, running this command from a workstation causes it to hang until ctrl-C is pressed. Interestingly enough, the mount has been made. GNOME-TERMINAL For no known reason, GNOME-TERMINAL starts with an error: "An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for gnome-terminal. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly." and clicking Details produces this three times: "Configuration server couldn't be contacted: CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/BAD_OPERATION:1.0" Clicking okay lets me into the terminal with no problems. XMMS-doublesize (very minor glitch) Clicking doublesize in XMMS sometimes causes the playlist window to jump too far to the right. (I say sometimes, and in fact I can't get it to happen anymore, haha.) By the way, didn't right clicking the volume control icon and selecting mute used to cause open volume control windows to mute in some way as well? Wasn't there also a red slash over the icon? Ah well, that's a question for the GNOME team. Mouse Jumping My optical wheel mouse is jumping around. Specifically, moving the mouse to the top right causes it to jump to the bottom left (occasionally). It also sometimes just starts lighting up like a lightning bug. I noticed that someone else had this problem as well. By the way I'm new to Linux (since August 2002) and already I'm a distro junkie. I've tried so many different ones, hoping to find one that has all the toys, doesn't confuse me, and starts programs lightning fast. I've tried Mandrake, SuSE, Yoper, Debian, RedHat, Sorcerer, Gentoo, CRUX, Vector, and even FreeBSD. RedHat wins in practically every arena, but I've finally found a good second place: Vector. It actually has everything I use (minus the games), even Abiword as opposed to OpenOffice.org. That's obviously no big deal, since I can simply install a smaller version of RH. The amazing thing is the breakneck speed. It starts programs faster than Win95 or, dare I say, Win3.11 on my system (except for Mozilla, of course, but it's an interpreter running inside an emulator with plenty of parsing thrown into the mix.) It starts up like my '71 Buick Electra, engine turns over half a turn, and you're ready to roll. I still choose RH "at the drop of a hat", so to speak. I'm just curious as to why I've had so much more trouble with 9 than I did with 8.1-3. (It's nothing sentimental, since 8.1, um, misplaced all my files for me.) Have Fun! -Benjamin Vander Jagt -- Benjamin Vander Jagt <benjaminvanderjagt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
