My exam

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

Look a Redhatter commenting about RedHat 5.  And judge about his
ability of being critic about his favourite distribution.


-Are the redhat people living in planet Mars?

All networking is oriented towards people with LANS.  In this planet
(Earth. It seems they don't know that) most people do not have LANS.
They have dial-up connections to the internet, floating IP addresses
and of course their link is not permenent.


When you install RedHat people in a LAN you get all the handholding
you need.  People with modems need much more help than others (they
are lone at home, without any colleague or hotline at hand) but if my
memories are good they don't even get a hostname.  Do not even dream
about get a non-routable address pointing at the dummy interface (like
in SUSE).  It is up to you to guess at what has to be done.

And for setting PPP.  OK it is easy but nothing is done in the most
important part: the automatic sending of accumulated mail and news.  A
person can (thanks to divine intervention) get its mail and news
config right but never getting answers to his pleas for help just
because his messages are not being routed.

And what about the choice of INN and SENDMAIL as agents?  Do they
think their only public is ISPs?  Both are overkills for home users,
difficult to configure and fit poorly in a dial-up context.

Many ISPs will force you to use host masquerading.  The doc tells how
to do it but it is to you to do the work and the doc manages to mix
masquerading with other issues so if you are not very careful your
internal mail will end up at your ISP.

Their answer is than most people will handle mail and news online.  Do
they think USA is the only country in the world?  Online reading is
prohibitively expensive East of Eden (USA).  Of course UUCP (the right
choice in countries where phone is expensive) is entirely left to the
user.  Yes comrade UUCP user, you can die.

The RedHat people do not seem to realize mail and news is the most
importnt factor in success with Linux.  No problem is insolvable if
you can get help and without mail and news in Cyberspace nobody will
hear you scream.

Frankly for a home user Slackware is a better choice in the networking
area.  At least Slack tries to ship software good for home users, in
fact, for this, Slackware was the best I had tried until I tested
Suse.

And for crontasks at 3am who can think a home user will keep his
computer powered up all the night?  Do they think I own the pwer
company?  Is it so hard to design a mechanism for machines who are
not powered up 24h a day?


INSTALLATION:

Is it so hard to put a front end for helping the user with partition
sizes?

Do they know what is typing blind because your keyboard is in US mode?
LILO 20 supports national keyboards.  Redhat not only fails to
configure LILO for national keyboards but in addition they misbuilt
the RPM so the utility for doing it is not shipped.  I had to rebuild
it.


DOC:

The doc is only the typical HOWTO hodgepodege.  No effort has been
done to put things most needed in front.  No effort for putting all
the doc in a single format like Unifix did (only one tool for viewing
all).  I nealy forgot: another proof of how RedHat treats us, aliens:
you will see a large 50 Meg package supposed to contain the doc in
German.  In fact it contains docs in many languages including french
(all the HOWTOs have been translated to french) but if you install it
you lose many megs of disk space because you are installing German doc
and many other languages.  Supposing you install it, because like I
said non-german users will not even know the package contains
something of intrest for them.

One day in a french news group a person asked about an advanced RDBMS
for Linux.  It had to support ODBC.  The guy warned than lack of an
RDBMS would mean than his company would choose NT.  There was an
answer "use miniSQL" and another "miniSQL is only a toy, there is no
good RDBMS for Linux" (RedHat 5 ships with Postgres, this was in 4.2
times and there is no proof they were using RedHat).  Allowing people
to ignore what software is available, greatly harms the Linux cause
because a robust kernel without apps is good for nothing.  Caldera
ships with a copy of the Linux Software Map.  This should be mndatory
in every Linux distribution.  Otherwise we will continue seeing people
installing NT believing Linux does not have the tools to do the job.


 X:

No X and half your distrib, the most exciting one, is only wasted CD
space.  I have seen many people fight for days trying to get a decent
X when the problem was than they were using an old version of X and a
Matrox Mystique so they were in VGA mode.  Redhat 5 has a configurator
who will choose the server for you (hardware auto-detection) but they
will not be doing the things right until they compare the date with
the date when the X server was released and tell "Warning your card is
not supported but this an old version, try to get an upgrade".  If they
find too difficult to program this my five years old daughter could do
it.

You start an app from the window manager, something goes wrong and it
crashes.  Do you see its dying message.  No.  You have to guess than
it is writing in the .FVWM2-errors file (an invisble file).  In
Caldera the message is caught and posted in an xmessage window.

RedHat does not provide anything for getting the Xaw3D look instead of
the ugly Xaw look.  If you don't like it (anyone like Xaw?) _you_ fix
it.

Of course the Win95 look in the desktop (configured point and click)
can be taken as a joke of a questionnable taste.


Joe User software:

No Wysywyg word processor.  No Andrew, no Thot.  Use TeX like a real
man or buy ApplixWare... to RedHat.

No end user database: only PostGres.  Xmgrok is not very powerful and
based on Motif, but that is the kind of datbases Joe User needs.  Too bad.

RedHat has a contract with ID for the porting of games to Linux.
Unfortunately it will be another Doom-like with plenty of blood.  The
kind of games you cannot play at, when your children are looking.  It
would be far better we get a King Quest style game: speed is not as
critical than in Doom so X is better suited to it and we could do than
our child have their first games in Linux: I find alarming than my
daughter already knows the Windows95 logo and not the Linux penguin


-Administration.

RedHat lacks integration.  Nothing comparable to Suse or Debian.  Do
you change your monitor?  Don't forget to redefine it in X and
SVGAlib.  If your 17" inches is being repaired and you resort to your
old 14" there is a chance you will forget SVGAlib and than you will
fry your monitor.

Your mouse will have to be defined in X, SVGAlib, Dosemu and so on.
If you change your hostnam then it is to you to hunt your hostname in
/etc/hosts, in the INN config files and so on.

When at install time the user asks for a non US keyboard it is not
necessary to be a genius to deduce two things: he is also using a non
US keyboard when booting and there are 99% chances than his native
language is the same than the language of the keyboard.  So he will be
happier if he can use his national keyboard at the LILO prompt (LILO
20 supports national keyboards), and if the setting of the LANG
variable allows him to get error messages in his native language.
Checking the LANG variable would also allow installtion procedures
arranging symbolic links so hypertext navigation leads the user to the
translated version of the doc.  Redhat does nothing about it.

GLINT.  It has a simple brain damage than has been sucking for years
and than I was able to fix in five minutes.  The Redhat people have
let the bug live for years: it allows you accidental downgrading of
packages and does not protect you against package conflicts.  The
problem is than it invokes RPM with --force.  I will pass about the
fact than if a dependency is missing you don't get any message so you
don't know what package lacks something and what is missing.  (It will
tell you about dependency problems when uninstalling).  Of course it
does not support recursive installs (install that package and
everything it needs).  Better use TKrpm: too bad RH does not ship it.
I think it is GPLed but it is the Not Invented Here syndrom.


RedHat's bugs:

A well known aphorism in computing: never use a .0 version.  Very true
with RedHat.  There were some unforgivable distributions bugs in 4.0
the most glaring being than ghostscript did not work due to font
misplacement.  THat meant than people without Postscript printers
could not print.

So when trying RH 5.0 I was excited: what would be the unforgivable
bug this time?  I found than GCC-2.7.2.3 did not work with Cyrix
processors when linked gainst glibc.  Because GCC worked on Intels
this seems a processor bug not a bug in GCC but the problem should
have been detected in the test phase.  The real distrib bug was than
tar was abominably slow I quickly found thna tar was querying NIS for
usernames.  That was due to an error in the building of tar.  Tar is
not a rarely used program it _should_ have been detected.

It is true than RH is very fast at issuing replacements (free ones of
course) so one month later all problems had been fixed, it is true
than .1 versions are lot better but until RH becomes better at quality
control beginners can have a hard time with their .0s.


Now, ladies and gentlemen this was my exam.  It is 1.30am local time
and it is time for me going to bed.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

==================== The Linux.  Use the Linux, Luke! =======================

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