Linux on the Desktop

In an inspired moment late Friday I decided to install RedHat Linux 8.0 on my desktop computer. The computer, a slightly more than 4 year old PII-333 with 192MB of RAM, had a spare SCSI disk which I believed could do good with a new OS.

Installation of RedHat goes like a dream. As I have a 10Mbps connection I prefer to install via FTP. I have installed RedHat numerous times, finding the correct disk(s) was easy. (The fact that I know that my Compaq Netelligent card is really a TI ThunderLan in disguise was of big help...) Installation took slightly more than 1 hour, and consumed some 2GB of disk.

Booting the system for the first time went smoothly, as did logging in. But from there I have been haunted by more than one peculiarity. Why is it that I cannot drag windows when I am in GNOME, whereas it works when I am in KDE? Why does not XMMS come with a MP3 decoder? Why is the NTFS kernel module not part of the default kernel configuration?

That was just the beginning. Never figured out the window dragging, ended up using KDE instead. The XMMS problem was easily solved, but well... had to go online to find the correct plugin. (I had to do a plugin search for Flash for Mozilla too, why is it not a part of the distribution?) But XMMS is still acting up. Why does it stop every say 5 songs to tell me that it cannot play sound when all I have to do to fix the problem is to click 'OK' and 'play'?

And why is the default language set to a non-ISO8859-1 language? Every time a terminal based application, especially Pine and other ncurses dependent apps, tried to display any of the Norwegian special characters æ,ø or å all I got was a terminal going bananas. *arg* And where to easily change it? (I ended up changing it in /etc/sysconfig/i18n, which was the natural(?!) place to start. Now my beloved Norwegian characters show up the way they should, but as a punishment I get the Locale not supported by C library thing all the time...

So, it really is uncertain how long it will take before I configure GRUB to make Windows my prime OS again. Not only does it do all the things I want, it does it quicker. (The new KDE is comparatively extremely slow!)

There is much more to be said. Anyway, I am fed up with having to spend hours on end just to get stuff the way I want it... so sorry TuX, I'll most probably will continue using Windows!

Posted by ludvig at October 21, 2002 11:14 PM | TrackBack