Red Hat Linux 9: A Step Closer, But Still With Some Annoyances

Source: OS News

The up to now highly anticipated Red Hat Linux 9 is finally released. OSNews had its hands to the final version of Red Hat Linux 9 for over 3 weeks now and we were able to evaluate it in a number of ways. The final version is not too different than the Phoebe-3 beta for which we wrote a preview recently.

I wouldn't like to repeat myself, as most things apply as in Phoebe beta 3, so if you want more info on the product in a "review-mode" please read our article as linked above. Only new additions are the cursor theme for XFree86, a few cleanups on the system and some bug fixes. Also, a lot has been said in other reviews on the web about the installation and the feel of the OS. This mini-article will only focus on what's missing, or what's not there yet.

First, I will list a few things of what you can actually find in the new release: you will find a good choice of apps on Red Hat Linux 9, from office to fax apps, some entertaining games, a fully featured web suite and more. The NPTL library offers better responsivess of the system taking care of how the Linux kernel is dealing with threads, there is a cleaned up start menu, a bug fixed Nautilus (however it still has disabled the ability to edit Gnome's menus), Mozilla's good looking AA font rendering and more. KDE 3.1 and Gnome 2.2 are included, in addition to a number of servers like Apache, Postgresql, mysql etc.

So, now let's see what -- in my opinion -- still missing from Red Hat (the below is indented just as constructive criticism btw).
Many users and admins will define this version as an "incremental" release rather than a full blown new featured version, despite the major version bump. The OS still lacks a number of GUI setting panels, like dealing with partitioning, boot manager, visual partition mounting (e.g. automatically show the partitions on the context menu under Gnome's "Disks"), Internet connection sharing, Bluetooth support, a visual way to install fonts for both GTK+ 1.x apps and fontconfig, a way for a user to easily install applications in its own space without the need for a root password and without the almost always accompanied dependency hell, a way to add new services easily, a Gnome Gamma correction tool, energy saver tool, a better Camera app that is more integrated to an image viewer or an image manipulation tool.