8 Oct 2002 Waldo   » (Journeyer)

Red Hat 8.0
I've installed Red Hat 8.0 as my office desktop. Or, rather, as a part-time desktop to see if it's feasible to switch my family business over from Windows. I'm playing stupid, and refusing to open a terminal, in hopes that I can figure out what it would be like for the average user. Here's the weirdnesses:
  • Lack of "Network Neighborhood." I can't even figure out how to go about making an equivalent happen. I eventually had to guess that, if I opened Eazel, I could open "smb://" as the URL to get a Windows-style SMB listing. I can then browse to the servers on the network, but it's not possible to make the resulting folders appear on the desktop or mount them as drives.
  • Some stuff just doesn't run via SMB. If I click on an audio file on an SMB share, I get the following error message: "'X Multimedia System' can't open 'Tom Waits - Chrismas card from a hooker in Minneapolis' because 'X Multimedia System' can't access files at 'smb' locations. No other application sare available to view this file. If you copy this file onto your computer, you may be able to open it."
  • What's with the "Extras" menu? It doesn't make any sense. If they're programs, list them where they ought to be.
  • Lack of a "My Documents" folder. No, I don't use it either, but people want it. Particularly Mac OS X's approach, subdivided into Music, Video, Documents, etc.
  • No Flash, RealAudio, MP3 support.
I really like Red Hat 8.0. I'd lost all faith that they had any concept of how to put together a desktop environment. Plainly, I was mistaken.

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