Red Hat Rant
Ahhh, so in my getting to grips with, I have a few gripes about Linux. Some day I may cultivate these into a well-formed, coherent technical explanation, but just now . . . just now, I’ll share with you a special favorite rant of mine.
New install, right? By default, it wants to check the install media (who cares?) then there’s a screen that says “welcome to <version of Red Hat>” where you get the chance to say “ohhh, wrong CD …” then you move on to disk partitioning, and you have to intentionally select that yes you want to erase all data, and enter a bunch of other parameters … network … firewall, SE-Linux … altogether 10-15 minutes if you know what you are doing. Nothing onerous. Lots of “yes, a firewall, and these other things, these are all a good ideas, I’ll just mostly agree to what you suggest.”
Then, the “commit” step, this stupid screen for which I have a special hatred, because to the naked eye, it appears to say: “you know you’ll need these CDs, right?” And the default response, if you are not careful, for no good reason, is to reboot!
Because . . . most people who think they want to install Red Hat are probably wrong, even if they’ve ponied up the $350 for an Enterprise license.
pppppppbbbbbttt!!!
Responses
Brian Moyles
Cool cats use Kickstart to install RedHat machines :)
Hatred
You should have called the Red Hat tech support, you’ve got a clear and reasonable complaint. Others have had to learn the hard way. You need to know the insides of the OS. Regardless the OS. I had to edit the latest Fedora Core 5 (Red Hat open source developement release) to boot to command line just to diagnose problems with the non-open source X driver that ATI provides. Problem was, it doesn’t work with the latest Xfree. I’ve yet to come across an Xorg or Xfree windowing system it works with. So much for linux for me. I migrated to Fedora just to get that fucking damn video driver to work, but despite their unsupported claims it works with Red Hat (i.e. Fedora), no luck. I need fast 3D editing, and I’d like nothing better than linux-core based operating system. Only trouble has been to get one to work and fully support my hardware.
I’d still opt for the Enterprise license, if you really need a stable operating system. Calling them should get things sorted out. That’s what you pay for. You don’t pay for the software (well, some of it, but the usefulness of some of it may be in question), but tech support is the most of what you pay for when you buy a Linux-based OS-distro.
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