Red Hat 9: The good, the bad, and the sweet fonts

Well it's out, at long last, I'm not saying that this release has taken a long time, I was ready for an update shortly after Psyche was released to clean up some of the rough edges. I'm not going to write a review on Shrike since others have done a much better job than I'm capable of, but I am going to comment on my observations after using it as a workstation for a few days.Downloading:When I first read that Red Hat was going to release it for RHN customers a week earlier than for the public, I was a little disappointed, since I cancelled my RHN account a few months ago. When ever a new Red Hat distribution is on the horizon, I can't help but feel like a 6 year boy waiting for Christmas. I assumed that I would probably be able to find Shrike on a private FTP mirror before it was released to the public, but I had no idea how easy it would be.On the afternoon of the first day, it was posted on Slashdot that Shrike was available with a program named BitTorrent. I had no idea how sweet BitTorrent is, but after downloading the Red Hat ISO's at a rate that was pushing the max of my DSL on the first day of availability, It's my favorite method of downloading distributions in the futureInstalling:One of the problems I had while installing Psyche is that my laptop could not boot from the install CD's. The problem as I understand it is that Psyche used a 2.88 MB boot image and apparently some systems have problems with that. I expected to have to use boot floppies with Shrike as well but it booted off the CD with no problems. I don't know if Red Hat went back to using a 1.4MB boot image or perhaps fixed an error that was in Psyche's boot image, I'm just happy that it works.The installation was pretty straight forward and went as expected. The one thing that I noticed is that the installing files took nearly an hour. That seems like a very long time to me, but perhaps it's because that I'm used to doing minimal server installations which only take 5 minutes.The GoodThere are many new features of Shrike that I now won't be able to live without, the first of which is the netprofile kernel boot parameter. If you have several network profiles on a mobile computer, you can configure GRUB to pass the netprofile parameter to the kernel and the system configures the proper networking profile while booting. It's one of those improvements where I never realized the old way was such a pain in the ass until I saw the new way. kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=LABEL=/ netprofile=HomeThe next feature that I can't live without is the ability for Evolution to use external scripts in it's filters. Combine this with Bogofilter and you have an effective client side spam filter. There are many other great features in Evolution 1.2 but the filtering is by far my favorite. I wrote a simple howto about configuring evolution with Bogofilter.The third thing that I noticed and keep noticing is how awesome the font rendering is I couldn't believe how good Galeon looked when I first opened it up and browsed to a page. Take a look:I know it's only fonts, but I'll tell you that reading the web has a whole different feel than it did a week ago. The new Xfree86 also seems rather fast and responsive. Since I have a laptop I don't change resolutions but being able to do that on the fly is a nice feature as well.With Psyche, I couldn't listen to audio while working on my laptop. X had a super low priority and anytime I'd click a link in Galeon or scroll my console window xmms would skip. Not any more, I can listen to my tunes again SWEET!The (not so) BadOver all Shrike is a pretty solid release, there isn't very many things that I don't like. One thing that bugs me is the Open Office splash window, it stays on top and in the way for way too long. If there is a setting somewhere to turn that off please let me know. Open Office also had an issue when you right click on a misspelled word, you might as well go get a drink, it's going to be at least 90 seconds of disk thrashing before the context menu pops up on my PIII 650 192MB laptop.When I write mail in Evolution somehow I manage to spell every word perfect. It's a real confidence builder for my typing skills. That's right spell checking in Evolution doesn't catch any misspelled words, I enabled the English library and all the relevant check boxes but still no errors when I check my mail. If I don't get this sorted out I'll be submitting this to bugzilla.There is also another minor bug in evolution dealing with the window while editing filters, you can check out bug #87884, it's annoying, but hardly a problem. One of the most disappointing things about Shrike is they omitted the menu editor once again. As I found out with Psyche it's a total pain in the ass to edit the menu config files. When I was in Raleigh for the RH401 class an unnamed Red Hat Employee (spot) said that the editor would definitely be in the next release after Psyche.That's my observations during the first couple days of using Shrike on the desktop, It's a solid release and well worth the upgrade from psyche in my opinion.