i finally got to try out redhat 7.3. installed it on another laptop i snagged from work. (i swapped out it’s little 6 gig for a possibly dying 20 gig, but so far, so good - although the drive is a little noisey.) 7.3 isn’t too radical, but is cool and it is working well on this box - a sony vaio pcg-f430. it’s only got 64 megs so i just placed an order on crucial.com for 2 x 128 meg modules - only $95! (anyone need a 64 meg module?) that should make things run a little better. gnome and kde both look very good on this lcd panel. it was a bit tricky getting the new “ng” wireless drivers up and running for my wpc11 pcmcia card. i still haven’t got wep working, though - spent a lot of time yesterday and today on that, but have given up for now.

hack note: i was up until 4am on friday night trying to get the wpc11 pcmcia card recognized. i got close, but no cigar. when i rebooted in the morning, it was detected! i guess you do need to reboot linux sometime just like windows!

so now linux has a plethora of gui broswers to choose from: netscape, mozilla, konqueror, nautilus, opera and galeon. i haven’t tested the new ns version7pr1, but 4.79 comes with rh 7.3 and seems rather speedy than 4.76 on windows - even with opera and galeon open as well! mozilla is buggy and caused my machine to slow down cuz it was hogging resources - i downloaded the critial updates from rhn (redhat network) which patched mozilla, but i don’t know if the problem is fixed yet. galeon, which is based on the same “gecko” render engine as mozilla, was a nice surprise! very speedy. doesn’t seem bloated. and rendered the css from movable type very nicely. the only complaint i have i that the text box doesn’t wrap right - same with mozilla. opera works real well also. it has some problems with the css - the font is a little screwy with the calendar in movable type - but it doesn’t have the word wrap problem in the text box. (i’m using opera to enter this now.) nautilus is the gnome browser and seems slow bringing up pages, but it works and renders nicely. konqueror is the kde browser and is pretty cool. if i’m in kde, i tend to use that, but that could change with galeon.

well, i’m off to read a bit of the hacker ethic then bed…