Red Hat Linux 9.0 Personal – Fast, Secure, and User-Friendly

Very unforgiving.
Could have included fixes that just weren’t there. Hence any real hardware problem prevented it from being installed. Could not install even in the least with a network connection and very time consuming trying to work out the snafus.

No support from reseller
The software works great. The reseller refused to get me a registration card to make support available from red hat.

Linux is great, if not fully compatible with all hardware
First, let me start off by noting that almost all of the reviewers that gave Red Hat Linux 9 very low marks had mostly hardware incompatibility issues. They bought Red Hat, threw the CD in the CD drive, and hoped for the best, expecting it to be able to successfully detect and configure all of their particular hardware.While Linux has made tremendous strides in hardware compatibility and usually can work with most hardware right out of the box, it does not have the advantage of market critical mass and monopolistic power that Microsoft has. Thus, all vendors that sell hardware for the home PC provide drivers for Windows, being that Windows has about 95% of that market. That being said, Linux now has made tremdous stides in hardware support. It supports most major hardware products, but lacks in the area of some of the more exotic or bleeding edge graphics cards, sound cards, network cards, and most winmodems. It’s getting better all the time (due to open source developers reverse engineering, and many vendors providing drivers), but Linux can’t boast the level of hardware support that Windows can, due to market realities.The people who gave bad reviews attempted to blindly install Red Hat Linux on their machines, without checking for hardware support ahead of time. Thus, due to hardware incompatibility or configuration, they had headaches and wrongly blamed Linux.My personal experience with Linux in general and Red Hat 9 in particular has been wonderful. I’ve installed it on an IBM Thinkpad 600E. The installation went smoothly and I only had to manualy choose the correct video driver. It did not detect the Mwave internal winmodem (I expected this) and did not detect the sound card, but I do not need sound on my notebook. Apparently it is possible to configure so that Red Hat can use the sound card, but I don’t need it. But Red Hat did seamlessly detect everything else and it all worked beautifully.I’ve had a lot of fun with Linux. I’m a programmer and it is chaulk full of development tools (without having to pay mega $ for MS Visual Studio). Linux is a programmers paradise. It also has everything MS Office has (with Open Office and KOffice). It can manipulate graphics with the GIMP, it has tons of games, and endless configuration possibilties. RH Linux loads both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments, and it’s fun to play with both, being that they are not exactly alike, and both have different strengths and weeknesses. And both, quite frankly, are much more attractive and fun to use than the Fisher Price interface of Windows XP. They are also far more configurable, with much more eye candy than XP. I’ve also been able to successfully download and install and use huge software titles like JBuilder 5 and Eclipse (Java Integrated Development Environments).I’ve also been completely impressed with the amazing stability and efficiency of Linux. I can crash an application, but it never affects the OS. I just have to kill the app, and everything else goes about it’s merry way without a hitch. Contrast that with Windows XP, and all of it’s bugs and the slightest application problem can bring it to it’s knees (prompting you to send a bug report to MS). Or, of course, the infamous Blue Screen of Death. No BSOD in Linux at all. And finally, there are far fewer virus worries with Linux.In short, Linux is great. It might be a bit rough around the edges for some newbie/non technical users, but it is very easy to use (just requires a small learning curve, just like anything else new) and can do so many great things, at a small fraction of the cost of MS alternatives.Those new to Linux should probablly start off with a distribution that runs from a CD, like Knoppix. Knoppix automatically detects and configures your hardware. All you have to do is pop the CD in and reboot. And it is completely risk free because it does not touch your hard drive. Knoppix can give you a taste of how great Linux can be. And if you like what you see, you should first check hardware compatibility at the distros web site, thanprobably re-partition your hard drive with Partition magic. And of the distro set up routines will detect the partitions and allow you easily set up a dual boot PC. Alternatively, buy a whole new PC with Linux pre-loaded (ensuring hardware compatibility). You can do that here at Amazon, or Walmart or Lindows.com, or many others. You can get a new PC for as little as $200 (the cost of WinXP by itself).But do give it a try and be prepared for hardware compatibility and that it is a different OS, so there will be a small learning curve. It’s very well worth the effort.The only reasons I did not give Red Hat Linux 9 the full 5 stars is because Red Hat has ended their retail product, concentrating on the enterprise. Also, Red Hat Linux does not include a disc partitioning tool like Mandrake and SuSE do. But I’ve loved it. I’m now looking forward to partitioning my eMachines PC with WinXP, and loading a dual boot Linux installation. I just have not decided which distribution it’s going to be.

Less Than What I Expected
I expected very much the release of RedHat 8.1 with a bit of impatience, and I was glad when I heard that it was not RedHat 8.1, it was going to be RedHat 9!When it was released I bought it, to find myself so disappointed in many aspects.First I’m going to mention the virtues. It has not changed much and it looks in most ways very similar to RedHat 8.0. The only significant difference is the upgrade of GNOME to 2.2, and KDE 3.1, both very beautiful and easy to handle. It can be very easily installed, you can make several logical partitions of the Hard Drive with Disk Druid (specially using “ext3 and “swap”). Recognizes almost all the hardware in your system, I don’t even have to configure GNU/Linux for it to recognize my two CD Drives (a DVD Drive and a CD-RW Drive).Now the negative part. RedHat 9 is very buggy, specially concerning graphics. When I began using RedHat 9, I noticed that there were some lines going down the screen that made it uncomfortable to see what was going on or what you were doing. I have to constantly reboot my computer once I log out to eliminate it.. still with that there are other small graphic problems. According to one user, this problem is corrected using VESA as the default graphic card.Before, with RedHat 8, it configured my Hauppage WinTV perfectly, and I could run XawTV without any kinds of problems. This is not the case with RedHat 9. The XawTV apparently is buggy or doesn’t configure the TV Card correctly. I had lots of trouble using XCDRoast which crashed constantly every time I tried to record some file in the CD-RW. This also didn’t happen with RedHat 8.Also, there are some facts that for me are so surprising coming from RedHat, if they wish to maintain their status as the most popular GNU/Linux distribution. First, during the installation procedure, RedHat 9 doesn’t offer (yet!!) in its graphic installation the option of formatting the Hard Drive using ReiserFS filesystem. You have to go to command prompt, and write “mkreiserfs /dev/hdx” where x is the number of the logical drive you want to format, then go again to the GUI and click “Reset” so that the ReiserFS format appears, and in the process of assigning “root”, “boot”, “usr”, etc., you have to constantly tell the machine that you don’t want to choose a format. If you want multiple partitions, it is recommended to have it partitioned previously (Mandrake is good for that, and also Partition Magic) so you can format with ReiserFS more effectively.Furthermore, they didn’t do the least effort to make it more user friendly, specially for those who use Winmodems. It is incredible that a distribution like Lindows OS (for me, not a good distribution) in its most recent release included them, and RedHat has not included them in any way. This will make the Linux users (specially beginners) to go through all the task of figuring out where to download the drivers, how to compile them and install them, and then configure the Winmodem so that it works (which for a beginner, it is a very tedious, frustrating and long process).I don’t know what happened to RedHat people this time, but I don’t think they made a good job doing this new release. What happened was that I reinstalled RedHat Linux 8, and will stay with it until they release the next one (9.1 or the 10)…. believe me, you won’t regret it, and you won’t miss RedHat in any way. It is the best GNU/Linux distribution today….