Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux 7.2

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Reliable
Secure
Easy to use
Isn't that what MS promises with each new release? Red Hat has been providing all three for years now. This release is the best so far. You don't need to be a computer nerd to know how to use it. I find it simpler to use that Windows XP! If all you use your PC for is to surf the web, e-mail, and chat, then this is for you. KDE, and Mozilla are great, and getting better all the time. If you want to be stuck in the upgrade cycle, that is windows, then stay away from this. When you use it, you'l never go back. It's all you need in an operating system and more. (Redhat comes with Star Office, and the Gimp), you get everthing that would cost you... (Office XP and Adobe Photoshop) if you went with windows. That alone is a good enough reason to try it out. You might just be surpised with what you find

Linux is what people wanted out of Windows... that being stability.

WinXP started off pretty stable, but as I add more software, it keeps having new problems and it feels like the updates never stop. So when I need to get some critical work done, I swing over to Linux. Linux feels a bit like a step back graphically for most Windows users (Red Hat doesn't have MEs or XP's slick looks), but I haven't been able to kill Linux yet... It tells me when it doesn't like what I'm doin', but the only problems I've encountered were done through my own toying with hardware configuration files.

Linux has a lot of options Windows doesn't, and the command-line option IS preferable for old DOS jockies like me.
KDE is a good GUI, but it isn't nearly as as advanced as XP or MAC O/S 10.1. I'd say Linux is more of a workhorse. The games for Linux are very behind the times, and it's standard processes can be confusing for those new to it. The capabilities this O/S offers professionals is amazing, however.

I'm starting to like Mozilla better than MS Internet Explorer, and after I get the hang of it, I know Linux is probably going to be first choice booting up. I'll probably always have Windows running on a seperate PC, or partitioned with Linux, as Windows does support the widest range of software.

Still, be aware; If you just bought a brand-spankin'-new PC, and think that your GeForce 4 and Audigy sound-card configurations are going to be a walk in the park, you're wrong. In most cases, you'll be hunting down drivers on the internet, and trying to figure out how to compile your kernel.

All in all, Linux is a great O/S, but the learning curve is steep. Don't feel bad if you're a long-time Windows user, and feel like a dumb newbie again with this O/S... I've spoken to many people about it... you're not alone!

I just recently installed this distro on my box at work and again on my home box and I couldn't be happier. Installation took about 40 minutes, and was the easiest that I have ever seen. When I started out with Linux, I decided to use Caldera's eDesktop 2.4, and was pleased with it, but RH 7.2 makes it seem quite old-fashioned and out of date. Unlike with OpenLinux, RH 7.2 got my sound card to work as soon as it was installed, and the X Windows system was configured practically automatically, unlike with Caldera, where I had to play around with XF86Setup and lizardx quite a bit. I even managed to get a higher resolution than I have with my Windows ME OS, which resides on a separate partition at home. The default boot loader, GRUB, worked so well with both OS's that I uninstalled Partition Magic as I felt that I did not need it anymore. For the people who are not overly fond of the command line, this is a perfect distro, as pretty much everything that you can do with the command line, you can also do with the GUI tools that are provided with this distro. Although an experienced Linux user, I did not even have to read any of the instructions prior to installing and all of my hardware (except for my WinModem) was detected at startup. My old trusty Rockwell hardware modem works fine with it though. The KDE 2 desktop is clean and crisp, Konqueror works as fine on the Web as it does on local files and KOffice has all the productivity tools that anyone could want, and behind it all are the tools that any old UNIX user will find necessary in a server. The only things that I actually had to configure was my Internet connexion (and even that was done mainly through GUI tools) and import my config files to get my shell and rc commands for some apps to get them working the way I wanted them to. On my web servers at work, the web services were extrememly easy to configure and have been running fine ever since I upgraded. So far this is the best version of Linux that I have ever come across and will be using it from now on.

If you're looking to try linux for the first time, this is a good place to begin. Redhat's popularity and (relatively) installationa nd upgrade packages make it very good for windows/mac users to get their feet wet in the unix world. Linux is still very much a tinkerer's operating system with some rough edges, but once setup is finished, I believe a normal user could now operate redhat without being a unix-savvy guru. If you've had some experience with linux before, I would recommend you look at the debian distribution, which offers an improved management/upgrade system and is generally geared a bit more to the unix-savvy.
For those who are unaware, 'Linux' actually describes the core of the operating system (called the kernel), and the rest of the programs, including the 'windows', are packaged together as a 'distribution', which all have different plusses and minuses. Redhat is very popular, so finding support for it is relatively easy. Enjoy!

I've used everyversion from 5.2 up to 7.2
of the Red Hat distribution,
and this is the best version I have seen.

The X configuration is much easier to setup, and you get
quite a few good apps prebuilt and shipping on the cd.

However, a couple of things to be warned of. First,
when setting up host name during post install can break
X. to solve
this problem I did set host name during install.
Also Postfix and the
power tools are missing from
this release.

7.2 is a great improvement over the previous. As I write this review, Red Hat Linux is up to version 9. I didn't discover any problems with this version, and the updates and patches available with up2date just keep comming, even though I hadn't discovered the problems that were fixed.

Linux is for those who either want to do the same thing all the time and are able to get their version of linux to do that, and those who like to tinker with the guts of the OS. I think Windows XP is a better choice for the rest of us.

I am not a linux guru, and I find it difficult and tedious to get things running that aren't installed and running automatically as part of instillation. By the way, instillation is a piece of cake anyone can do, and once it is finished you have a ton of application software installed and running, unlike Windows, which only installs the OS and you have to install each application seperately.

Although I spent 35 years as a software engineer, I still chose Windows XP for my home machine because I am tired of tinkering with an OS. And tinker with the linux OS you will surely have to eventually do, probably sooner than latter.

(...)

What I as an (Oracle) server user don't like about RedHat is the missing Oracle support (of course it will work; but compare with SuSE (...) and also Oracle uses SuSE for their Linux development now, they switched away from RedHat), and some server features like the Logical Volume Manager was long missing and is still much better supported by SuSE. So yes, independently RedHat deserves a great review, but in comparison with SuSE it's only #2, that's the reason why I subtracted some points.

I bought this version because SuSE would not install well with my monitor. Red Hat 7.2 automatically installed all of the necessary drivers, and configured my DSL. The nvidia drivers (...)work flawlessly with my GeForce 2 MX. Great job Red Hat!

I have been using RedHat on and off since version 5.0 (I could never get 4.2 to work)I was using Mandrake up until recently and decided to return to the Hat. I started using RedHat 7.2 on my main workstation because it supports the most new software. When something new comes out RedHat is usually the first to be supported. Sometimes with other distros you have to wait until it's version is released. (Example:Ximian) I use Suse on servers because it comes with every program imaginable. One thing about RH I don't like is the registration process. Everyone complains about MS but no one seems to say much about this for RH. All Linux distros are reliable and fun to learn with so take your pick.

Overall, Red Hat 7.2 is a good distribution - the installation process is very simple, and should be easy to handle for Windows users trying out Linux for the first time. You can have a ready-to-use system in under an hour if you are fimiliar with Linux, while new users will have to do some light reading from the included installation manual.

-Red Hat 7.2 is a little hardware hungry with the default install. You'll need at least a Pentium II and 64MB RAM to run it smoothly.

-The loss of the powertools CD is a blow for those users who want to tweak their system a little bit, especially those that want to replace Sendmail with Postfix. Replacing Sendmail in 7.1 required a simple RPM installation. Now you get to build Postfix from source.