Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux 9.0 Personal

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I own XP and I do like it very much -- but I also want to expand my OS options and I really do like Red Hat 9 among other Linux distros. Here is my review:
1. Red Hat 9 is better than RH8 in the areas of MUCH IMPROVED fonts (in all applications, esp, in mozilla browser, it is clear and sharp), STABILITY (no more strange lockups), and SPEED (applications pop up faster). Plus Red Hat 9 easily installed and found all the drivers necessary for my HP ZE1115 notebook. Even though I have RH8, I can recommend heartily RH9 to others.
2. Red Hat 9 is better than other Linux distros I tried (Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1; SUSE 8.1). SUSE is NOT friendly to notebook installation and its font is not comparable to RH8 or RH9. Mandrake 9.1 is better than Mandrake 9.0, but still while it is improved, its font lacks RH9's sophistication. However, in Mandrake 9.1, you can import MS TTF automatically by clicking (a big plus), but not in Red Hat 9 (you still need to use shell command lines). In overall comparison, Red Hat 9 satisfied my needs better than all other distros.
3. Windows users should easily migrate to Linux especially using RH9 (b/c it is easy to install and desktop is much like windows). If you are not into games, but in everday computing (web surfing, word processing [OpenOffice.org is compatible with MS Office], and other needs, then RH 9 will not disappoint you. As a Windows user, I really like Linux's Virtual Desktop; literally you can have four (default setting) desktop and use each desktop according to your catagoriezation of work. Windows cannot do this.

In sum, I think, anyone who tries RH9 will not be disappointed but will enjoy Linux's world with ease even those who are diehard Windows users.

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, than
probably 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.

I've struggled through many Linux distros recently--printer and modem problems with Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0; configuration challenges with Suse 8.1. I had thought that Mandrake offered the best distribution of Linux, in terms of ease of installation and configuration, until now.
This latest version of Red Hat Linux is by far the most user friendly, as well as the easiest to install that I've ever had the pleasure to deal with.
The graphical interface is very impressive--this is an attractive distribution. Red Hat 9.0 is vivid proof that Linux has arrived as a viable alternative to Windows in the personal desktop market.
Red Hat 9.0 may be the best Linux distribution released up to now. For the curious PC owner who wants to investigate Linux, it is the way to go.

Seems a bit strange to me but at least two of the reviews that slam Linux as worthless are from Washington reviewers.

My experience with RH9 is that it is one heck of an operating system. The installs went perfectly and it recognized my modem, my printer, my network card, my display card, my display, my drives, processor, everything. Perfectly. No calls to anyone to get authorization codes. No balking at running if I change hardware. And I can install it on as many computers as I want - legally.

The desktops are gorgeous and the ability to have multiple ones and switch between them merely by sliding my cursor off the edge of the screen for a moment is wonderful.

The Office apps read and write Windows Office documents just fine and it comes with Office (and tons of other stuff like CD burner software, fax software, games, and on and on) all in the low price. You'd spend hundreds to load up a Windows machine with comparable software.

It's just my opinion but I think Linux has finally become a very viable alternative to the "other" OS. I still dual boot for when I actually do need that "other" OS because there isn't a Linux alternative for something but my default is to jump right in to RH9.

If you are even curious, isn't it worth [the price] just to see it for yourself? You just might be amazed. I was.

I was very impressed with this offering from Red Hat. The install was clean and simple, with no problems on my Dell 8200 (P4 2GHz, 512MB RDRAM, 40GB). Video and sound was working right out of the box. The install process was simple. Took me a little while to get my printers working the way I wanted, but nothing major.

Linux is an operating system for experienced users, or a new user who is *really* willing to put in the time needed to learn a computer system. If you're an average user with no technical understanding of computers, and are looking for something stable and non-mico$oft, you'd be better off to look into Apple's Mac OS X.

Having said that, I feel this is the best, most user friendly version of Linux I've ever worked on, and would highly recommend it to any experienced user.

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.

...

Installed RH9 on HP laptop (Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM). Install is nice and painless, especially compare to Debian I ran before. Bluecurve is beautiful. Worlds ahead over Debian 2.11, Caldera and even Suse 7, ran all of the before.However following is still an issue:
1. Display drivers. Had a resolution problem. Fixed after olaying in a terminal with rpm and driver packages.
2. Does not mount cdrom automatically all the time. Not a problem for me, since I can mount it in command line, but woul be a source of frustration for a first time user.
3. Graphical package management sucks. With windows user is used to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. Here you install a package from lets say linux.org and if you wish to remove it, you wont see it in graphical interface. No big deal for a UNIX geek, but a problem for a first time user.
4. Problems upgrading Java plug in in Mozilla.
5. An error trying to use Red Hat Network update, needed to install new packages (command line again), really nasty for a first timer.
6. Quite a hog for Linux (do not try to install on Pentium 2:))
7. Lack of any built in media support (mpeg,real,mp3,etc)
Verdict:
Still not a system for a home user. Red Hat realized this I guess, and there will be no more Red Hat Linux. They are leaving home market for Enterprise Server market.A home user will be stuck with Fedora project, which is free, but totally built for an enthusiast Linux geek.
p.s. For hardcore Linux people. No I am not paid by Microsoft, do not live in Washington and not a personal aquaintance of Bill Gates. :)

I dual boot my Dell laptop (with no help from Dell because of Microsoft $$$) using XP and RedHat9.0.

With RH9 I can barely tell the difference between it and XP - plus all of my Office and Email packages are free. If it was not for the WinTel modem (Dell does not supply linux drivers) I would rarely need to even use XP - I used XP about 20% of the time with RH8 and only use XP about 5% of the time with RH9.

In summary I have one expensive XP install, and 6 other old computers on my home network running RedHat and SUSE for free.

... And Amazon[.com] did a great job sending RH9 - I just placed the order 2 days ago and thought it would take weeks.

I was amazed - this is a very complete package. Besides a tight OS you get full-featured word processing, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, task management, web editing & browsing, e-mail, contact and organization software, fax software, CD burning software, multimedia, and on and on and on.

It installed effortlessly on two computers, recognized everything and installed the proper drivers, and configuration is a piece of cake. About the only thing that requires any more than casual computer familiarity is the disk partitioning before you do the actual install but it is explained very well in the manual. All you have to do is read it and follow the steps.

And it doesn't care if you change hardware or install on other computers. No codes to enable it and no disabling if it detects too many changes. I'm still running dual boot simply because I have a few program where I still need Windows so I can boot into either OS whenever I want or need.

... Unbelievable value!

There are a lot of different "flavors" of Linux out there, many of them free to download and install. Price aside, there are many Linux distros that are more user-friendly in terms of installation as well as things "just working" like they should.
Other possibilities a first-time linux installer might consider:
Mepis
Mandrake/Mandriva
Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, RH9 is not the latest and greatest from RH. Go to http://fedora.redhat.com/download/
for the latest from Red Hat. Especially if your machine is not over 3 yrs old!
These and many other O/S 's are not only available, but actually reviewed at http://iso.linuxquestions.org/

Here is a hint: linux can be installed on your hard drive right alongside windows! You really can have it all!

And you only have to pay for the M$ part!