My Impressions of RedHat 9
It all started when a friend at work purchased a box set and wanted me to help install it on his compaq lap top. The lap top already had Windows XP on it, so we split the 40 gig hard drive in half with partition magic and rebooted with disk 1 of the 3 disk set in the CD drive. The install was simple and went smooth. I chose to partition the drive myself because I'm always afraid the auto partitioning will wipe out the other OS, it probably wouldn't but I just like to partition it myself so I know what's going on. We chose a work station install with the default software package and the install went without incident.
Then the reboot and X would not start. I tried “redhat-config-xfree86” and it would not run without X working, “?” whose idea was that? The usual configuration tools for X didn't seem to be installed. I tried to open XF86Config with my favorite editor, pico, not installed,(I guess I really should learn to use VI) I tried the Midnight Commander, not installed. By now I'm thinking why aren't these basic tools installed, this is stuff that is normally on every Linux system. Well after an internet search I found an X config tool that was installed and got the graphical interface up and running.
Every thing else worked fine, sound, network, mouse, don't know if the modem worked, didn't try it, but my guess is that its a win-modem and will require a driver. I didn't get to play with it much because it took so long to get X working that we were out of time. So I borrowed the install disks too install it on one of my computers at home.
The install too my main desktop at home went without a hitch, I did a new install over my RedHat 7.2 installation saving the old “/home” partition. Again I chose a workstation install with the default software package. The machine rebooted and everything worked, sound, graphics, mouse, and the network card was recognized, I only needed to enter my network information. The only thing that didn't work was my ISA PNP modem, which didn't surprise me, I haven't seen any Linux installation yet that would setup this card.
One of the first things I did was to install “mc” and “pico” because I knew they were missing from my experience with the laptop. The rpms for these are on the installation disks along with “gkrellm” which I also installed at that time. Next I attempted to install “xmahjongg” from a source tarball only to find that there was no compiler installed. At this point I decided to reinstall and select all but the server software packages. This still didn't install everything as I figured out later that I could delved deeper into the software groups and selected more individual packages, but at least It got me the development tools for compiling software.
So, what do I think of RedHat-9? Well the installer is good, easy to use and picks up most hardware. The Gnome desktop interface is nice, haven't tried KDE yet. “Open Office” and the “Mozilla” web browser are included which made me happy. But I was disappointed with the lack of basic system tools. There was no option in the setup to boot too the command line, I guess not many do this but its nice to have that option. Overall I got the impression that it was dumbed down or geared more toward someone who just uses the computer more like the average Windows user. I guess this is not a bad thing, if Linux hopes to attract more users away from the Windows community then this is probably the type of thing to do it. But it's not quite what I want, although it will be staying on my computer for awhile and I'll play with it, and tweak it, and maybe it will grow on me.