RedHat
Ease of installation
The installation program is fully graphical, it takes quite a while before the GUI is ready and the installation can begin. During the whole installation there is a help text available at the left side of the screen. The text is very informative about the choices about to be made, but not always exhaustive. It is always possible to go back to the previous screens during the installation and the whole navigation through the installation is very simple and intuitive.
In this review, the default installation setup was picked, which is a GNOME workstation.
After the installation was complete, the CDROM was ejected and the system made a reboot, a message asking to remove the boot floppy was missing.
The default login is text mode.
Setting up hardware
Mouse:Does not recognize scroll mice. The installation did not succeed in setting the manually chosen scroll mouse correct up.
Network interface card: Networking is setup during installation.
Graphics Adaptor: Autoprobes the graphics adaptor with no further modifications.
Sound card:Sound was not installed during installation. When the sound configuration utility was run afterwards the reason was found; Redhat detected the Cirrus Logic CS4614 in the test machine but does not support it, but did tell that the ALSA-project supported the card.
Selecting software
The options in the software selection menu was
Gnome workstation (default)
KDE workstation
Server
Custom
The first 3 options will install a preselected list of packages whereas the fourth option gives the user the opportunity to choose every single package to be installed on the system. In this package selection menu some information about the total size of all the selected packages was missing.
Ease of usage
For everyday usage, the default menus in GNOME created by RedHat is fully usable. There is no need for the user to setup any further applications.
The cdrom drive is supermounted which makes it easier for first time users to use Linux.
Language support
Redhat support the following 17 languages:
* Czech
* English
* French
* German
* Hungarian
* Icelandic
* Italian
* Norwegian
* Romanian
* Russian
* Serbian
* Slovak
* Slovenian
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Turkish
* Ukrainian
Ease of maintenance
Software maintenance
Adding and deleting software is performed through the universal RPM Package Manager (RPM command), however it is necessary to download packages before installation. However additional programs to automate this process exists, but has not been tested. For more information about the RPM package format can be found on the General comments page
Managing hardware
The tool Kudzu detects newly installed and removed hardware. However it may lead to problems if you have rather old and/or unsupported hardware based upon the ISA bus.
Technical information
Difference in Commercial and free version
Outside the States it is possible to buy two different commercial versions of RedHat Linux A Standard Edition and a Deluxe Edition.
Software
The Standard Edition features:
An installation guide and a documentation CD
The Deluxe edition features:
In addition to the standard edition a Getting started guide, an application CD with 30 popular 3rd party workstation applications and a Powertools CD containing 300+ Open source applications.
Support
In the Standard Edition you get:
30 days Priority Online Access to software updates
90 days Web- or email-based installation support
In the Deluxe Edition you get:
90 days Priority Online Access to software updates
30 days telephone installation support
90 days Web- or email-based installation support
Submenu |
