Well lets look at the good side. If you just install redhat 9 as a client or workstation machine it will find your network, your modem, your wireless, your video, your printer etc,. It will install all of the operating system and all of the applications you might want and at the end of it you will have a complete working system. It's slick, it's complete and there's nothing else you will need to get working.

If you come from a windows background, and let's be honest most people will be coming from that background, you will probably be used to a box which arrived with windows already installed so the first thing is that you will not know that installing an operating system can take the best part of an hour. Similarly you might look at the specs and want to know what on earth takes up 1.8G without realising that windows small install size is only possible because an out of the box installation of windows will let you play patience and do nothing else until you install several gig of applications.

There are a lot of minor points like this where Linux may look worse if you are comparing it to windows without really understanding what you are looking at. For example booting up linux with a standard build is slower than windows but if you know what you are looking at you will see that Linux is starting a lot of services that windows will not even consider.

Are there any points which could be better? Well of course there are, for example it could make it clearer which services can be disabled, linux will start a lot of mail and web services which are extremely powerful and useful but not needed if all you want is a single machine with a mail client and browser. Also installing as a dual boot machine is still confusing, it's better than windows in that it won't assume it can destroy everything but it's still unclear for a novice user how to set this up.

In short if a novice user were to be given this and windows and to install them on two empty systems they would probably find both easy(ish) to install. Linux would win slightly on installation as it generally seems more reliable at working out what your hardware is. Linux would win as a usable out of the box solution as once installation is complete your applications are there. Windows would probably win for applications appearance once they had been installed. The only problems Linux really faces are that people are unwilling to face the learning curve for something slightly different.


Poor quality   June 25, 2004
 9 out of 24 found this review helpful

I am very disappointed with Redhat. This is a worse distro than version 6 in my opinion.

Organisation of programs is poor. Naming conventions are predictably dire. It did not pick up my sound card, my webcam or my printer. It will not play my CDs or DVDs. The games provided are predictable arcade games dating back 15years or more. Stability on linux is not as good as many would have you believe. It is still capable of hanging which is as good as a crash. And perculiar technical error messages appear when you try to run some programs or do unexpected things.

Security loopholes exist on linux too but I a simply can't be bothered to figure out how to connect to the internet through linux and it is therefore not a problem.

A dual boot partition allows me to switch between linux and windows but the manager refers to windows as DOS and sets linux as the default operating system. How annoying is that.

Performance on linux is nothing special in comparison with windows. Infact in some cases it might even be worse. Booting up takes ages. Running programs seems to take just as long. There is nothing fast about linux.

All in all....moving over from the darkside (Microsoft) is too difficult for most people to contemplate. I should not expect to have to buy new hardware just to move over to linux. I should not have to find drivers and alternative software for them. This should be provided in the distro.

I should not have to buy commercial partition software in order to set up a dual boot system. Again the distro should do this for me. After all windows is the number 1.

Even doing simple things like setting up screensavers, themes and finding files becomes a nightmare on linux.

Good Luck!


NO MORE REDHAT   January 7, 2004
 6 out of 13 found this review helpful

People, save yourself the cash, RH9 is not supported by red hat as such no more, its source has been given over to the open source community in the guise of FEDORA, you can download it free and are entitled to the update service for free. just use your browser and look it up save yourself the cash, thats the beauty of Linux=Freedom


Finally, feasible competition for Bill Gates’ crowd   January 3, 2004
 35 out of 36 found this review helpful

Having worked with Sun’s Solaris, Novell, Windows and Linux over the past ten years, Red Hat 9 is a version of the Linux operating system that can finally compete favourably with Microsoft Windows as: a front-end server; a desktop workstation that is much cheaper to operate; and, even a finely-tuned laptop where performance with minimal resources is critical.

The OS is incredibly easy to install on a new system, and if you can't bear to get rid of Windows completely, then it is a fairly straight forward procedure to set up your system with a dual boot option giving you the choice on start-up: Linux or Windows.

Red Hat uses a version of KDE that gives Red Hat a Windows-esque interface and allows a mass of software to be downloaded especially for Linux. And the good thing... is that most of the software for Linux is free. OpenOffice is the typical example. This is software that has most of the features of MS Office 2000/2003 but is open source, free, 99.5% compatible with MS Office and you can download updates/upgrades any time you like. But just about every conceivable piece of software that is written for Windows now has its counterpart for Linux and, generally, they are all free too. That’s a significant saving in on-going costs.

Other good points include a relative speed-up. If you’re doing the same task in Windows and Linux, then generally the Linux version runs faster. Certainly, if you use Linux as a server platform then you can expect some nice speed-ups in most Java applications.

Yes, it has a few downsides aswell, but they can be fixed relatively easily. There was a significant security scare about the Linux kernel (the processor machine code) about six weeks ago but a new version of the kernel has been released to fix it, and it is readily available. Another technical difference is that around 80% of the world uses Internet Explorer to browse the internet and there is no version of this for Linux. You can use other excellent browsers such as Firebird, but there are slight differences between the two. So if you’re a web developer, you need to double-check all your stuff.

You can fully expect Linux to be the operating system of choice within 10-15 years. Oh, and if you’re a true masochist, you can actually download the 1.8Gb version of Red Hat for free… I’d personally pay for a set of CDs and some nice documentation!