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Found a lost piece of my own work! A RH 6.2 review from PCW, August 2000
Stumbled across this in the Internet Archive...
Red Hat Linux 6.2 Deluxe
Red Hat used to be a big fish in a small pond, but version 6.2 must prove itself seaworthy.
Red Hat is one ofthe longest-established Linux distributions and the first to be split into packages - archived bundles containing all the programs and supplementary files forming an application, allowing the user to add, remove or upgrade individual subsystems in a single operation. This modularity and upgradability made it the first Linux for non-experts and proved highly successful, to the extent that it remains the most widely used distribution in America and, in some ways, the de facto 'standard’ Linux.
In the past few years, though, rival distributions have surpassed it in some areas and the company’s rigorous stance against including commercial components has imposed some restrictions.
Now Red Hat is playing catch-up. Version 6.0 moved to the 2.2 kernel and version 6.1 aped Caldera and added a graphical installation program, Anaconda. This latest version, 6.2 (codenamed Zoot), smoothes out some wrinkles caused by these changes, adds an interactive startup sequence allowing troublesome components to be deactivated and claims better hardware detection. KDE is offered as an alternative GUI, although GNOME - now on its second release - is the recommended default.
Installation is quite easy. A boot floppy is provided, but the CD is bootable and after a prompt launches straight into graphics mode. Like Corel LinuxOS, there’s an option to install Linux into a FAT filesystem if you want to keep Windows and don’t want to repartition your drive - although this reduces performance. The installer’s partitioning tool is pretty basic, though, and only FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is supplied for non-destructive repartitioning; we recommend buying Partition Magic for this.
There is a selection of pre-configured installations, including server, GNOME and KDE workstations and a custom option which allows packages to be individually selected. The installer can update an existing Red Hat installation from version 2.0 upwards, which is a neat touch. We tried this on 6.0 and 6.1 installations and it worked well.
There were some niggles, though. On a recent notebook PC, all the hardware, including graphics, sound, PC Card slots, USB and power management was correctly detected and configured, but on an older Cyrix machine, vanilla NE2000 and SoundBlaster 16 cards were missed - although the 'Getting Started’ manual contained simple instructions on how to add them later.
[screenshot]
Red Hat 6.2 offers a choice of GUIs as well as a vast array of skins for that personal touch
Unless you choose a custom install, there’s no option as to where to install the LILO boot manager and it silently overwrote PowerQuest’s BootMagic.
You can choose whether to boot into text or graphics mode, but misconfiguration of the X server on the Cyrix desktop meant that graphics mode failed and had to be configured manually from the command line.
Once installed, the GNOME desktop is pretty good. There isn’t the same range of integrated accessories and utilities as with KDE, but a range of helpful non-GNOME tools is included and the GNOME tools include an excellent help system, file manager and a full spreadsheet, Gnumeric.
The choice of window managers and graphical 'skins’, wallpapers and screensavers is stunning: GNOME looks more attractive than KDE and is vastly more customisable. The desktop also holds links to helpful websites and local documentation and icons for CD and floppy drives. Ifyou choose to install KDE instead, or even alongside, you get only the default KDE desktop.
The basic version of Red Hat can be downloaded as a CD image from the company’s website or installed over the Internet. The Deluxe boxed edition adds 90 days oftelephone support, novice-level printed manuals and several additional CDs: documentation and source code as well as free 'PowerTools’ and commercial workstation applications. The Professional edition doubles the period of support, which also covers Apache configuration and includes more server-based tools.
Red Hat remains a solid distribution, but it no longer has the technological edge. SuSE is easier to install and includes vastly more software, Caldera is better integrated and has more corporate features and Corel, although immature, is the most user-friendly and Windows-like Linux around.
LIAM PROVEN
DETAILS
★★★
PRICE £64 (£54.47 ex VAT)
CONTACT Red Hat 01483 300169
http://europe.redhat.com/
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS x86 processor with 16MB of RAM and 500MB of disk space
PROS Easier than ever; widely supported
CONS Poorer integration, features and user-friendliness than the competition
OVERALL Red Hat is the Linux baseline: if you’re already familiar with it, it’s still a sound choice, but other variants offer more
Red Hat Linux 6.2 Deluxe
Red Hat used to be a big fish in a small pond, but version 6.2 must prove itself seaworthy.
Red Hat is one ofthe longest-established Linux distributions and the first to be split into packages - archived bundles containing all the programs and supplementary files forming an application, allowing the user to add, remove or upgrade individual subsystems in a single operation. This modularity and upgradability made it the first Linux for non-experts and proved highly successful, to the extent that it remains the most widely used distribution in America and, in some ways, the de facto 'standard’ Linux.
In the past few years, though, rival distributions have surpassed it in some areas and the company’s rigorous stance against including commercial components has imposed some restrictions.
Now Red Hat is playing catch-up. Version 6.0 moved to the 2.2 kernel and version 6.1 aped Caldera and added a graphical installation program, Anaconda. This latest version, 6.2 (codenamed Zoot), smoothes out some wrinkles caused by these changes, adds an interactive startup sequence allowing troublesome components to be deactivated and claims better hardware detection. KDE is offered as an alternative GUI, although GNOME - now on its second release - is the recommended default.
Installation is quite easy. A boot floppy is provided, but the CD is bootable and after a prompt launches straight into graphics mode. Like Corel LinuxOS, there’s an option to install Linux into a FAT filesystem if you want to keep Windows and don’t want to repartition your drive - although this reduces performance. The installer’s partitioning tool is pretty basic, though, and only FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is supplied for non-destructive repartitioning; we recommend buying Partition Magic for this.
There is a selection of pre-configured installations, including server, GNOME and KDE workstations and a custom option which allows packages to be individually selected. The installer can update an existing Red Hat installation from version 2.0 upwards, which is a neat touch. We tried this on 6.0 and 6.1 installations and it worked well.
There were some niggles, though. On a recent notebook PC, all the hardware, including graphics, sound, PC Card slots, USB and power management was correctly detected and configured, but on an older Cyrix machine, vanilla NE2000 and SoundBlaster 16 cards were missed - although the 'Getting Started’ manual contained simple instructions on how to add them later.
[screenshot]
Red Hat 6.2 offers a choice of GUIs as well as a vast array of skins for that personal touch
Unless you choose a custom install, there’s no option as to where to install the LILO boot manager and it silently overwrote PowerQuest’s BootMagic.
You can choose whether to boot into text or graphics mode, but misconfiguration of the X server on the Cyrix desktop meant that graphics mode failed and had to be configured manually from the command line.
Once installed, the GNOME desktop is pretty good. There isn’t the same range of integrated accessories and utilities as with KDE, but a range of helpful non-GNOME tools is included and the GNOME tools include an excellent help system, file manager and a full spreadsheet, Gnumeric.
The choice of window managers and graphical 'skins’, wallpapers and screensavers is stunning: GNOME looks more attractive than KDE and is vastly more customisable. The desktop also holds links to helpful websites and local documentation and icons for CD and floppy drives. Ifyou choose to install KDE instead, or even alongside, you get only the default KDE desktop.
The basic version of Red Hat can be downloaded as a CD image from the company’s website or installed over the Internet. The Deluxe boxed edition adds 90 days oftelephone support, novice-level printed manuals and several additional CDs: documentation and source code as well as free 'PowerTools’ and commercial workstation applications. The Professional edition doubles the period of support, which also covers Apache configuration and includes more server-based tools.
Red Hat remains a solid distribution, but it no longer has the technological edge. SuSE is easier to install and includes vastly more software, Caldera is better integrated and has more corporate features and Corel, although immature, is the most user-friendly and Windows-like Linux around.
LIAM PROVEN
DETAILS
★★★
PRICE £64 (£54.47 ex VAT)
CONTACT Red Hat 01483 300169
http://europe.redhat.com/
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS x86 processor with 16MB of RAM and 500MB of disk space
PROS Easier than ever; widely supported
CONS Poorer integration, features and user-friendliness than the competition
OVERALL Red Hat is the Linux baseline: if you’re already familiar with it, it’s still a sound choice, but other variants offer more