A Review of Red Hat Linux 6.0

Product: Red Hat Linux

Version: 6.0

Pros: Improved plug-and-play configuration and slicker-than-ever GUIs mark Linux's ascension into the mainstream. Red Hat 6.0 is also the first Linux distribution to include IBM’s ViaVoice speech technology. It is on the Red Hat Linux 6.0 Application CD. (See http://www.software.ibm.com/speech/news/pr-linux.html for details.)

Cons: ATI Rage Pro incompatibility (present in 5.x) is still not addressed, or at least, still doesn't work correctly. Don't use an ATI Rage Pro-based card, unless you enjoy fiddling. We experienced some freezes and crashes in Red Hat-supplied apps.

Getting Started

We downloaded the ISO version of Red Hat 6.0 and burned our own CD. As with version 5.2.2, this image did not create a bootable CD; hence, we still had to use a DOS utility called rawrite as follows:

rawrite -f  boot.img -d a:

...after first copying the rawrite.exe program and the boot.img files from the CD over to a DOS PC's hard disk. Then, we inserted the boot floppy these commands created and rebooted.

Installation went smoothly at first, with almost precisely the same non-intuitive issues we noted in our previous review: the "mount point" needs to be named "/" and the amount of hard disk space defined in the Disk Druid utility needs to be 1MB smaller than the number the utility says is available.

Red Hat doesn't help newbies out much with these issues, nor does version 6.0 tell you the default user name ("root"). These were all minor issues, compared to a problem that emerged when the system reached its X (graphics mode) configuration screen. It didn't work properly with our system's ATI All In Wonder Pro graphics card and the bitmaps didn't appear. The system, apparently oblivious to this, proceeded to boot Gnome, one of the two GUIs we had elected to set up on our system. We tried dozens of configuration options -- all unsuccessfully -- and noted hundreds of messages on Usenet from similarly frustrated ATI owners, before giving up, with the intent of installing a Voodoo Banshee card instead. Fortunately, we happened to notice that, even though the Xconfigurator told us it had failed, it seemed to work properly afterwards anyway. When we saved an xf86config and typed startx, the graphics subsystem worked as expected.

(This was our solution to the ATI issue, incidentally. Just configure it with the defaults it recommends, select "Let Me Choose" and select the resolutions  -- we chose 1024x768@16 bits per pixel -- you want to be displayed, choose "Quit" instead of "Back" after it warns you that it has encountered a problem and cannot continue, and then type "startx". Needless to say, it's not exactly intuitive.)

In part 2, we look at the GUIs supplied with Red Hat Linux 6.0....

For Further Reading:

• Linux Versions - Comparing the Linux releases from Red Hat, Caldera and S.u.S.E. Plus, Corel WordPerfect and Linuxberg.
• Linux_versions-pt2 - Linux for Mac, plus download locations for Red Hat 6.0, SuSE 6.1 and Caldera 2.2 distributions. (updated May 4.)
• Ars-Technica: Red Hat Linux installation
• Linux Today: What's new in the 2.2x version of the Linux kernel (available at www.kernel.org), released Jan. 29th.

More like this . . .

How many search commands do you have in your PC?

How many search commands do you have in your PC? asked Bill Gates during his keynote introduction at Forum 2000, where he unveiled a set of next...

Linux News

2003 Aug. 7: Noted at News.com: This week, KooBox.com started selling what it calls the first complete Linux computer. US$449 gets you a 1.2 GHz...

A Mac OS X Overview

Server and Client At the 1999 Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs, Apple's interim CEO, and Avie Tevanian, Apple's senior vice president of...

Editorial: MS World Domination Scorecard

Microsoft is often accused of -- and has been convicted of -- anticompetitive behavior in the technology marketplace. In this article, I'll look at...

Windows Server 2003

Introduction Microsoft's next server platform is known as Windows Server 2003. It will be offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, designed for...

Alternative GUIs for Windows XP

As we've noted in our earlier features on Alternative Graphical User Interface (GUI) options for Windows PCs, there are a number of products that can...

Codename: Whistler

Codename: Whistler This preview examines the feature-set in the Professional version of Windows XP, code-named "Whistler." There were...