I’m posting this from my Linux box at the world headquarters of Network Strategies in beautiful downtown Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Installing Red Hat 9 was by far the easiest OS installation I’ve ever experienced, and that includes lots of OS installations.
It’s way easier than Windows, and that goes for 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, Me, and XP, although version 1.0 was almost as smooth. But it should have been, because it didn’t do anything.
Lots of Silicon Valley dudes live double lives, using Solaris or Linux at work, and then regressing to Windows at home because the computer’s shared and Windows used to be so easy to install, manage, and use. But that era is rapidly coming to an end, if it’s not ended already.
And since this is a computer I put together out of old parts laying around, if my packet-scheduling kernel doesn’t work right away, nobody cares but me.
Agreed re RH 9. I’ve got it on three boxes now, one of which is my dual-boot with WinXP. I normally only use the XP for video editing, and soon enough…
For the time being, I’m using X-WinPro on my Win2K machine to run stuff on the Linux box, so I can use Explorer for most of my browsing. I’d like to dump the Windows stuff completely, but fine-tuning the human factors on Red Hat looks challenging.
Anyhow, I can use Source Navigator to browse the Linux kernel sources, so I’m happy.
Heh. Consider Mark Pilgrim’s struggle with XP or Ian Hickson’s experience with Debian by way of contrast.
RH9 would have to be miles ahead of RH8 to get me back on board. RH8 drove me into the arms of Gentoo, which is 180 degrees from RH. The install is a piece of cake. It’s the updates and maintenance and severely disjointed dependencie chains that made me put a bullet in its brain. Not that I’ve done a damn thing with the box since I got it genned up, lazy bastard that I am.
It does seem to have a built-in crash timer that prevents it from staying up for more than a few hours at a time, and this could prove to be a deal-breaker.
I’ll second Scott’s experience with RH8. Thinking I’ll give Gentoo a try one of these days, but just haven’t gotten around to it.
Hmmm, I did an FTP install of RH8 on three of my cheap-o boxes at home a long time ago and had zero problems. I was actually about ready to start upgrading them to RH9. I’ve had a few little nits, but overall have been really satisfied.
The only things I really use WinXP for anymore are a) my multitrack recording software and b) games.
Richard, unless you have some really odd hardware peripherals it sounds more like a hardware problem like bad RAM or mobo…
Let me restate, cuz it ain’t clear: RH8 was a piece of cake to install, as Big Dick said. It was the upgrades and maintenance that kicked my ass trying to use it.
Gentoo, OTOH, was a bear to install, relative to RH. But it’s a dream to maintain. Of course, I have not bothered with X or any other graphicsy things. I loves me some command line.
OH, well that explains it. You should have seriously looked into starting up KDE at least once. RedHat’s graphical update tool is a breeze and does all of that dependency stuff well. With a free subscription to the RH Network (which can email you when updated RPMs are available), it’s a cinch to maintain patches.