RedHat 9 review

I just installed RedHat 9 on my workstation at home. The installation was a bit touch and go as the first CD was a bit smashed up. However I’m a little disappointed that the fancy “media test” program didn’t pick up on the problems. It took about five tries to actually get anaconda to start, and eventually I gave up on the GUI installation and did it in text mode.

Also, redhat didn’t detect my XP installation, which sits on a second hard drive (/dev/hdc while the rest is on /dev/hda). So now I’m looking around to setup grub to boot it.

My last gripe with the installation was that I was never asked what my system’s hostname should be, so it’s currently localhost.localdomain.

All of these though are very minor, and overall I’m very impressed with RH9. It looks lovely, has lots of useful applications bundled. I’m having none of the font troubles that Jeremy Zawodny had. So perhaps that’s one solution to the ‘fonts on linux’ problem. Use RedHat.

I figure I’ll give RH9 a run for a month or so, if I don’t like it I could always install Gentoo on my desktop.