Red Hat Linux 7.1 :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

Endless frustration

2001-07-19
Answer carefully -- why do you want to run Linux? In my case, I needed a UNIX system that I could run on my laptop for assorted web demos and the occasional development stint while on the road. I needed it to install with relatively little fuss and be similar enough to other UNIXen that I could rely on my established years of experience (SunOS, Solaris, IRIX) with occasional help from a good manual or two. And I wanted to run a wide variety of commercial and open-source applications.

For me, Red Hat Linux 7.1 is not that system.

I purchased the software six weeks ago and have yet to accomplish a single minute of useful work. Instead, I have wasted uncounted hours wading through reams of arcana scattered about the Net, desperately seeking a fix that will keep my machine from freezing every time I push a damned mouse button. And this is on an "officially supported" box, the IBM ThinkPad 600X. I shudder to imagine what users with unsupported hardware endure.

Red Hat online support, which comes for a month or two with purchase, has been no help at all. Their responses to each of my problem reports invariably amounts to, "Well, try fussing with this utility or that setting and see what happens."

If you have ample time to waste slogging through the guts of UNIX, by all means this is the O/S for you. If you need to focus on your business, you might consider a more stable offering.

Good for some, but not for all 2001-07-12
This distribution of Linux is good to get you started. It installs easily and can set up most of your hardware automatically.

Linux people who want customise, modify and otherwise manually enhance their system will not like this. The compiler shipped is a customised "red hat version" of the popular gcc, which means a lot of things will not compile and install correctly.

The distro also installs a lot of software you might not want - even if you ask it not to!

Add to this that you must now subscribe and pay for fixes to the operating system, I would not reccomend this to the serious user.

Go for slackware instead.

Better 'n Windows 2001-07-12
Linux has always been a great alternative to Microsft Windows and 7.1 is no exception. I'm absolutely sick of seeing Microsoft everywhere when there are so many better OS's out there. Red Hat Linux 7.1 is just as easy to use and so much more fun to tinker and play with, plus it doesn't crash or give you any of the other problems Windows does, not to mention several differant desktop environments which all work great. It's capable of so much more and pretty much all the software one would need for it is free. One small complaint is that it doesn't support multimedia stuff as well as Windows can. However, unless you're doing some hard-core stuff you probably won't really notice.

Great product!! 2001-06-26
I LOVE Red Hat linux. It is a GREAT Windows alternitive. It is MUCH better than Windows. I tried other linux distros too such as Linux Mandrake, Debian GNU/Linux, SuSE (by far the worst) but Red Hat Linux is the most bug free, flexible, user friendly, operating system out there.

HOWEVER: If you have broudband you may want to download it...Otherwise...this boxed set is nice :)

Big improvment over RedHat 6.0 2001-06-23
The computer I have is a HP that has a win modem and a few other custom things. This version of Red Hat actually reconized it and my monitor. The install is a lot easier and seems to be as stable as an OS can get. With the K Desktop Environment running it looks a lot like windows without the flakeyness of icons being dammaged and other weird things that Windows does.

Debian is said to be the most secure version of Linux so if you want to run a full-time server you might try that or a version of BSD. P.S. If you have never played xBill you have got to try this little game.

Don't believe the hype 2007-01-26
I've used Linux (Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake), Windows, and Mac, and I can honestly say that Linux, in all its incarnations, is still highly problematic, and not ready for general consumer use.

There are a number of problems with this product:

1. Too many distributions (flavors) means hardware incompatability and application incompatability problems. Application A will work on Red Hat, but will not work on SUSE. Scanner B will work on SUSE, but not on... you get the picture. Sure, you can rig it up to work, but most of us don't want to spend 2 days re-compiling the kernal to get a cheap scanner to work on our system.

2. Support is given out on a volunteer basis (unless you pay for it). Unless you are a UNIX/Linux expert, others in the "community" won't even talk to you, and will probably kick you off their message boards. Linux users don't talk to new users. They don't want people using Linux -it is their little private club.

3. Limited or non-existent USB support. You will have to browse the web for some tool for a workaround.

4. No games -at least major games that have been out in the last 5 years.

5. Very few multimedia applications.

6. Installing applications can be a nightmare, as you eneter "dependency hell." The app needs 13 componants, all of which need to be downloaded from different websites and installed in a specific order.

This being said, Linus has its uses. Mostly as a back-end, enterprise database or email server. It is NOT a desktop OS. Red Hat has dressed it up to look like one. When you find yourself typing 700 lines of code to get your camera to work, you will discover that it is a patch job by a bunch of amateurs.

Go with Mac OSX if you want a stable, secure, powerful, OS with multimedia, and UNIX utilities.

Not much more than the downloads... 2001-09-20
If you have a good broadband connection, download the ISO's and burn your own. That's pretty much all this is. The documentation is minimal at best with quite a bit of advertising, easily replaced by third party books you would be wiser to spend your money on than this.

So why did I buy it? Because I couldn't get my downloads to work right until after I'd already given up and ordered it. Murphy's law of downloads :-D...

Not the best out there 2001-08-05
I've been running SuSE 7.1 for the past couple of months and it's been great!! So I decided to give RH 7.1 a go (since it's supposed to be one of the best/most used distributions out there). I was very dissapointed. To start Gnome's file manager kept respawning itself, programs run under certain logins and cause segmentation faults under others (these include programs that come standard with the distribution), and since I'm a Java developer what really got me was that you need to go through a whole work-around just to get Java to work!!

I'm sticking to SuSE and would advise everybody to do so. This release just doesn't cut it - don't buy it!

If you want to run a linux server look elsewhere 2001-08-02
First I need to mention that I am not new to linux. I have been running various versions of SuSE for the past 3 years and FreeBSD for about 6 months (but I won't got into that).

When I decided to drop BSD and go back to linux (being short on cash) I decided to give RedHat a shot. First, since I have an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller, the installer refused to run. So I switched everything over to IDE (spare HD's are nice) and installed it. I will say that this installer is fairly easy to work with and went smoothly.

Now that I've got the system up, I want to start working on the firewall and getting rid of some kernel bloat... Well, no go! You can't recompile the kernel (unless you want to remove the function prototypes from every header file)! The firewall is an excercise in futility too... ipchains is installed by default so the rc3.d script that fires it had to be nuked, even then iptables doesn't work (I even tried stuff right out of the docs and it wont work)

all in all if you want to run linux, look somewhere else (myself, I'm going to try mandrake 8.0 next), and avoid the headaches that this distro will cause

Linux 7.1 Upgrade 2001-07-20
I have installed 3 different versions of RedHat, 2 of Mandrake, 1 of Caldera. Linux 7.1 is (IMHO) a disaster. It is somewhere between 50-80% bigger than 7.0 for the same modules. It refuses to upgrade a 1.1 GB 7.0 setup into a 2GB partition. Giving it 3GB and doing a complete install results in an unrecognized 3C509 card, no documentation about the network configuration utility, and a generally non-functional system. What it does do seems to run slower than 7.0. Tomorrow I start on my 2nd week of trying to get this thing to work. (Stick with 7.0 :=(( )