Red Hat 6.2 Review

by Shadow Stealth

20 April 2000

"About 2 days ago I bought a GPL Red Hat 6.2 CD, which costs about
$8.50 in Singapore. Here's my review of Red Hat 6.2!" - Shadow Stealth


Hardware Configuration

Pentium III 533 Katmai CPU
Intel CC820 Motherboard
128MB SDRAM (Upgraded to P08 BIOS)
Creative Nvidia GeForce 32Mb SDR
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
1.44 Mb Floppy Drive
24x Teac IDE CD-ROM
56K External Modem
2G IDE Harddisk
Philips 17 Inch Monitor (Model 107E)

Note: The Supermicro motherboard P5MMA will not successfully install Red Hat 6.2 due to a keyboard error.

Experience

The installation process is similar to the previous Red Hat version 6.1. The GUI installation will be intuitive if you have installed Red Hat v6.1 previously. The installation took approximately 5 to 6 minutes on my system. The overall storage capacity needed is about 606MB on a Gnome Workstation configuration. XFree86 v3.3.6 detected my Creative Nvidia Geforce graphics card properly and probed my monitor. Although I knew XFree86 v3.3.6 supported the Intel 810 driver, but the installation process did not interrupt with my current Intel CC820 motherboard. (I hope the next Red Hat release will have support for the Intel 820 & 840 motherboard.) Anyway, at this point in time there weren't any problems with it.

After the installation process, I logged in as root to configure my graphics resolution and Sound Blaster card. Next, I configured my graphic resolution to 1024 x 768 with the Xconfigurator command. Then I configured my sound card with sndconfig command. It detected my Creative Sound Blaster Live! value card without any problems at all. I enabled the sound effects via the GNOME Control Center.

You can customize your windowing environment via GNOME's Control Center and it has Enlightenment, Sawmill and tvm which you can choose from and configure as well. Under Enlightenment themes, it has "icE, eStep_New, eStep_Classic, Shiny Metal, Clean Big, Clean and Brushmetal." I configured the background with a cool Propaganda "Vol5 2a.jpg" image using the icE themes. (See my screenshot #1 and screenshot #2, which I captured with Xwd.)

Next, I decided to configure the resolv.conf with pico, and move on to configuring the 56k V.90 external modem with the Dial-up Configuration tool. I then finally proceeded to connect to the Internet by selecting RH PPP Dialer. RH PPP Dialer dials out using the preferred number and connected to my ISP. Once I got connected, there's a modem transmission speed indicator applet that flashes on the screen. Cool! With these I am able to determine when I'm connected.

I bring up my Netscape v4.72 and surf the net. The provided Netscape v4.72 doesn't come with any plug-ins, so you have to download them, untar and install. Unlike Caldera's Openlinux eDesktop 2.4, where the Netscape plug-ins are pre-installed. I wish Red Hat would do that in their upcoming releases. Frankly, Red Hat 6.2 does not have Real Player pre-installed either, so you have to get some of the apps which you want from the Internet.

I have a site which you could download from - Red Hat 6.2 Power Tools.

You could also get some apps at the Tucows or Linuxapps sites.

At the time I wrote this review, Red Hat currently released 4 erratas for which you can download the RPMs. Or if you have bought the Red Hat Standard, Deluxe or Professional package, you can register and make use of Red Hat's Upgrade which is resided at System. It will detect your system and install the necessary upgrade apps.

Here are the currently available updates at the Red Hat site:

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh62-errata-security.html

12-April-2000 gpm-1.19.1-1 (RHSA-2000:009-02) New gpm package to fix gpm-root privilege problem

30-Mar-00 ircii-4.4M-1 (RHSA-2000:008-01) New ircii packages available

And

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh62-errata-bugfixes.html

14-April-2000 kernel-2.2.14-6.x.1 (RHBA-2000:013-01) Context Switch bug in x86 kernels

12-April-2000 Installer updates (RHBA-2000:010-01) Installer updates for Red Hat Linux 6.2

Conclusion

Red Hat 6.2 detected my graphics card flawlessly and the installation process went smooth as ever. Although there's not much different from Red Hat 6.1, I wish Red Hat would further improve it by adding lots of pre-installed apps on their next release like Caldera did on their eDesktop 2.4. Red Hat 6.2 is running kernel v2.2.14-5, the previous 6.2 beta version was running kernel v2.2.15.

More Info

Pick up a copy of Red Hat 6.2 Standard, Deluxe, or Professional at great prices and help support this site!

View Online Visual Help

I highly recommend the book "Red Hat Linux Unleashed" (with CD-ROM) as it's extremely thourough in coverage and serves as an excellent reference book later on. Many readers have also suggested the book "Running Linux" for getting your feet wet with Linux and as an introductory book. A book called "Learning Red Hat Linux" is also highly rated, but you may want to take a look at "Red Hat Linux 6: Visual QuickPro Guide" , which takes a highly visual, "guide you through it" approach. Take a look and see which suits your fancy.


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