Red Hat Linux 7.1

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   July 12, 2001
 4 out of 6 found this review helpful

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   July 12, 2001
 4 out of 6 found this review helpful

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!!   June 26, 2001
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

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   June 23, 2001
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.