Rating: 
Summary: Endless frustration
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Endless frustration
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: If you want to run a linux server look elsewhere
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: If you want to run a linux server look elsewhere
Review: 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
Rating: 
Summary: RedHat Is all you need
Review: Here is the ultimate Operating System. Installing it on a Laptop and a Desctop PC there was not a single problem or any unrecognized Hardware. It's fast, it's stable, it's easy to use and has all the tools that may be usefull and even some more.
Rating:
Summary: Im a Linux Convert - Its Fantastic
Review: I have been using Windows for 6 years now, and every couple of months I normally had to do the old "re-format and re-install" just to keep windows healthy and reduce the number of reboots to an acceptable level. I always thought that it was common for an operating system to crash after a couple of hours surfing until I installed Redhat Linux 7.1 It has NEVER crashed for me! Its unbelievable! The installation is even more advanced than Windows 2000 installation which is still largely text based. I installed and configured a dual boot system in less than 15 minutes, via the GUI installation wizard. The range of Free GPL software for Linux is also very impressive. The only thing now is, that, unlike Microsoft, I have too much choice!! Amazing!
Rating:
Summary: Im a Linux Convert - Its Fantastic
Review: I have been using Windows for 6 years now, and every couple of months I normally had to do the old "re-format and re-install" just to keep windows healthy and reduce the number of reboots to an acceptable level. I always thought that it was common for an operating system to crash after a couple of hours surfing until I installed Redhat Linux 7.1 It has NEVER crashed for me! Its unbelievable! The installation is even more advanced than Windows 2000 installation which is still largely text based. I installed and configured a dual boot system in less than 15 minutes, via the GUI installation wizard. The range of Free GPL software for Linux is also very impressive. The only thing now is, that, unlike Microsoft, I have too much choice!! Amazing!
Rating:
Summary: Linux 7.1 Upgrade
Review: 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 :=(( )
Rating:
Summary: Linux 7.1 Upgrade
Review: 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 :=(( )
Rating: 
Summary: New features and more usability
Review: I just got Red Hat's newest version in the mail the other day. The Install was better than previous versions, it found my monitor and video card with no trouble at all. I had some problems partitioning, however, it gave me an error about the /boot partition being > 1024 cylinders. I quickly found out that this was happening because my Windows 98 partitions were taking up all of the cylinders to and a little above the 1024th. I rearranged my partitions, and created a linux /boot partition completely under the 1024th cylinder and everything worked fine. Other than that problem, everything was smooth. Linux configured my soundcard on bootup, so that was cool too... Anyway there is a lot of cool new features in this version, like "Konqueror(KDE web browser/file manager)" and the new version of KDE is a lot more customize-able than the previous one. There's not a lot I don't like about RH 7.1, overall I think it's a big improvement over my old (RH6.2) Installation.
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