“Reviewers like to evaulate Linux distros for the mythical Uncle
Ralph and Aunt Faye, the prototypical clueless technophobes. Can
Aunty and Uncle, who still rub sticks together to make fire,
install and run Linux? Let’s get real. Computers are complex
machines for performing complex tasks. There is always a learning
curve. No one sits down to any PC–not Mac, not Windows, none of
them–starting from zero knowledge, and is instantly
productive.“Ease of use is a good thing, a worthy goal. Even more important
is having robust tools to do work. The whole point of purchasing
all that nice hardware and putting an operating system on it is to
run applications. Let’s dig into this shiny new offering from Red
Hat and see if a person can do any actual productive work with it.
I tested it on two home-built machines: a Celeron 333, and a Duron
800. Both have 256 megs of RAM and the usual assortment of
peripherals: CD, CDRW, printers, scanners, tape drive, IDE hard
disks.“At this point, there would normally be the obigatory passages
devoted to how the installation went. Let’s face it, Linux
installation is no longer such a big deal, certainly not for Red
Hat. Installation here is easy, just insert the disk and go. I do
prefer a clean installation, rather than upgrading over an existing
install, which was the method I used here…”