Product Reviews

Despite various attempts at Windows Desktop alternatives, Linux is still best suited to servers, for which Red Hat is by far the most popular choice. With this in mind, it was no surprise when in May 2002 Red Hat split its product line in two: Linux and Enterprise Linux.

The former flagship, Red Hat Linux, is now 'a community product for SoHo users, independent professionals, students and hobbyists with minimal support needs'. Prices start at £31, but you can still download a version as CD ISO images. However, support is available only to members of the Red Hat Network, with a year's membership starting at $60 (£38), although you get a two-month subscription and 60 days' phone and web support with the £114 Professional version.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a slower release cycle of 12-18 months, contains optimisations for SMP, I/O and database operations, and includes bundled support and consultancy. This comes in three variants: WS (Workstation or Client Edition), ES (Enterprise Server) and AS (formerly Red Hat Advanced Server). WS supports up to two CPUs and 4GB of RAM, ES adds various server applications, and AS adds support for up to eight CPUs and 16GB of RAM, plus clustering failover and load balancing. Currently at version 2.1, it's priced from £241 for WS and up to £1,935 for the Premium AS Edition.

Red Hat Linux 9, meanwhile, is the latest effort at a Desktop-friendly OS, comparable to Mandrake or SuSE. As it's no longer the basis for the Enterprise offerings, Red Hat is free to update it more frequently, leading to an unprecedented jump from version 8 to 9. However, the differences are fairly modest. There are new device drivers for a variety of 3D cards, support for Bluetooth, PDAs and digital cameras, a Windows Terminal Server client, CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System, as used in Mac OS X) and a new font server.

The default installation gives you an elegantly minimal GNOME 2.2 Desktop, with toolbar icons for Mozilla 1.2.1, Evolution email (an Outlook lookalike) and OpenOffice 1.0.2's Writer, Impress and Calc. The Desktop is clean, with only a link to the user's home directory, a wastebasket and a Start Here folder. This contains folders called Applications, Preferences and System Settings, offering easy access to the

This is the second version of Red Hat's Bluecurve interface, and in terms of visual appeal it's superb - more elegant and refined than Windows XP's Luna and more subtle than Apple's Aqua. Window dragging and resizing is smooth and solid, there's an hourglass - a Linux novelty - and text is attractively anti-aliased throughout the GUI, even in OpenOffice and Mozilla.

With just a few clicks in Add/Remove Applications under System Settings, I added the system and development tools, allowing kernel recompilation and connection to Windows servers, and the optional KDE system. None of this required a reboot, and afterwards I could connect to an XP machine on the network from the command line without further configuration. Even the KDE 3.1 Desktop is identical to the GNOME one, complete with anti-aliasing.

However, unlike distributions such as Xandros or Lycoris, or indeed the general-purpose commercial systems, Red Hat 9 isn't designed to directly replace Windows or co-exist with it, and there's no concession to novices moving over from Windows. There's no network browser or Explorer equivalent, no mount points or icons for Windows or other Linux file systems, and no attempt to resemble any other operating system. Like version 8, it doesn't support proprietary formats such as MP3, Shockwave, Flash or RealMedia, even though free players are available.

Under the hood, it's modern but not state-of-the-art. The kernel, XFree86 and GCC are, at the time of writing, the latest versions (2.4.20, 4.3.0 and 3.2.2, respectively), but there are no devfs, for example. The journalling ext3 file system is used by default, although it happily mounted ReiserFS, FAT16 and FAT32 partitions, but not NTFS.

Hardware detection is good, although not perfect. The wheel on a USB mouse worked in all programs, but although it detected an AGP Nvidia TNT2 card and configured it correctly, it used the open-source 2D-only driver - Nvidia's proprietary 3D accelerated drivers currently don't work. Plus, it failed to notice a PC Card FireWire adaptor or laptop power management.

But Red Hat has caught up nonetheless. Version 9 is as user-friendly and accessible as any Desktop Linux, and looks considerably better than its rivals. However, it doesn't try to ease the transition from Windows and omits tools and facilities common in most other Desktop distributions. Red Hat remains the closest thing the Linux world has to an industry standard, and this version is the best ever. If, however, you want a straighforward replacement for Windows, or simply maximum simplicity or versatility, you're better off looking at Xandros or Lycoris.