Red Hat Linux 9

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.

Author: Liam Proven