Have you ever thought of getting to know Linux and using Linux as the main Operating system? If yes, go grab Redhat Linux flavor. It is one of the most commonly used distro among people new to Linux. The installation is quite simple. Atleast, in my case, it was able to identify all the drives, monitor, keyboard, mouse, RAM, sound card etc without any problem.
You will need all the 3 CDs for a full install; but if you carefully read through the various packages/program available to install, you will be able choose to install the program you need. (For. ex, you wouldn’t install the packages for reading tape drive or packages for printer or scanner unless you have one of these connected to your compu).
Among gnome and kde, the desktop managers available, gnome takes less resources and hence is faster. KDE is very good for people who want to manage their system like windows. The most interesting part of Linux is that, ones you install the OS, and the various packages, you can happily forget about putting in seperate CDs for ’’word’’, acrobat reader, photo editors etc (unless you didn’t choose these during the initial installation).
RH9.0 doesn;t by default play .mp3 songs, so I had to install a small .rpm file from gurulabs.com to enable playing mp3 files. Moreover, I prefer using gmplayer for playing videos. The beauty of gmplayer is that it can play .mp3, .avi, and .mpg files. In addition, I had to install yahoo messenger, as gaim wouldn;t work for me. For office utilities, we have openoffice and koffice to choose from depending on ones taste. The browsers available are mozilla1.1, knoqurer and lynx (a text based browser). The default mozilla browser didn’t have popup blocker, so I had to download the latest version of it which had the popup blocker by default. My personal favourite for browser is ’’elinks’’ a text-based browser. It doesn’t come with the RH9.0 CDs and has to be downloaded from the internet.
These is a wide range of editors to choose from. I personally like ViM (the Vi Improved editor). In addition, KATE, KWRITE, Emacs, gedit can also be used. ViM, kate, emacs and kwrite can identify a number of programming languages and highlight the key words.
OCTAVE is a built in program which is similar to the commercially available MATLAB. In addition, Linear Algebra Package (LINPACK) is available with the installation. For engineering and scientific drawings XFig is very good and easy to use. Ones you get a hang of XFig, you would never think of MSPAINT. You can only create black-and-white drawings using XFig. Gimp can be used to create color pictures and drawings.
The biggest advantage of using Linux, is that it is Virus free. (Though viruses can attack, they cannot spread beyond a user account as to change a system file, root access is needed.
Though most of these features are available in most Linux distros, the main advantage of Redhat come in its Windows like controlling features. You can control the various issues pertaining to the system using the graphics driven menus. I strongly recommend that a person who is pessimistic to use Linux should be given a demo of Linux using RH so that he looks at the various features of it and gets a feel for the ease in using Linux. I am sure that ones he realizes that he has his computer under his control, he will never leave Linux.