When it comes to software, you have a fairly good selection. You can pick between KDE and Gnome for window managers. OpenOffice.org is included, as well as enough packages to make anyone short of a Debian user happy. In the package selection, however, there seems to be no laptop-specific software. After you pick your packages, it'll take at least half an hour to install everything. For me, it took just over 40 minutes on my primary system, and about an hour and a half on my secondary system. Next is a quick network setup screen. If things go well, and your network card is detected, you'll get an incomprehensible list of options. Pick through them and go ahead to the next screen. You'll get the option to create a boot disk. Might as well.
Finally, there's X configuration. You'll get a suggestion for a video card driver, and also for a monitor. There's a good chance you'll get the generic vesa driver recommended. Red Hat doesn't have a way to test your configuration before testing it, so it's probably a good idea to take the default for now. Red Hat does a decent job of detecting your monitor. If you get a generic or unprobed monitor, however, scroll through the list and find your monitor. Red Hat's done a good job here: every system I've tested has had their monitor listed somewhere in there. I was forced to use the vesa driver for both my systems, the "nv" driver doesn't work with my graphics card on my main system, and there was no driver for my weird chipset on the secondary system. I used the probed values for my secondary system, but I was able to find my screen for my Inspiron.
After that, reboot and you can jump into your new Red Hat installation.
Assuming things went well, you should boot up to a graphical post-installer. You're now prompted to make users, set up network stuff, et cetera. You finally get to a login screen once you've completed that final segment of installation.
Post-installation, I'm not all that happy. Red Hat doesn't support the ethernet card on my Inspiron. I got drivers from the Broadcom website, but I never could get them installed. I ended up digging out an Intel Pro/100 ethernet PC card. Still no drivers for that, either. I remembered vaguely that Intel bought out Xircom or something, tried the Xircom PCMCIA drivers, and it worked fine. Go figure. On my secondary system, the PCMCIA 3Com network card I use worked fine. Finally, there seems to be no support for power management at all. Not APM, not ACPI. I looked on Red Hat's website, and I still couldn't find any information. A lot of modern laptops handle things like battery through the BIOS, but I would have liked to at least have a battery monitor.
Ratings:
Ease of Installation: 8/10
It's hard to screw up. The availability of release notes during installation is a nice touch.
Partitioning: 6.5/10
Not only on my laptops, but even on other systems, I was never able to use the automatic partitioning. Personally, I didn't mind, but in other cases, forcing a new user to deal with disk partitioning isn't the best idea.
Software: 9/10
There's a ton of software here. Pretty much everything you'll need to be productive, except for things like battery monitors.
Hardware compatibility: 7/10
Major incompatibilities include my Broadcom 440x network card, as well as my NVidia Go FX5200 graphics card. I don't like having to use generic drivers for a fairly mainstream card. Red Hat's selection of drivers doesn't seem to cover many mobile chipets, with the exception of ATI stuff. I'm extremely annoyed with its inability to get my network card running. Most other distributions I've tried have been able to, why can't RH9? Good job on screens, though.
Power management: 1/10
No apparent support for power management features at all. At least it didn't interfere with my BIOS running the show.
Personal feel: 7/10
I don't like distributions that make me work just to get an internet connection going. I especially don't like them when they refuse to work with my built-in ethernet card at all. I'm not surprised that I had to use generic drivers for my video cards, but that doesn't make me a happy person. I am impressed, however, by how many screens and monitors are supported. It saves you from having to look up things like horizontal scan rate. Speed feels slightly slower than Windows XP on my main machine, but faster than Windows Me on my secondary.
Overall rating: 6.4/10
Red Hat's lack of support for simple things like power management and network cards hurt it here. An excellent software package helps redeem it, but in the end, it's not really suitable for a portable system. What good is an OS if you can't even check your battery status?
About the Author:
Tyler Bancroft is a student from London, Ontario, Canada. Although he has no free time, if he did, he'd spend it playing with vintage computers, reading, and playing rugby.
- "RHL9 on laptops, Page 1"
- "RHL9 on laptops, Page 2"
