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Slick Installation and Setup

The Red Hat 6.0 installation scripts are much slicker than their 5.x predecessors, with on-screen help available for most items. The installation routine now automatically picks a kernel that's optimized for your processor: The operating system can be compiled to support specific features of 486, Pentium, Pentium II, and other processors. In the past, you had to recompile the kernel yourself to get CPU-specific optimizations.

Red Hat gives you three installation choices: the preset Workstation and Server options, and Custom. Most experienced Linux users will want to use the Custom option, but the other two are a good way for Linux novices to get off the ground quickly.

The Workstation option requires at least 16MB of RAM and 600MB of disk space, and gives you a configuration that includes the GNOME GUI and Internet connectivity. The Server option wants more hard disk space (1.6GB), and sets up a comprehensive server, including Samba file and print services for NT and Windows, NetWare file and print services, the Apache Web server, and FTP and Network File System services.

The installation defaults in both the Workstation and Server options give you a reasonable amount of control over disk partitioning and package selection. And if you don't like the GNOME interface, you can opt for the KDE GUI, which is also bundled with 6.0.

Easy on the Hardware

Like any other Linux distribution, Red Hat 6.0 can run on hardware that the newer Windows variants would choke on. I installed 6.0 successfully on two old portables--one with a 486DX-75 CPU and 20MB of RAM, the other with a Pentium-133 CPU and 16MB of RAM. The OS ran reasonably well on both machines. Operation was smoothest in character mode, of course, but performance in GUI mode (useful for running several terminal windows on the same screen) was also satisfactory.

On newer machines, Red Hat Linux 6.0 is a very snappy performer, especially compared with my Windows 2000 Beta 3 operating system. I installed 6.0 on a Gateway Pentium III-500 system with 128MB of RAM, a 13GB EIDE hard drive, and a 16MB Riva TNT graphics card without problems. On this system, program windows launched instantly; and even heavy-duty apps like Netscape Communicator felt incredibly responsive. Multitasking was also impressively smooth: I was able to launch a kernel recompile in a terminal window under the KDE GUI on a server that was routing Internet and intranet traffic at the same time. Even under this load, the system didn't skip a beat, and network throughput remained the same as under a light load.

The only exception to Red Hat Linux 6.0's strong performance was disk access. At times, the OS seemed to hesitate before reading from a disk. For example, on the same system and within similarly sized data sets, finding a file was much faster with Windows NT and NTFS than with Red Hat 6.0 and its Ext2fs file system.

But what it really takes to make a great operating system is a good interface.