I have switched from SuSE back to Red Hat. As much as I liked the SuSE lizard logo, SuSE 9.2 did not work well enough. RHES4 works extremely well.

This page contains brief notes about my experience so far with Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, release 4 (RHSE4), configured on March 9, 2005. I think that ES stands for "Enterprise Server". The ES must be marketing-weeny terminology paralleling Red Hat's "AS", which must mean Advanced Server. Why is marketing taking up so much of World GDP?

SuSE 9.2 was not usable for my needs so I switched back to Red Hat, now in the guise of the Enterprise Edition. SuSE was impressive in the shear array of software available (I have always chosen to install "everything", although in the case of SuSE that is not possible since there are incompatible packages on the install DVD -- for Red Hat, the "install everything" option still works). But SuSE 9.2 had too many glitches. At one point I needed to reboot and SuSE failed to boot. I knew I had to go back to Red Hat.

I retract my previous statement about disliking Red Hat's decision to no longer support a retail version like they did with Red Hat 9 and its ancestors. RHSE4 is everything and more that the old Red Hat X were and well worth the $350 annual fee to subsribe. I love this RHSE4 box. It works great.

How I use Linux

I have used Linux as a server for ten years and been involved in UNIX culture for 30 years. Sometimes I use my server as a workstation. This is one of those times. Currently, I am using Red Hat Enterprise mostly as a work station. But I am the software architect for a growing start up and we will shortly need to upgrade all of our old Red Hat servers, so my current use will soon expand greatly. I will also upgrade oceanpark.com to RHES when I can find the time. Currently oceanpark.com Is still running Red Hat 8. I am composing this web page on my RHSE4 workstation, which I love.

Server applications I run, generally speaking, include: Apache, Tomcat, Oracle, SSH, LDAP, DHCP, Samba, NFS, IMAP (via stunnel), MySQL, PostgreSQL, djbdns, a custom SMTP server programmed in CLISP, NNTP servers, and some other custom applications.

Client applications I run include Firefox/Thunderbird, SSH, emacs, vi, Open Office, myriad X clients of all kinds, and programming tools such as Perl, gcc, cvs, etc.

Positives and Negatives about RHSE4

Positives

Install involved a small number of mouse clicks except that I use expert mode for disk partitioning. Install went perfectly.

Excellent overall look out of the box

Concise economical choice of menu hierarchy

Open Office continues to improve. At my level of need, I am able to open Microsoft Word and Excel documents so far without incident.

The Red Hat Network update feature works very well.

Red Hat Network package management GUI has improved

ATI Radeon 9600 card was supported out of the box.

No idiotic 'Edutainment' menu item that annoyed me on SuSE

Negatives:

I do not have a long list of negatives. I love my RHSE Desktop and live in it. However, for the masses, Linux is still not ready to supplant Windows. Here are some of the reasons:
 
* Lack of cross-application file manager to select, open, manage files
* Lack applications for the masses (games, CAD, audio apps, etc.)
* Microsoft DOC and XLS formats are not open standards
* No alternative to Microsoft Access (MySQL+PHP is working on it)
* WINE is a pipe dream, people. (C.f. VMWare = Awesome)

WARNING (bug): Do NOT run the Adobe Acrobat Viewer as an application (OK to use the Firefox Acrobat reader plugin). Adobe Acrobat freezes up X and I had to use Ctl-Alt-F1/F7 plus some guessing about what to kill in order to get X back alive. Very annoying.

Unable to listen to music from Firefox out of the box. The default offers to save file to disk. Have not had time to figure this out. Totem appears not to be installed in spite of my having installed "everything". I still listen to http://di.fm via Winamp on my Windows machine.

Thunderbird has a very annoying bug that intermittantly refuses to save sent mail to my local Sent folder. (and see next item)

No clue if my Red Hat Network update feature (which does work very well, per se) will or will not eventually fix my Thunderbird application. What gets updated? Security patches? Yes. Bug fixes? Yes. But do I get upgrades to applications via Red Hat updates? Hard to tell. If you know the answer to this (and have read this far), please drop me a note.

Configuration Details

Installing Red Hat Linux and configuring components has become a truly point and click exercise, with no problems to speak of. I would still like to see the configuration tools become better at informing you what system files are changed when you modify configuration parameters. But by now I too have probably succumbed to guru-itis such that I have so much knowlege about Red Hat Linux and UNIX in my head that I no longer know what a newbie would need or want to know by way of tips about UNIX commands and configuration files.

However, Red Hat configuration at the command line level has changed little over the years. For somet tips, see my configuation notes for Red Hat 8.0.

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