Red Hat Linux

Through my husband's job at the university, I was able to purchase "Red Hat Linux Enterprise Desktop (Academic Edition)". The word "Enterprise" occurs often in linux circles, so I thought I would have a try.

Although I am not a newbie when it comes to Linux, Red Hat had me stumped. Its registration procedures were complicated for me. My first problem occurred because I created a Red Hat account because the seller told me I needed one. However, it turned out that I had to create an account by clicking on a link in the email message they sent to me.

I installed Red Hat with little dificulty, although it did not detect my screen size and I have been working with somewhat squat letters. Initial reaction is that it is not as pretty as Ubuntu or Mandriva.

The usual procedure with installing linux (or any OS) is updating the packages. This was not automatic with Red Hat and here is where I got into trouble. Well, it was automatic except that I had to re-install Red Hat several times because Ubuntu 9.10's Grub 2 could not find it. Nor could easyBCD a cross platform application which I had been using with Windows 7. Something went wrong, I think, because of the re-installing. I did not like the default hostnames and usually change them, and for this reason, the Red Hat registered hostname had a different name than the one I was currently using. I figured out that I had to delete the profile on Red Hat but I could not figure out how. The Red Hat FAQ was missing a step, I think.  Today, after wandering around, I found the spot where I could delete the profile. Once this was done, I ran the command as root:  rhn_register and everything worked perfectly!