Which retail version should I get?

Well with Red Hat Pro being the same price as Red Hat Personal, i'd get the Pro version as you can opt for which packages you want installed anyway.
But personally, i'm a SuSE boy, i find it extremely easy to use, nice look and some good features, but it's all up to personal preference.
But i'm expecting AT to come along sometime in the near future and suggest Mandriva :spin: :safe:
 
Red Hat 9 is ancient and unsupported, don't waste your money. If you want to try Red Hat Enterprise Linux, look at CentOS -- it's a distro built from the same source code as RHEL, but with all of the company branding removed. Then there's Fedora Core, RH's community distro.
 
I have Mandriva and setup/customisation was pretty easy (with a little help from the good man AT!)
I did screw it up though, but that was my fault and I eventually managed to get it sorted...having not used any other versions of Linux (apart from Red Hat for like 5 mins once) I can't really say much. But Mandriva was easy to set up even for a n00b like me!
 
The current version of Mandriva is 2006, which would probably be Mandrake 11.0 if they were still using the old naming convention. 10.1 is pretty old now, I wouldn't buy it.
 
Shoot, well it had KDE and Gimp so I thoght it was pretty good. Thanks for the heads up, can't find 2006 unfortunatly. I'll check their site.
 
Exfoliate said:
Shoot, well it had KDE and Gimp so I thoght it was pretty good.
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Well, my wife has been running 10.1 since it first came out, and she's been really happy with it. But it's a good idea to get the latest version of your preferred Linux distro and avoid older ones when possible. That way you'll have newer versions of all the software provided, and you'll have a much longer support cycle on your OS. Especially in your case since you have dialup, an upgrade via urpmi/FTP would be very impractical to say the least.

Exfoliate said:
Does CentOS come with Gimp and KDE? Or is it just a basic OS with little in terms of apps?
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CentOS is a community-supported rebranding of RHEL, and it does include Gnome and KDE. But the only thing I'm using it for is a couple of headless servers which aren't running a GUI at all and very litte software, so I really couldn't say how good it is for desktop usage. I would imagine pretty bare bones compared to many other distros. If you're looking for a good desktop OS, I unreservedly recommend Mandriva 2006 Powerpack.

If you find that you cannot afford the full boxed version of Mandriva 2006 but you don't want to download it and burn it yourself, you might consider buying an inexpensive multiple-CD or single-DVD copy from a CD Vendor.
 
Exfoliate said:
Nice! Mandriva Linux 2006 DVD (x86_64) it is, thank you very much AT! Just out of curiosity what's i586?
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i586 is all x86 architectures >= Pentium1 Pro. By the way, this is the version I recommend for desktop systems whether they are capable of 64-bit operation or not. The reason is that on a desktop system, there is very little speed tradeoff, and the i586 version is much more mature. The biggest benefits for the long registers in a 64-bit CPU are seen in large databases, which are rarely found on desktop PCs (at least presently). As a result, many desktop apps are not as well-tested in their 64-bit versions, while software like web servers, databases etc. are very polished and well-tested on a 64-bit platform.

-AT
 
Exfoliate said:
Wow, glad I asked, i586 DVD it is, thanks again.
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Yeah, Fred and I tested his AMD64 rig with 2006 x86-64, and it performed nice but we found that the i586 build was overall better on his machine, and just about as fast as long as we custom-compiled his kernel for his architecture. You should see that thing host games while he's also using it as a client. :)
 
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