RHEL 5 Workstation

march 31, 2007

Ok, it's really called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop with Workstation Option", but that is quite a mouthful. Anyways, after playing with just the regular RHEL5 Desktop Basic (ie. without the Workstation Option), I found that it didn't have all that I needed (and/or wanted), so I went ahead and got the "Workstation Option". If you're going to use your computer for anything other than basic web browsing, email and office stuff, the the workstation option is a must -- it has Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, kernel-devel, and all sorts of other geekery tools. So, why RHEL5? Not because I need the support -- though it is cool to be able to have someone to bug. But, I have always been a Red Hat user and wanted to get back into using the real thing -- and not a rebuild. Without Red Hat, there wouldn't be CentOS and the other rebuilds. I will still use CentOS on my servers (since I can't afford to buy all those support entitlements). For my notebook though, I want the real thing. I sure as hell do not want to pay for Windows Vista (or even Windows XP). Vista doesn't seem like something I would want to deal with at this point. And after reading about JR's experiences, ugh, no thanks Microsoft. Vista seems to be one big piece of DRM -- why would I want to pay for that? Windows XP is still nice, but I really don't want to pay for it. It is too much trouble to keep up and running. Yes, Alice, this is the one. At least the one that will live on the notebook -- unless something horrible happens to RHEL5 and their support can't help me fix it, the notebook should be running RHEL for a long while. RHEL5 is based on Fedora Core 6, but it feels a lot snappier.  The performance difference between RHEL5 and FC6 is quite noticeable.  I am not sure why this is.


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