Introduction

[nagarsurender]

Hi,
My name is Surender (with one 'r' . I am fairly new to Linux. I have installed RHEL 5.0 on my new work laptop Dell E6400 as I really got sick of XP.
Looking forward to learning the great Linux

Regards,
Surender

[Rubberman]

RHEL 5 (and the various derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux) are great, but whether all of your wireless and other stuff work well on the laptop with them is a question. I run RHEL/CentOS on my workstation, but I have had better luck running Ubuntu on Dell laptops especially. I have 3 that I run various versions on, with best results running Ubuntu 9.04. All of the wireless stuff, including my USB Sprint broadband cell modem as well as my brand-x USB webcam, all worked out-of-the-box without any configuration, driver/firmware installation whatsoever.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Hope you'll have fun running RHEL. If you should have any problems with it, don't hesitate to start a new thread for each issue.

[Mudgen]

Rubberman and ozar gave some good advice. RHEL is really oriented to servers, and you'll likely have a better experience with Ubuntu. Or if you want good laptop support while learning the Red Hat way of things, consider Fedora.

If you have good reason to stay with RHEL, be aware that you'll need an "entitlement" to keep it updated. Unless you can get one through work or are willing to pay for a subscription yourself, you might want to reinstall with Centos, which will be identical to RHEL, but without the trademarking and with no-cost updates.

[Rubberman]

As I mentioned, there are a number of community or other versions of RHEL that are available. There is CentOS and Scientific Linux which are binary compatible with RHEL. They are maintained well - CentOS by the user community, and Scientific Linux by the high energy physics community which is basically the major international labs such as CERN, ANL (Argon National Laboratory), and Fermi Lab. They try to get their releases out within a few days of Red Hat's release of a new version or other updates, such as kernel bug and security fixes. My wife, who works in the computing division at Fermi Lab uses Scientific Linux daily. I who am an independent IT consultant, use CentOS. On our non-Apple laptops we use Ubuntu.

[nagarsurender]

Dear Rubberman, ozar & greyhairweenie,
Thank you very much for your replies
Actually I am using Oracle Unbreakable Linux (OUL) (RHEL 5.0). I work for Oracle in ERP consulting and OUL is well supported within Oracle.
I must say that I did have lot of issues with my wireless setup and somehow managed to fix it.
I am using 64 bit Linux and for some reason I am having issues with lots of software installations, to give you some examples I am having issues with OpenOffice 3.2, Zimbra, Adobe Flash player, VirtualBox etc.
For the time being I am using Windows XP virtual machine (VMWare on Linux) as a work around. Otherwise I am impressed with the stability of OUL (RHEL 5).

I have used Unix at University (while doing my MS) for two years and that was 10 years ago since then I have been using Windows and really do not want to use it anymore.

Regards,
Surender

[Rubberman]

I forgot about Oracle's RHEL derivative. I run Oracle 11 on my CentOS system just fine. FWIW, for OpenOffice, I prefer the Go-oo.org version - better support for MS Office formats, supposedly. In any case, I've had zero problems with it and use it all the time. As for the flash player, VLC plays flash videos just fine. For a Firefox flash plugin, use the 32-bit version of Firefox, and use the 32-bit version of Adobe flash - you can get it from their web site. It works well for me also. Unfortunately, I had major problems with the 64-bit Firefox + 64-bit flash plugin, so I reverted to the 32-bit version. Mostly it works just fine.

[Mudgen]

Ah. OUL. I didn't realize Oracle had an agreement with Red Hat permitting Oracle to call it RHEL. Although I've been surprised that the replacement up2date program that's part of joining an actual RHEL install to Oracle's ULN update channels is not "de-branded". Anyway, it's good that you have access to a commercial support channel, since you're using a server-oriented distro on a desktop. Not faulting you for that, but you should have your eyes open that you'll likely have more issues than with a more desktop-oriented distro.

I've had no problems with OpenOffice on any of my 64-bit Fedora platforms. It does want a 64-bit java. IIRC, Oracle wants to install an IBM-ish version of the Sun JRE, so you may have to poke around with "alternatives" and/or install another java version in parallel.

As to Firefox/Flash, I've found putting the 32-bit Firefox on an x86_64 install, or nspluginwrapper-ing the 32bit Flashplayer, to be more of a PITA than getting a straight 64-bit environment working. I've used the Adobe 64-bit Flash plugin for quite some time. It worked pretty well in alpha release, and is now in beta and pretty solid. See
Adobe Labs - Downloads: Flash Player 10.1

I don't use or have experience with Zimbra or Virtualbox, so no remarks there.

[Rubberman]

As to Firefox/Flash, I've found putting the 32-bit Firefox on an x86_64 install, or nspluginwrapper-ing the 32bit Flashplayer, to be more of a PITA than getting a straight 64-bit environment working. I've used the Adobe 64-bit Flash plugin for quite some time. It worked pretty well in alpha release, and is now in beta and pretty solid. See
Adobe Labs - Downloads: Flash Player 10.1

It may be that on Fedora (which is a newer kernel et al than RHEL+) the 64-bit version of Firefox+Flash are stable. Not so (in my experience) on RHEL+. Perhaps it's because my default java installation is 32-bit? Don't know. I might to reinstall 64-bit FFox+Flash w/ 64-bit java to see if that works. No time right now. You know what they say - if it ain't broke...