I installed RH Linux 8 Professional more than 6 months ago. I am doing dual booting with Win XP. by using Partition Magic 8.0. Now they have version 9.0.

Should I upgrade to the latest version of RH? .

How great is the difference between RHL 9 & RHL 8? Is the difference really great like Win XP to Win 98?

New kde & gnome probably, new/updated packages, better hardware support, newer kernel and less overall bugs
Same story every time a new RH comes out.

i hated red hat 8 and went to 7.3 and am very happy with it so i won't be swtiching, however, red hat 9 is very good also and IMO way better than 8.

See my guide link below and click on the red hat 9 link on the first page to see the difference between the two. The good thing is that you will get a better distro by upgrading and still maintain your settings.

As i installed RH9 the pppd wasn't working.
with Fritz Card!PCI

that's why you should check the red hat site to see if there are any hardware issues with the devices you have, pretty rare that it would be though, considering that rh 9 is supposed to have better support for hardware.

I've been using 8 for a while now and have no intention of upgrading. All my hardware works.

I still don't know if upgrading to new a kernel is worth it if everything is wokring right. If I want the new KDE ot GNOME I'll just download it.

Where Red Hat 8 was damn good, Red Hat 9 is better. Better hardware detection, better on laptops, better window managers (kde 3.1 is soooo nice). All around worth it. IMHO.

rmartine, I'd like to see you try and download KDE or Gnome and upgrade your RH8 like that. Watch out for RH's busted compiler if you decide to go via source instead, and do think about trying to upgrade your GCC either...

I just recently upgraded my worn out Redhat 8 install to Redhat 9. With all the customization and fsck errors I had in RH 8(ext2), I think I may have damaged it slightly anyway. It crashed after I left it on for 4 days. Now with Redhat 9 (i installed ext3), the fscks are gone, the system seems to be much more stable on my amd machine( although I have not left it on for more than 2 days yet) , on my laptop, X does not crash anymore. Also I just tested the external usb 2 drive with my amd machine and it worked really well (in RH8 it crashed all the time). My only problem was configuring the use of a remote printer with my laptop. Printconf cannot seem to do it but the cups web utility worked fine. Also, I had to install SWAT and enable it in xinetd as the SMB Server utility (new in RH9) did not allow me to manage an SMB printer.

You should definitely upgrade to rh9.0. Actually do a clean install. I liked 7.3, hated 8.0 felt like I was moving backwards as far as compatibility. With 9.0 samba is pre-configured, apache server was easy, I got kmerlin working on it real easy, ...I could go on and on and on. rh 8.0 was a nightmare for me. I was even considering going to mandrake but 9.0 saved the day.

Yeah. It has a cool mouse pointer.

The cool mouse cursor made it for me. Definately worth the upgrade

Well... after reading your post I became ambitious and actually upgraded my KDE. I found a great HOWTO and here is a link to it for anyone who needs it. I am now happily using KDE 3.1 when not using Fluxbox

http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwbo...rum/18460.html

Ah yes: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ - Coz RedHat is broken

I tried it. Went back to 8. Reasons:

1. no wine in 9.0 codeweavers wine works nicely but I couldn't seem to get it to work on my linux only system. It worked on the dual boot win98/RH 8.0 (upgraded) easily as it had access to the /mnt/windows partition. I lost the ability to use the wine that came with 8.0 after I did an apt upgrade, thats how I ended up trying the codeweavers version. on the dual boot machine.

2. realplayer 8.0 didn't work.

3. netscape 7.02 seemed to hang after browsing for a while.

If your not using any of the above then give 9 a try. It could be ok for you.