Hi

I am currently in the process of switching from a very well known Microsoft operating system to a Linux Distribution.

A friend of mine said I should try Red Hat, so I downloaded Red Hat 9.0, which installed flawlessly.

I loved the nice look

My problem: It is unstable, I have no Idea why or whether I did something wrong or not, but every second time I ran a program it hanged up

So I downloaded Red Hat 7.3 (The Same friend told me this distro was more stable)

Well So I downloaded it, it installed flawlessly (again ) and a important thing:
Wine was preinstalled, Wine didn't work for me with Red Hat 9.0

Red Hat 7.3 looks pretty stable, but I don't like how it looks (yes yes I know that is a silly reason), could someone either explain me:

1. How to make Red Hat 7.3 (using KDE) look like Red Hat 9.0 (also KDE of course)

or

2. What I could do to make Red Hat 9.0 more stable (I would like this one more)

As you may see from the way I'm writing this text I am not a professional at Linux, I startet 2 days ago, so I am a total beginner, but I've already learned a bit about Linux.

Maybe the Red Hat 9.0 was unstable because of one of my Hardware Components:

Msi Ultra Kta3
Amd Athlon 2000xp+ (1.666 mhz)
512 mb ram (333)
2 80 gb hdds (those from IBM)
Geforce 4 Ti 4600

If Red Hat 9.0 wouldn't have been so unstable I would choose that one over 7.3 so hopefully someone has an idea

btw. I did a complete update with that up2date tool (including the Kernel)

Thank you in advance for any help you could give a Linux-Beginner

Im using redhat 9, and found that its just specific things that make it unstable, for me its the cd-rewriter.

But while trying to find Why its unstable, some1 warnd me about my AMD processor,

they said that somtimes its memory conflicts with ur graphics cards AGP memory or sumthing like that, and gave me a simple line to add to a config file to fix it, sorry i cant remember what, maybe som1 will let u know.

also, ive seen alot of people saying that they are having trouble finding a stable GEforce driver, maybe you could try a different driver.

im new to linux also, only been using it a few weeks so soorry i cant help more. but i have seen many people in this forum asking your question, so hopfully u should find your answer.

Thank you for your Reply, I would really want to now that little Magic-Line

I do also have a CD-Rewriter in my pc (as most people do these times)

I would have to suggest Red Hat 9....

I use Red Hat 9 flawlessly on several athlon based pc's as well as a celeron one. Maybe installation was corrputed. Did you test the media first?

Red Hat 7.3 - 9 (with the exception of 8.0.93 beta) rules!!!!

Yes I checked the media (all 3 cds), well I'm going to reinstall 9.0 now

Red Hat 8.0 and Red Hat 9 both look about the same. Red Hat 7.3 looks different. On RH 7.3 I do not like how the fonts in web pages look. On my older Pentium II computer all three run equally well. On my newer comuputer only Red Hat 9 would intall and run normally when I enabled the motherboards second harddrive controller which is a Highpoint. I have an Athlon XP 2600+. RH 9 works well except for having a peculiar problem keeping time in hours. It does a good job of keeping time in minutes but not hours.

When I say it works well I mean that X-Windows itself never locks-up or anything. My favorite commonly used programs also run well. However, on this an all versions of Linux there are programs I have found in the menu that do not run well or do not run at all. On my old computer I have used the latest versions of Mandrake and SuSE and like how they look too. The also seem to offer about the same stability.

The programs that run perfectly include the Mozilla browser and the Open Office wordprocessor and spreadsheet. I also have installed CrossoverOfice which is $60 wine enhancement software that allows me to run Word 97 and Excell 97. They both run perfectly. I do not know why yours is less stable. Perhaps some distro would work better or perhaps one of your peripherals uses a poorly written driver.

PS, I my above post where I said that there were a few programs that would not run, I did not mean there were very many. I mean that I chose to have the installation program intall lots of extra stuff and when I try everything in the menu I found a few that would not run. They were programs I would probably have never used anyway. Even then, I do not recally any that caused X-Windows to lock-up.

Yesterday for the first time of unsing Linux in 1 1/2 years I had X-Windows totally lock-up on me during normal usage. I pressed CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE which immediately took me out of Gnome back to the Linux command-line interface which was still working perfectly. I then typed startx and was back to using Gnome about 10 or 15 seconds later.

I find red hat 7.3 best for me, however; 9 is really good, 8.0 was garbage - even 8.0.94 was better than 8.0.

Anyway, have you disabled plug n play in your bios?
Also, most people that I know hate the stupid bluecurve theme that comes with red hat 9 and you seem to like it, strange but true it seems.

Anyway, to each his own. If you want to customize red hat 7.3 to look different, you can check out my guide, there is lots of info there on various topics and includes how to add themes to kde and where to get them.
Email me if you have further questions if you want, there is a link on my guide for that also.
Link to my guide is below.
The section on adding themes is on the "Helpful Tips" page.