I have found the installation of RedHat to be pretty easy.  If you have a
normal motherboard, with normal IDE controllers, a normal modem, and a
sound blaster card, you can almost gaurantee success installing redhat.
One minor annoyance is if you dont have a bootable cdrom drive, then you
have to make a boot install disk first, but that isnt too bad.  Redhat
does do a lot of the hardware installation automatically, but sometimes
you still need to do some pretty serious troubleshooting.  Getting X to
run, it is sometimes difficult to find the right monitor/graphics type.
Redhat has XConfigurator to try and help with this.

One thing to remember:  Linux is much more powerfull than windows in many
ways, and with the power comes some responsibility and challenges.  Be
carefull when you are root, especially with 'rm' commands.  Always have
your firewall up if you leave your system connected, or it WILL get
cracked into, sooner or later.  I learned the hard way.

And lastly, if you have never used it, you will probably get VERY
frustrated.  Just keep at it and you will figure things out.

Helpfull links
tldc.org
redhat.com/support/hardware

for questions, there are usually nice folks on
irc.openprojects.net


On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Brett Getz wrote:

> Hey guys I have been reading  the posts about Linux to run on slower machines.  I am really interested in getting Linux on my desktop PC.  What is all need to get up and running with Linux? Also is it really difficult to set up the hardware or does Linux do that for you I am really new at this so any help would be useful.  Thanks Brett Getz
>
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