Review: Red Hat Open Source Desktop

The Red Hat Open Source Desktop product adds to the growing landscape of Linux client systems now being offered from Sun (JDS), Novell (XD2), Linspire, Lycoris, Mandrake and others all claimants to the throne currently ruled by Microsoft.

Earlier this year, when Red Hat’s CEO Matthew Szulik was visiting India, he mentioned that the market was ready for a Linux desktop revolution and that Red Hat was working on a new product “Red Hat Desktop”. This desktop package was going to target the enterprise and small-to-medium size businesses that need inexpensive, yet high quality, stable and supported client systems. “The ambitions are grand, but the expectations are going to be moderate at the outset,” Szulik said in an interview. “What we’re focused on for the next 12 to 18 months is doing a great job in the enterprise, the government and academic marketplaces.”

The Red Hat Open Source Desktop package has the classic combination of personal productivity tools, such as Evolution for e-mail, Open Office for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and the like, Mozilla for Web browsing, GAIM for instant messaging (IM), professional Agfa Monotype fonts and other desktop applications, an Apache Web server, and Samba and NFS for file sharing. It also comes with full support and software updates through the Red Hat Network at an annual subscription price tag of $2500 for ten clients and $3500 for 50 clients (about $70 per system, per year). Red Hat doesn’t sell individual subscriptions - instead, it’s offering bundled subscriptions.

Red Hat Desktop is compatible with other Red Hat Enterprise Linux products and provides complementary technology and services. It is available in configurations that include Red Hat Network Proxy or Satellite Server, facilitating manageable and secure deployment. Red Hat Desktop supports single CPU systems with up to 4 GB of main memory.

Installation

Method

To install Red Hat Desktop, we used a bootable floppy disk to load the installer. The boot floppy diskette can be created from the images/boot.img file on the first installation CD. We also needed a network drivers diskette (from the drvnet.img image on the same CD). We chose the NFS installation method since it saved us from burning CDs of the ISO disks. This assumes that you have another Linux or UNIX system available to act as the NFS server.

Installation process notes

The graphical installer is similar to other Anaconda-based Red Hat distributions. The first couple of screens for the configuring language and keyboard layout are text-based. The actual graphical installer is launched after successfully detecting your video card, monitor and mouse.

Next, you are presented with the disk partition configuration screens. You have two options to choose from. You can let the installer “Automatically partition” your drive(s), or you can “Manually partition” them using Disk Druid. Most users will opt for automatic partitioning. However, if you want to preserve data located in a particular partition, either on the primary or a secondary hard drive, you will want to configure the partitions manually.

Next is a series of screens to configure your system s mouse, firewall, network interfaces, time zone and root password. Then the package selection screen is presented. You can choose to install the “Default” packages or “Customize the set of packages”. The default packages include the Desktop shell (GNOME), Office Suite (OpenOffice), Web browser (Mozilla), e-mail (Evolution), instant messaging, sound and video applications, games, and administration tools. I chose to install the “Default” packages.

After you complete package selection, the installer performs a check for package dependencies. If no conflicts are found, the disk partitions are formatted. The actual package installation process begins now. The default package set consists of 528 individual RPM files totaling 1,827 MB. Package installation takes about 15 minutes.

Once package installation is complete, you are asked to configure the resolution and color depth for your desktop environment. After this, your system is rebooted, ending the installation phase.

First boot

Upon boot up you will notice that the usual display of system messages has been replaced by Red Hat Graphical Boot, a simple computer icon with a progress bar below it. You can press “F2″ to see the messages. Since this is the first boot up, a program called “firstboot” is launched. This presents you with a set of post-install configuration screens for the license agreement, system date/time (NTP) setup, additional user account creation, Red Hat network registration, and software installation from additional CDs. Once you complete the “firstboot” screens, you will see a graphical log in screen, similar to Fedora Core 1. After you type in the user name and password, the Red Hat Desktop finally appears.

Red Hat Desktop

Red Hat Desktop comes with slightly dated versions of GNOME (v2.2), OpenOffice (v1.1.0), Mozilla (v1.4.2), and the Linux kernel (v2.4.21). With the recent release of Fedora Core 2, customers of Red Hat Desktop will be a little behind the times. But this lagging behind is supposed to be offset by the vendor’s promise of greater testing and integration of stable components.

Although Mozilla is a very capable Web browser, Red Hat does not provide the standard plug-ins for handling Macromedia Flash or Java. So the user ends up having to download and install these separately. The selection of fonts available to the user is satisfactory for creating simple OpenOffice documents and presentations.

Evolution does a great job of providing the user with a complete e-mail/calendaring solution. It supports standard mail protocols (POP3, imap) and message storage formats. Plus it provides useful components to handle calendaring, address books, and daily task lists. Users waiting to try out GIMP 2 will have to wait a bit longer until Red Hat integrates GNOME 2.4, since GIMP 2 will not work with the older GNOME 2.2.

Industry Comments

From the vendor - Red Hat

At a press conference in London this May, Matthew Szulik discussed how Red Hat’s client strategy was forged from the need for choice in the technology industry to drive innovation and forward thinking. Javed Tapia, director, Red Hat India, said, “The launch of Red Hat Desktop spells Red Hat’s commitment to the client environment. We have ensured that Red Hat Desktop provides a complete user experience with e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging, office suite, imaging and multimedia, plus installation support and a year of upgrades and updates.” With Red Hat Desktop, Red Hat plans to address the growing demand for PCs in India. He added, “In India, PC manufacturers have already started offering Linux OS with their products. This has fueled the demand for PCs and laptops as prices have plummeted. In fact, India is a step ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to the adoption of Linux on the desktop. Governments, corporates and even the education segment have already started using Linux on the desktop.”

From integrators and users

Major industry players seem open to this new desktop.

HP: “A key component of HP’s Linux strategy is to provide its customers choice, and Red Hat’s initiative to support Linux on the desktop aligns with that vision,” spokesperson Elizabeth Phillips said.

Dell: “We don’t see a significant demand from our customers for factory installation of Linux on the desktop, but we’ll continue to monitor what customers want, including products from key software partners like Red Hat,” spokesperson Carmen Maverick said.

LVM: “We are considering the Red Hat Desktop solution because of the open source merits of security, manageability and cost-effectiveness,” said Matthias Strelow, technical team leader at LVM, one of the largest insurance companies in Germany. LVM is a heavy user of Linux at the desktop level, with more than 8,400 currently deployed Linux desktops.

The Challenge

Red Hat Open Source Desktop is an attempt to offer a level of integration for the client desktop, which is competitive with what is offered by Microsoft. But whether or not it can begin to unseat Microsoft dominance, only time will tell.

A problem with the current suite of open source desktop products is how to balance stability and reliability with incorporating the latest features and innovation. New features and rapid innovation are the major attractions of open source, but tend to be less stable. So today’s desktop products from major companies use older, more tested components. This strategy is well suited for the enterprise customer, but may be less successful in the consumer market.

So the next challenge is to increase the range of features and innovations packaged in the OSS desktop, yet ensure an ease of use and stability that individual consumers can rely on. As the OSS desktop platform matures, even your grandma should have the best of both worlds.