New to linux and need guidance with redhat 9 installation

[Lee Maschmeyer]

Hi Jaffar,

I don't know anything about which flavor of machine yours is, but I wonder
if you really want to go with Red Hat 9. Unless things have changed since
the last time I was there, support for that version ends this Thursday. You
might be considerably ahead going with Fedora. Though all the talk about
"bleeding edge" scares some people, I personally have had good luck with
Fedora 1 at work and will probably install 1 or 2 at home within the next
week or two to replace 9. It's also worth noting that 9's installer has a
problem which makes the cursor in vertical lists appear to be a line below
where it really is. This has been fixed in Fedora.

There doesn't yet seem to be much documentation in the Fedora project (the
Release Notes are good), but there is quite a bit of docs on the RH9 home
page, including a Getting Started guide which, though it is rather
GUI-oriented, is still pretty good. I get screamed at every time I mention
it, but their primary focus is GUI. This means we have a few extra hoops to
jump through and a few more rough edges. So far this hasn't become too
significant for experienced users, so if something isn't aimed at us, don't
get hyper right away. For example, Fedora's installer doesn't give you an
option to have a text logon, but when you boot the first time you can go to
a console, logon, install your speech if it isn't already there (braille
is), and change /etc/inittab to give you text logins after that. If you've
got some experience and sighted help, it's not too bad; if you're unfamiliar
with Linux, it's a considerable thorn in your side until you get past it.
Once you do get past it, though, things are mostly pretty good.

I'm afraid this is too longwinded. Sorry,

Lee