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You can freely download Red Hat CD images from Red Hat's website, or better yet from a mirror. The money you pay goes towards a technical support contract, the software is free. If you want technical support, you probably need only the personal edition.

Gotchya. Cool.

Personally, with each edition of Red Hat, I buy one copy just to support the company. I've never found a need to use their tech support.

You prolly could BE their technical support. ;^)

Good on you for supporting them. Will do the same.

Go to EFNET irc #Linux but, first turn off any auto-away features on your irc client. If you ask a question, be patient, polite, don't use colors and we'll help you. Give us a hard time, you'll get channel banned without answers. Oh ! And don't log on from AOL.
(sig would know who I am by my channel nick :) ... and yes, I'm still there.

RedHat 7.3 is OK. It has some bugs out of the box (eg ftp sometimes fails for large file transfers, some NFS problems, etc.). See the RedHat gnats bug database. You can get patches from them for some bugs. I am more a BSD type, and do Linux for the $$$. I have found BSD based systems tend to be consistently less buggy and also more consistent internally and in the systems interfaces and Internet networking arenas. Both Linux and FreeBSD don't scale well-- internally they tend to use linked lists where hash tables would be more appropriate. Linux seems to be eclipsing BSD these days in the firewall area (iptables) and SMP. FreeBSD tends to be the choice of proprietary Internet appliances, probably because of less restrictive licensing considerations and more stable networking implementation.

RedHat Linux 7.3 came up rather easily (about 1 hour) on my 3 homebuilt P4s. To play with the customization and modify via source code changes one needs to know about RPMs, which seems to be somewhat peculiar to Linux at this time. There is a RPM book out (forgot title) which gives you about 80% of what one would really want to know about RPMs. For setting up a server one tends to go outside the normal RH distribution and on the net (eg for wu-ftpd).

Hardcore Linux devotees prefer Gnome over KDE. I have tried both and both are buggy, with KDE being noticeably worse to the point of being (from my point of view) unreliable for everyday use. Gnome is better. This illustrates the principle that you generally want to follow the prejudices of the Linux hackers when presented with choices within Linux, since they tend to maintain the stuff they prefer better than the stuff they don't like. Mozilla is your basic mail interface (but I prefer BSD mail for transparency and simplicity over the visually oriented GUI cr*d).

Get a low end ATI Rage for the video card, it seems to be somewhat the defacto standard for Linux. If you like to listen to music and you are running an x86 with builtin sound device on the motherboard and RH 7.3, you'll need an auxiliary PCI sound card since RH 7.3 Linux doesn't recognize the motherboard sound device.

RedHat is trying to attract "Enterprise" class business and is succeeding here and there (especially in government institutions which have to be concerned about MicroSludge audits and associated formalities). My impression is that RedHat is hanging on financially by the skin of their teeth, narrowly avoiding the fate of VA Linux. They might make it financially but in any case the Linux base will carry on in some form or another.