Red Hat's latest offering is a finely tuned offensive into the lucrative corporate desktop market. With the Linux steamroller on a collision course for Redmond the last year has seen a number of major wins for the open source upstart with corporations such as IBM and governments that include Germany, France, China, Japan, Russia and Britain either already making the switch or considering it. And not just for servers, but on workstations too.
Which explains the presence of Red Hat's Enterprise WS, the workstation counterpart to its Enterprise line of server distributions that include Enterprise AS for the high-end and mission-critical, and Enterprise ES for core business use.
Coming on nine CDs, although only three are used in a standard installation, it contains just about everything a corporate desktop jockey is likely to need. The default install takes up two gigabytes - much more than a default Windows XP install - however this includes a full office suite (Open Office), personal information management software (Evolution), web browsing (Mozilla), instant messaging (Gaim), a selection of graphic tools (including The GIMP), video conferencing (GnomeMeeting), multimedia programs (including CD and DVD authoring), project management and remote desktop software, and a suite of easy to use Red Hat configuration tools. Bar any specific business applications, Red Hat has made sure you want for nothing.
In fact, despite its workstation moniker, a full development environment is included as well as server packages for web serving, file sharing, mail serving and databases. Enterprise WS could just as easily be configured for basic server duty, and in fact there's even a minimal installation option for headless boxes.
The install routine is certainly one of the easiest of any Linux distribution, providing a sleek graphical installer with clear concise steps and full hardware detection, right down to the sound card (previously a troublesome area for Linux). You literally need only click 'Next' a few times and you've got a brand new Red Hat system.
Package selection is a dream with defined categories that makes it easy to browse and select the available applications. This same system is then used on the desktop later when choosing to add or remove software.
The install also detects the CPU of the machine and installs an optimised kernel - which is the core of Linux - for the architecture. This is akin to being able to run an Athlon or Pentium optimised kernel for Windows, and reaping the performance benefits this brings. The kernel itself is based on the 2.4 branch but includes backports of various performance features from the latest 2.6 stable kernel, including the much ballyhooed NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) that improves efficiency for multi-threaded applications.
GNOME is the preferred desktop for Red Hat, but KDE is bundled as well. Whichever is used, the desktop remains consistent in look and operation, thanks in part to Red Hat's professional looking Blue Curve theme. All GNOME and KDE based programs are combined into a single menu system based on category (a welcome change compared to some distributions) ensuring the desktop remains as intuitive as possible. That said, one thing remains unchanged - this is Linux, and despite its aesthetic appeal it's still different enough that any large scale deployment is going to need some retraining. However as far as Windows-like desktops go, Enterprise WS is by far one of the closest yet.
The only real negative to Enterprise WS is the same negative of Linux in general - the level of hardware support. Systems based off NVIDIA’s popular nForce chipsets, which are rapidly becoming mainstream, will need drivers installed manually - and given this applies to the nForce network device, this isn't easily done without access to another machine. In the realm of wireless forget about 802.11g support, as it's simply non-existent at the moment (though 802.11b is supported in full). On the upside, Enterprise WS is already available for 64-bit Itanium and AMD64 platforms.
The standard Red Hat Enterprise WS 3 package includes a one-year Red Hat Network subscription for support and updates. And with a price point that beats out Windows XP, especially if you consider that it comes bundled with an office suite, there is some clear competition for Microsoft for the corporate desktop. As a home system it's just as capable, but you'd be better off forgoing the unnecessary support services and heading for Red Hat's community based distribution, Fedora (fedora.redhat.com).