Since red hat has split into red hat enterprise (costs money) and fedora core (free), they no longer offer red hat donwloads. Is there a way I could get red hat 7?

>Is there a way I could get red hat 7?
Sure.

Don't know if you already know this, but actually Red Hat split up when they reached version 10. Therefore you can get Red Hat Linux up until version 9, if you care.
http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Soft...Hat-Linux.html

they do offer downlaods. theres ana crhive hidden away on redhats site

You could try these links to dowwnload red hat for free.
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/distro.php?distro=8
http://dir.linuxforums.org/
http://www.madtux.org/
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat
Redhat is rpm based. As we all know. Good if you like rpms.

Just because it hasn't been mentioned, RH7 has reached it's EOL, there are already a few HUNDRED vulnerabilities for the software included with the distrobution, and I wouldn't recommend installing it on anything that will have internet access. If you want RHEL (RedHat Enterprise), use Whitebox, if you want the Free faster moving distrobution, use Fedora.

use CentOS. In my experience it gets faster security updates than whitebox and has a bigger following

How is yum? Easy to use? Is there any more rpm hell that I have read about in other forums? I used some rpm distros. aLinux comes to mind but I think that have been others. I don't think that aLinux is based on redhat it just uses rpms. I never did experience rpm hell. I think it is a dependency issue. What is the best CentOS version? I heard that CentOS 5 is a beta frozen release. Which implies there are known security issues with packages in this release, and that there will be no updates provided in order to resolve those issues. Would you say that CentOS 4.92 would be the right CentOS to try?
Another question to ask the CentOS users is this. Is it tricky to get the right nvidia-glx driver installed? If what i have read is true then CentOS is pretty good, warranting an install and some further trials. Everybody knows by now that I am a MEPIS die hard user. I do love trying out new linux systems just to see where they stand against my fav.

Which do you and everyone else think is better? CentOS or fedora core ? I think I will try one of them over the next week or so. I think I read somewhere here that fedora uses grub. Does CentOS use grub? Thanks in advance for any help.

rpm 'hell' comes from people not understanding how to use RPM's. If you have the rpms, you can either use up2date to get them (you CAN add additional software channels to up2date as well as yum), or use the --aid option when installing it, for RPM to locate/include the required RPM's. Yes, occasionally it will come accross where you can't install something that is an RPM, but most likely you are attempting to install the wrong package if you run into 'that' many issues. That being said, yes, yum does prevent a lot of that form occuring, just like up2date does.

One saying that I will always support, is unless what you are using doesn't do what you want, stick with what you are used to. In terms of Linux Distrobutions, there is no 'better' distrobution, just a 'better for me' distrobution. You can make any distrobution look/act/feel however you want, almost to the point of making them identical.

yeah yum is very similar to APT (the backend that synaptic uses). It avoids RPM hell by checking dependenices.

e.g

yum update - gets updates
yum install (packagename) - install a specific package and all required packages

Get centos 4.4 - there is no 4.92 like you were saying, maybe you got confused?
4.4 is equivilent to redhat enterprise 4 quarterly update 4 (like a service pack)

By the way the nvidia drivers shouldnt be too hard (i have the ati ones) , just edit xorg.conf to use a standard vesa driver so that you are able to go to nvidias site and download the RPM

CentOS sucks as a desktop system but for a workstation/server you cant beat it. Not very high tech but reliable and has low requirements (full install runs just about fine on 128mb ram) - roughly on a par wityh debian sarge but has much better GUI admin tools for apache etc....

My CentOS 3.4 server has been running for a couple of years nonstop running my website - no probs