Red Hat advice

[blubomber]

I am starting to research Red Hat for i will be installing two new servers around May of 2005. One server will be used for applications and the other for Data Warehousing. I am planning on Opteron CPU based servers.

Anyone know of some good books? Also, would downloading the ISOs from the internet and installing them on the new server be the same as ordering the server with Red Hat already installed?

One more thing, i have messed with Mandrake, from ver 8.1 to 10.0, a little bit, so i am familiar with how things work. I am no expert yet though. How does Red Hat compare to Mandrake as far as installing programs and basic day to day tasks? Will Red Hat install on a computer with WinXP already installed as easily has mandrake does?

thank you.

[EvilRick]

You might check out ExamCram2's Server+ and Linux+ books as a start. For me, the only way to learn is to "do". Install it and use it like it's going to be used in your environment. Break it and see if you can fix it.

Buying from RedHat will get you their support. If you're going to install in a productions environment, I would recommend purchasing from them.

Installation will be just as easy.