Installation:Gentus is based on Red Hat and Boots from the CD. It gives you the choice of either a text-based or graphical installation. It automatically detected my Mouse (a Genius Netscroll PS2) and my Graphics Card (A Creative Blaster Riva TNT 2 Ultra).
The Partitioning is easy and done using Disk Druid.
It comes with most of the necessary software – ALSA, KDE, Gnome but no office package.
The boot manager is LILO which is also easy to set up and automatically set up my Windows partition, BUT it wouldn’t allow you to add a config for any other Linux distros that may be on your machine.
Booting Up:
Gentus boots up quickly and starts all the required services. One problem was that there wasn’t any working sound config tool. It came with ALSA, the Redhat ‘setup’ and AbitConf (all for setting up sound cards) but none of these were able to configure my OLD SoundBlaster AWE 64.
The was also no graphical login which was annoying seeing as though I’d asked for one.
The installation allowed me to set up my Network card (a Realtek 8139a), which was easy as long as you know what you’re doing.
Conclusion:
Gentus isn’t bad considering it’s given away free with all ABIT Motherboards. I bought Gentus because it is supposed to be optimised for ABIT motherboards but I couldn’t see how – there was nothing in the Kernel, no special software, nothing!
It seems no different from any of the other Redhat based distributions that are currently available.
