I am looking for some advice on wether to use unix or red hat linux? I have played with most windows OS and Mac OS up to in and including OS X. any and all advice would be appreciated

This all depends on what you want to do. If you want large scale, multi-user dependability you will want to use unix. If you want an alternative to Windows that will give you multi-users and stable medium scale releability you would want linux. I do not mean to say that Linux can not handle the load of Unix, but Unix is made for the client server network where most of the load is placed on the server. Linux is made for the Personal Computer environment as a replacement for Windows with the stability of Unix.

Right now looking for something to replace with windows and tinker and learn. Wosrt case may be a few computers on a small network with a server. Nothing real large scale. Now if i understand correctly, there are differnet versions of linux, any better then others?

some distributions are more user friendly...

basically, Linux is the kernel, the rest of the operating system (most of it) is made up of GNU software, ie open source stuff designed to be compiled on many versions of unix. On top of that, you are free to add other programs, binaries that have been compiled for your specific system, for example.

If you want to have a windows replacement, then i'd say try linux first. I'd recommend Mandrake or Red Hat, or a bunch of others but this is not the place for "what distro is best". That is totally dependent on your needs.

To download GNU/Linux or FreeBSD (a unix derivative, free and open source but based on the Berkeley Software Distribution rather than linux or GNU) go to http://linuxiso.org/

Good luck.

ok i went to the site and downloaded and burned the 3 redhat Cd's. tried to boot from the cd to load disk 1 and no luck. not sure if this is the place to post this but i am new to linux and just having a really hard time. any and all help is appreciated