Comment by 29athrowaway

The Red Hat CDs had HOWTOs in them, you could use them to get many things done step by step.

If there was a packaged version you would prefer that, but not a lot of stuff was packaged in RPMs at the time.

When Ubuntu came out and they started sending CDs for free worldwide (kudos to Mark Shuttleworth), that's when the Ubuntu/Debian started dominating.