The heck with it: a preliminary Fedora report.

• To: ldm-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: The heck with it: a preliminary Fedora report.
• From: Gilbert Sebenste <sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 23:54:25 -0600 (CST)

OK, since several people have asked, here are my impressions so far.
Weather2 and weather3.admin.niu.edu are P4 3 GHZ machines, both now 
running Fedora Core 1, pretty much fully patched. Here's what I see so 
far.

There is one known major bug, as far as I can tell. There is a known issue 
whereby kudzu, the hardware detection agent, simply doesn't recognize 
the network card I have. Throw in a 3Com 3c905 NIC and it simply will not 
recognize it is there. Throw in anything else, including any other 3com 
card, and you are fine. It's a well documented and Fedora's biggest bug; 
they're working on it. In the meantime, I grabbed two dirt cheap 100 base 
network cards and they work like a dream on weather2 and weather3.
Pete Pokrandt sent me this:

>Keep me posted on fedora. I've had good luck on the machines I've done
>a clean in stall on or upgraded so far, other than kudzu dumping core
>on some, and freezing up the ethernet chip on another.

The workaround solution: disable Kudzu. BTW, Pete also tells me Gempak 
works fine as well on Fedora Core 1 (FC1).

The only other bug I have is with WXP. A possible bug in Gnome makes the 
background color of GIFs I make white instead of black. Dan Vietor is 
working that one out, and I have posted a feeler on the Fedora email list. 
Otherwise...WXP works fine. McIDAS works fantastic. LDM is 
incredible...the load is next to nothing. Making huge radar files, 
satellite images, and a ton of processing on weather2 and weather3, the 
load average is normally less than .50. It was around .9 to 1.3 with 
Redhat 9 under the new weather 2 and 3. Better GCC and less memory 
leakage have really helped out Fedora 1, I guess. Gnome works very well, 
and is installed by default.

There are other issues that do not affect me. Modem identification and 
getting them to work has been an issue (maybe Kudzu again). Doing very 
complicated stuff (like getting a network printer to print with Samba) is 
causing headaches, but that's beyond what I need. Security fixes have been 
quick, and I have had no problems doing an upgrade versus a clean install.
So far, 3.5 out of 5 stars. Far beyond a rating that Windows 95 had from 
me on its first try. I gave RH Linux 9  4 out of 5 stars. I saw 20 stars 
after I installed Windows 95, mainly from banging my head into a table in 
utter despair and frustration. :-)

So, if you are running WXP graphics, hold off right now until the 
background color problem is solved. If you are running McIDAS, Gempak, and 
LDM, you will probably like Fedora a lot. It is basically RedHat 10, and 
yes, you still get Redhat's config programs to wrk with. They have had 
some problems with them, but over the past week, patches have come out 
which have solved the major problems.

I liked RedHat a lot, so I decided ultimately to give FC1 a whirl. 
Despite some bugs, I'm still enjoying the ride.

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: gilbert@xxxxxxx                                               ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
Work phone: 815-753-5492                                                *
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