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.
*******************************************************************************
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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