Hi Ya'll,


How different is Fedora from Redhat? The reason I ask is because I need to Install proprietary software which requires Redhat or HPnix. I also need to Install a custom module that requires a 2.6 kernel.


Is the directory structure, tools, initscripts, etc the same, and in the same location as RedHat was? Or should I expect to do some customizations to Fedora in order to mimic the same environment that this software expects (RedHat)?

Do you know which kernel version Fedora 4 has? I went on the Fedora site but it makes no mention of it. Does Fedora come with an up2date or similar feature allowing me to upgrade to the latest Kernel version once I have Fedora installed?

All help is appreciated!

Fedora is the test bed for Redhat all fedora packages are not fully tested or secured. I have tried to use Fedora for "proprietary" stuff, and had nothing but headaches. I recommend that you use Redhat if you can Fedora is updated almost every day, and sometimes the updates break stuff.

If you are interested in not paying for true Redhat then I would suggest CentOS. I have four RHEL 4.0 servers one Fedora server and two CentOS servers. I can honestly tell you that CentOS rocks, and is 100% compliante with Redhat software. If you do not know anything about CentOS they take the Source RPMs for RHEL and compile them pretty much perfectly. I have had 100% compatibility with all Redhat only software. There is no way I would ever put Fedora into production again with CentOS availible.

CentOS huh? I will try it! I am so desperate I will do anything! If it works, I will buy you a beer next time you are in Arlington, Va! ;-)

Thanks again Mr. Joshua!

I don't know about Fedora 4 but FC3 comes with a 2.6.12 kernel I believe. I was also unaware that Fedora was a test bed for Redhat development... is that true? That's pretty interesting.

In general, I prefer Redhat 9 over Fedora 1-4. I have a lot of reasons, but some people still like Fedora better. I work for a small software company that develops software primarily on Linux. Our applications tend to involve a lot of external hardware (we do a lot of medical robotics and stuff), and also stability is extremely important to us. Here is a list of reasons why I do not like Fedora; some of them are pretty minor and there's probably some that I forgot. Like I said, don't take my word for it, I'm a picky and impatient person:

1) I can't grasp the concept of volume groups. I have not once been able to succesfully install and mount a second hard drive in a Fedora system when I didn't configure that hard drive during OS installation.
2) I don't particularily like the graphical "interface" to the init process. It's silly that it starts X just to run init scripts, and also it's caused me lots of headaches when using kudzu to configure new hardware. It is possible to turn this off, so I've heard, so I wouldn't take this one too seriously.
3) There is an automatic update utility; up2date. I have never seen a Fedora system (1, 2, 3, or 4) where up2date worked straight out of the box. Even going to the Fedora help IRC channel (probably a bad idea, heh), the general response from moderators, admins, and other people who seemed to know what they were talking about was "oh up2date sucks, use yum instead". So, an automatic update utility, yum, does exist. But the one with the nice GUI, up2date, does not seem to work.
4) I had a lot of odd, transient OpenGL problems with Fedora Core 2. I never tested the stuff out on 3 or 4. It could have been related to the X server, or to the nVidia drivers. I tend to think it was a problem with the nVidia drivers because the Fedora kernels seem to not give the modules that much stack space to work with. It is likely that, if it was an nVidia problem, it has since been fixed. I've never seen the problem on newer Fedora distributions though.
5) I had a few custom hardware drivers that worked on Redhat 9 but caused kernel panics on Fedora. I eventually traced everything down to stack overflows, resulting from limited stack space available to the kernel modules. This was annoying, but it was fixable, but only because I knew what I was doing. That is unfortunate. But, of course, these weren't hardware drivers that people would normally be using for every day things.
6) I absolutely could not figure out how to write a character device driver for the Fedora kernels. I did everything by the book, and also based off the experience I have with such things under 2.4 kernels. The compilation process changed, I know, and that was not a problem. But simple things that should have worked like registering a major device number, were failing for no apparent reason. I never figured that one out; it may have been something specific to the way I was doing things (although I was pretty much doing hello-world stuff).
7) Symlinks and permissions that I change in /dev on Fedora 2, 3, and 4, are always removed/reset on reboot. I can't figure this one out either. Actually, if anybody knows how to stop this from happening, I'd really appreciate some advice as it's becoming a bit of a problem for us.
8) For some reason, it's just annoying that they used xorg.conf instead of XF86Config. Uh... that's not a problem, but I don't like change and when you are used to setting things up on a Redhat system, those kinds of things cause some small productivity problems here and there. Not an issue with Fedora itself, but it is an issue if you are moving from Redhat to Fedora. There's other configuration differences as well.
9) We have some issues with motherboard serial ports performing poorly and serial expansion cards dropping bytes on Redhat 9. The problems are actually fairly complex so I won't get into it, but I spent a considerable amount of time hacking serial port drivers and stuff to try to fix this problem, and never came up with a solution. Sadly, the drivers that come with Fedora 4, which you would expect to come with a "newer and improved" kernel and driver set, still had the same issues. I don't particularly like the fact that problems that were around back in Redhat 9 are still there.
10) There seems to be a new Fedora major revision number once every couple of months or so. Any OS that increments major version numbers so fast does not strike me as being in stable development condition. I eventually will give the Fedora distributions another chance, no doubt about it. They do have potential but at the moment I just feel a lot more comfortable, and safer, with Redhat 9.

On the bright side, Fedora 4 seems mostly stable. We use Redhat 9 on our systems when we know we need the stability, and Fedora 4 when we want to use newer versions of stuff. For the most part, Fedora doesn't cause that many problems. I personally just don't like it. My first bad experience was actually the OpenGL problems that I mentioned, and that was a pretty bad experience, so it pretty much soured my impression of Fedora from then on.

This is not to say that other distributions like SuSE or Debian or whatever aren't "better" than Redhat 9. I primarily have experience with Redhat and Fedora distributions, so that's where I'm coming from.

Hope this helps, and I'm happy to finally have a place to vent all my little Fedora frustrations,
Jason

JCipriani,

In case you are still interested, yum has a GUI called Yum Extender. It works pretty well.

bushidozen: Thanks! I'll install that on some of our machines tomorrow; it looks pretty useful and will certainly improve that Fedora experience. Maybe some day they'll make yum + Yum Extender the default in a new installation.

JCipriani: If you’re having that much trouble with fedora, why don’t you ask for help?

Or is this your request for help?

If so, I’ll check off a few of your questions:

1) You should look at the LVM HowTo, especially Chapter 11 “Common Tasks”: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...LVM-HOWTO.html

Volume groups and logical volumes are analogous to extended partitions and logical partitions, respectively.

2) To stop X from loading during the init process, remove “rhgb” from the grub kernel command line. To stop X from loading at all, change /etc/inittab to runlevel 3 (id:3:initdefault). To disable kudzu, disable the service in whatever runlevel you want to run in.

3) Up2date sucks, there’s no other way to say it. Haven’t used it since learning yum and apt in FC3. If you want a GUI, then use yum with one of the graphical front ends (gyum, yumex). Personally, I don’t understand the fascination with the yum and apt graphical front ends.

4) FC2 had very serious teething problems because of the introduction of the 2.6 kernel. I installed it on a few systems and moved back to FC1 before it took down another xp installation (I lost a couple of xp’s to FC2).

8) The last time I check the modern releases, it seemed like only Debian and its derivatives are using XFree86. Xorg seems to be taking over. Must be a reason.

10) No matter what the founding fathers might say, Fedora in actuality is a “testing” release, much like Debian Etch. If you want stable in a noncommercial release, then use Debian Woody or Debian Sarge.

Again, if you’re having trouble, ask for help.

WhatsHisName:

Thanks a lot of the advice, that's useful stuff and does help. For the record though, I was just giving my opinion about the problems I noticed with Fedora to the OP. Personally, I'm happy with Redhat 9 at work here just because it gets the job done well and I have no reason to change. Most of our OS-related discussions here consist of half of us pushing to install FC4 on our machines for some reason, and the other half of us being happy with what we know works. So, while I myself am not actually interested in getting Fedora to work well for me, the information you gave is still useful to the people here that are insisting upon using it. But, no, it's not a roundabout cry for help; rest assured I would have posted a proper question if I needed to.

Thanks though,
Jason