Hi everyone,

I just have a quick quesion about Red-Hat, coz I'm using SuSE but unfortunately no drivers for my RAID controller has been developped for it. However, drivers for Red-Hat are out.

What do people here think about Red-Hat? How good is it? What are the main changes (advantages/disadvantages) compared to SuSE?

Thanks

Red Hat 7.x went downhill from 6.x and 7.x uses the buggy gcc 2.96-RH.

Drivers for RH will prolly work with SuSE

Well the drivers I found were originally made for RH 7.1 I think, but I don't know what kernel version that is. I've got SuSE 8.0 with kernel version 2.4.18 (I think, hehe ), d'you reckon these drivers would work?

The only problem is that there's a .pdf in there that explains how to install these drivers on an existing system, and how to install them when you install RH from scratch, but with my SuSE version I wouldn't know how to do it, coz when I start the installation process it doesn't actually ask for a disk with the drivers, therefore it just doesn't find my HDDs coz they're connected to my RAID controller.

What would you reckon is best anyway? RH 7.3 or SuSE 8.0 Pro?

Not all 7.x version shipped with the broken gcc compiler. But I still preferred 6.2 myself though.

Which is the better banana: Jamaican or Aftican? It really depends on what you want it for. RedHat is 'an industry standard' and is often synonymous with Linux, but I wouldn't say that it's any better or worse than SuSE. You say that the drivers for your RAID setup are available for RH? Can you not get the source code? If so, you might find that it works on your SuSE setup anyway!

My advice would be to get RH and give it a try alongside your SuSE setup. If you're not happy with how RH does things, then you don't have to keep it!

Well my real problem as I said before is that with the drivers for my controller (HPT374) made for RH, found at www.highpoint-tech.com, come with all the doc to explain how to install them when installing RH from scratch, which is basically what I wanna do, but I wouldn't how to do it for SuSE. Apparently when you install RH it asks for a disk with the controller drivers, but SuSE doesn't , and this is my problem

Now, if I do set my RAID, I won't be able to install SuSE, unless I had another HDD that I could connect to the standard IDE controller, but this isn't the case.

I just would like the opinion of an advanced user who would have used both systems, coz I'm still quite used to Windows and I thought we could compare the 2 systems just like we compare Win95 to Win98, but I guess it's not possible

hehe, sorry for that crap example, it'd be like comparing your african banana to some canadian apples.......lol

I just downloaded the file called v1.0_374_redhat.zip from here. Once unzipped, you should check out the PDF file Install_RedHat_HPT374.pdf... specifically the bottom of the 4th page (curiosly named page 2) and the top of the next page. The section is about installing the drivers into an exisiting system. Now, since these are kernel drivers (and init scripts), they should be fine on your SuSE system. However, ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP OF REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS, OR INDEED, WHEN ATTEPMTING TO DO ANYTHING TO THE SYSTEM ITSELF. You have been warned.

Good luck.

Thanks, I did do that before, but I can't remember why I wasn't succesfull, oh well, I'll give it another go tonight I guess, but if it doesn't work I think I'll install RH.

Thanks for your help.

If the driver was made to work on RH specifically, it probably would also give you a version as well. I am sure that, like was said above, they just wanted to pick a very "well known" distro name, which would be RPM based and say that it's "compatible" with that. That's not to say that it's not compatible with every distro out there, but it's to say that it's compatible with the distro that most closely resembles the largest user base.

SuSE does have the option to load "vendor" drivers in YaST2. You may want to try that route if you haven't yet.

Cool

Where do I find that 'load "vendor" drivers ' option? during installation or after installation?

Oh, I do think the drivers would work with SuSE but it's just that on the vendor's drivers page there's like a table with some different distro like SuSE, RH and others but for all of them but RH it says 'not available yet'.

In the SuSE control panel. It's under the first page. Not on SuSE right now, but it's there. If you are root, it's the second icon on kicker. Click it and choose control panel.

Cool