I just performed an installation of REDHAT4.1 on a new P-pro.
I would like to compare this with the latest SLACKWARE, so if
anyone has infomagic CD's they could lend me I would appreciate it.
Let me summarize my experience with REDHAT:
I went with REDHAT for
A) costumer support
B) upgradability
the installation went OK, REDHAT's installation is a bit more streamlined
then SLACKWARE (which i've installed at home twice before). However
LILO refused to work and in fact hung each and every time. A request
for help went to REDHAT Saturday and I finally received a reply on
Wednesday morning, in the meantime I went to "loadlin" and have subsequently
managed to make a boot floppy (thanks to Steve for his hints).
Once I was able to boot, networking was working, Xconfiguration was a
snap and getting things to the print queue took less than a minute
(i remember spending a week or so with magic filters at home before
I could print). So far I was very impressed. I had accomplished all
this in 2 days of effort, 1.5 days mucking with LILO, rearranging
my hard drives..... So subtracting the LILO problem, it takes about 0.5
days to get and rolling once the disks are repartitioned.
So far so good....we have ported the CLAS code to Linux using g77.
We went with g77 since it provides a cost free solution to FORTRAN
and allows FORTRAN developers to write compile and debug FORTRAN.
REDHAT does not come with g77....anyone who has built g77 knows
this is a pain....
there are many other small problems that irk me with this distribution.
With SLACKWARE color-xterms, kernal rebuilding, worked without a problem.
I still cannot get color-xterms to work, and I get undefined symbols
when I try to build a kernal with sound card support.
Also, cvs, xfig, kernal sources and other useful stuff is not part of the
default download. It was by accident that I found the "upgrade" menu
that allows you to select and install these packages....
I no longer believe the hype about REDHAT, although they have a many
things going for them but they need to clean up some of these details
for a truely painless installation.
again...let me know if I can borrow someone's infomagic CD's....
Arne
--
Arne Freyberger
JLAB (Mail Stop 12H) Phone: (757) 269-6268
12000 Jefferson Avenue Pager: (757) 680-8884 freyberg@cebaf.gov
Newport News, VA 23606 Phax: (757) 269-5800 http://www.cebaf.gov/~freyberg