Back to RedHat
by Volker Weber
I have removed SUSE Linux once again from all my systems. This time I tried really hard to keep it, but somehow we just don't seem to get along. The nice people at SUSE had sent me a Professional Version, but I just don't seem to like it. Maybe if I tried to run it with Gnome instead of KDE. But what is the point running SUSE if you don't want KDE?
While I was busy downloading Fedora Core 1, I removed the SUSE partitions from the notebook and installed my trusted RedHat 9, using an SMC wireless card from the outset. Joining my network (SSID and WEP) was easier than expected.
Boy, do I like the clean BlueCurve interface with its nice font rendering right out of the box. It was the general look&feel that had sold me on RedHat when I tried version 8. The menus are clean and it does not list the same functions all over the place. Maintaining the panel is quite easy and I was able to replace Mozilla with Firefox easily.
I had planned to do an upgrade install to Fedora, but decided to do a clean install which did not work very well. After the initial 3-CD install I was unable to boot into the operating system. It hang right after the PCMCIA subsystem and I did not feel like cracking the problem.
Instead I reverted back to RedHat 9 and upgraded from there to Fedora. That actually takes more than twice as long for the upgrade alone. If your hardware needs an hour for a full RedHat or Fedora install, you can count on two to three hours for the upgrade. Since I was busy with other things I just let it work in the background and checked for a CD change request once in a while.
Without any difficulties Fedora installed and rebootet into my wireless LAN. I updated the up2date utility manually because there was a newer version available. The utility is now busy patching Fedora to the latest level.
Find somebody else's screenshots here. Happy camper. :-)
Comments
This might be true for desktops. For Domino on Linux servers it is really recommended to use Linuz Enterprise Server 8 or at least SuSE 8.1. There are very strict limits where to run the Domino server. There is a technote with the up to date versions which are supported for Domino. I would take those compatibility lists very serious because there are changes in thread-libs, Java versions and other details which might break Domino. If anyone is interested I have a nice presentation about Domino on Linux which I am happy to share. The Technote in Lotus Knowledge base is #1097184. In case you are interested in the presentation send a mail to linux@nashcom.de
Domino runs here in its native environment. :-) According to the technote (don't try to understand the URL) I could run it on RH 7.2 as well which would suit my usage pattern.
But I agree that SLES might actually be the best choice.
If you still got some old machines 'hanging' around, or just want to do a short look onto those nice, small and 'uncluttered' distros which are out these days, try to get a look at Crux (esp. for i686 machines) and Damn Small Linux (which currently enlightens my life, thanks to such niceties as superb-tiny ISO image (50 megs), but still got all a developer would want, incl. FluxBox as window manager, xserv instead x11 (faster, smaller, and also comes along w/ wheel mouse support), web (monkey) and ftp serv, running fucking stable, etc. etc. ) ;)
cu, w0lf.
While IBM is not supporting it officially, we are happy with Domino 6.51 running on Debian Linux 3.x (woody) :-)
Rock solid stable and the OS is completely free software.
Migrated my web server to Fedora Core 1 a month ago. After the up2date upgrade (hope you dont experience problems with trying to upgrade all packages at once) I started to add further update channels.
Eric S. Raymond has an excellent HOWTO called "Fedora Multimedia Installation" that is worth reading. Though I ended up with a different setup: include Macromedia to up2date, get apt from Dag Wieers which comes preconfigured with several apt update servers. Installed synaptic (apt update && apt install synaptic) and used the slick UI.
Finally added KDE to my server list in apt and upgraded to KDE 3.2.1.
Fedora Core with KDE 3.2 absolutely rocks!
