Not particularly, when there's RHEL out there, and especially when there's Tao Linux which was _known_ to work, and is based on RHEL. Fedora is intended to be a rapid cycle development distribution, not something that will be stable over a longer period of time. People seem to be interested in it because of Red Hat's involvement with it, but it will never be a Red Hat product, and will only have slight resemblance to RHEL. While Tao will also never be a Red Hat product, it is built from the same source RPMs. A good number of licensed RHEL users on Intel, also run Tao (or one of the other rebuilds) on systems that don't require the type of SLAs that would make you willing to spend the money on RHEL. Their experience with those has been pretty much identical to the official Red Hat product.
Improvements to Linux/390 seem to be coming mainly from IBM, not SUSE or Red Hat. (There's some hope that can change by getting more non-IBM involvement in the future, but that is, well, in the future.) I would have my doubts that Linux/390 community testing of Fedora would result in anything significant being pushed upstream. Then there's this statement from Alan Cox (June 6, 2004): "Understand however that right now the FC -devel packages for S/390 appear solely as build tests for portability, so I don't think anyone knows if they run. Certainly you'll need to roll a kernel either from Marcelo's tree or IBM to get going. "S/390 Fedora would be fun, I'm not sure it would be useful but then again nethack for S/390 has had a lot of downloads too 8)" And this, just last month: "The FC3 kernel has a few other changes too. Also because it's Fedora and also because 390 isn't mainstream it doesn't contain any mainframe patches that IBM or others have made however much they've been labelled as urgent." That worries me somewhat. It's hard enough keeping track of all the stuff that is tested, and is known to work. If Fedora ever reaches that state, I would gladly start referencing it on linuxvm.org. I'll be following up with Tim Stalker about how he got his installation working, to see if it's in that state now. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Geoff O'Callaghan Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 5:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Fedora Core Development Post, Mark K wrote: > Tim, > [snip] > I was not aware of anyone who was running Fedora on the mainframe. > Some time ago, Alan Cox recommended against trying it, because it > receives little or no testing on the mainframe, and he had doubts the > installer would work at all. If you got it to work, a short > dissertation on how that was accomplished would be a nice addition to > the archives. > Well isn't that the exact reason for people to actually use it - to iron out the wrinkles? Given that this community is small, though reasonably active I would think that considerable improvements could be made to FC which should in turn lead to improved quality/functionality in RHEL. -goc- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
