Post, Mark K wrote:
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.
My extremely well concealed point was that innovation does not come with
the 'stable' platform.
Innovation in Tao etc is not likely to make it into RHEL. Innovation in
Fedora is more likely to be integrated into RHEL and therefore benefit
z/RHEL users.
I'm not saying run your production systems on FC for s390 or s390x. I'm
saying that if you want to contribute to the development of RHEL on a
platform that many on this list hold near and dear then FC is a way to
do it. That being said, after an initial burst of bugs I would expect
FC on z to be more than capable of running most apps for those who
aren't interested in formal support contracts.
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.
Well who knows really. If someone wants to give it a go then good on them.
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.
Well i'd be surprised if Alan was trying to discourage anyone from
trying. That statement seems to be just that - a statement on the
current position rather than a dire warning to exit the building as soon
as possible.
"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.
That just means there is a gap in the process waiting for someone to
step up and fill it. If I had the time I would, but I don't (recent
arrival in the house :-) )
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.
Sounds like a good step. I'd certainly like to build on any work that
has been done so i'd like to know what you find out.
-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
