Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Ross S. W. Walker wrote: > What driver problems did you experience with it? I'm interested in > knowing possible problem areas before I hit them. One thing I did notice > is for drivers that use dkms to compile I had to do a couple of tweaks > to get them to recognize the CentOS kernel version as RHEL4, but they > were simple sed macro changes. > > I tried FC5 for a while, but I couldn't keep up with all the kernel and > libc updates, so decided for my SAN server to use something more stable. > > -Ross > > > For us having good hardware support is paramount. We are a small business that cannot afford to have a stockpile of hardware lying around. When something breaks we need to be able to run down to the local computer store and buy some replacement hardware, plug it in, and have it work. For an example, we needed to install gigabit nic cards because our nightly network backups were beginning to exceed our backup window and we determined that it was the network that was the bottleneck. So we went and purchased some gigabit nic cards and installed them and no matter what driver we told CentOS to load in /etc/modprobe.conf it just refused to recognize the cards. Now after about two weeks of posting on the forums we finally found a recommendation for gigabit nic card to we could go buy that had a driver that would work with CentOS. But by that time we had already loaded FC6 on the boxes and had everything running with no problem. And this wasn't the only problem we had had. We had video driver problems and had to switch the video cards as well as usb problems. It seemed like CentOS could not work with any of the newer hardware. You had to hunt around in flea markets and eBay to find hardware that it would support. Nothing you could buy at the local computer store would work with it. This is somewhat of a problem with Linux in general though. There needs to be an effort to add support for newer hardware into existing kernels on an ongoing basis. Anyway, it just became too much of a headache so we decided we didn't want to wait for some other similar hardware/driver problems to appear so we moved over to FC6. Yes, there are a lot of updates that come down the pipe with FC6 but you don't have to take them. I wait about a month and then on a test machine I'll accept all the new updates and test them out on that machine before I update the production machines. I also check all the forums to see if anyone is reporting any new problems with recent updates. All in all I would say that our experience with FC6 has been very good. Gerry