Fedora target audience, what about the research area?

[Laurent Rineau]

On Friday 28 July 2006 18:58, Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
> Laurent Rineau <laurent.rineau__fedora_extras at normalesup.org> writes:
> > At the ENS, it is 258 machines, and at the Inria it is 689 machines.
>
> And you tell us they have no central distribution points for updates
> and for custom packages, and have no single sysadmin able to, at the
> very least, exclude or include whatever is needed for successful
> operation of a particular binary driver?

Actually, the ENS only has a proxy, but the Inria has as Fedora Core+Extras 
mirror server, in which they could blacklist some packages at need.

> Of course I don't know if they have NVidia-based cards running NVidia
> drivers. Chances are they don't play Doom.

We do not play doom, but in my team at Inria we work with surfacic or volumic 
meshes with millions of triangles or tetrahedra.

> I can believe it might be a problem for part of home users (gamers?)
> but a research institute is way too much for me.

The more the work will be  difficult for sysadmin to maintain usable systems 
for researchers, the more they will thing about switching to something else 
(actually, I agree that Fedora may not have been the best choice, for them).

> OTOH, I wonder how many people on this list would have a problem
> themselves. Especially if livna/etc. provided "conflicting" driver
> package(s).

On my machine (nvidia drivers installed by hand), the upgrade would lead to a 
crashing X11 server. Actually, I am not the kind of user who could be 
disappointed by that problem.