ATI video comes out of the closet

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2007-09-08 at 10:52 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Dave Ihnat wrote:
> 
> >> What are talking about? Is it dificult to install or use Fedora? What's
> >> the dificulty, I don't get it. Could you elaborate?
> > 
> > Fedora is an experimental OS.  Things break when new releases come out.
> > It shouldn't be used for production.  But it's got all the latest
> > coolstuff.  So?  What's the problem?
> 
> The problem is that the only way to get current applications which are 
> evolving rapidly and have the cool stuff you want is to get them bundled 
> with a wildly experimental kernel and device drivers that will regularly 
> die underneath them.   I don't see the point of changing the kernel or 
> drivers in a machine _ever_ once they work correctly except perhaps for 
> security updates or when adding new hardware.  The semantics of what the 
> kernel is supposed to be doing was established pretty well 30 years or 
> so ago.
> 
> I realize that fedora isn't the distribution I wish it were, but I think 
> everyone would be better off it there were a way to have Red Hat style 
> administration, a stable kernel and device drivers, and up to date apps 
> all in one distribution.  It isn''t nearly so traumatic to have an 
> occasional crash or need to restart a single application as it is when 
> the machine won't boot or you lose access to disk drives containing your 
> data.

As a distro alternative, how about RHEL or CentOS together with the
CentOSPlus repo and Red Hat's EPEL (Fedora packages for RHEL) repo?

Alternatively, there was also some discussion a while ago on this list
of Fedora providing vanilla kernel RPMs.  Not sure what the status of
that is now.
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs