[clue-tech] Questions about CentOS/Fedora

[Collins Richey]

I have been reviewing various free distros for their use on machines
we give away through the RecyleIT program (see CLUE homepage if
interested).

Slackware - nice distro but probably not best for users with no linux skills
Fedora - FC3 is quite nice. Very short release cycle. New releases
represent RH screwing around with bleeding edge stuff.
CentOS - similar to FC3 but ??? longer release cycle. New release
based on RHEL, thus less screwy stuff.

I included CentOS at the recommendation of Greg Knaddison, but I've
encountered a few problems. Do we have any other CentOS users? I have
a few questions about FC3 and

1. Everything about CentOS from the installer onward looks very much
like FC3 with the RH trademarks removed.

2. My sound card (a builtin supported by snd_intel8x0) worked on FC3
but not on CentOS. Both are udev systems. On CentOS the /dev/mixer,
etc. are not generated, so it's impossible to unmute the card. The
aliases used are practically identical on both systems. CentOS uses an
older 2.6.9 kernel; FC3 has a 2.6.10 kernel.

3. Fedora is not quite stable on CentOS. I use Gmail, and when editing
a new mail, the lines get some strange invisible characters that make
it impossible to arrow key through a line to make changes. One a line
like

----
this is some text that I want to edit and talk about snd_intel8x0) ...
----

When I scroll through the line and get to "I", the cursor is
positioned at the start of the next line, i.e. you can't get to the
end of the text. I seem to remember (details forgotten) that earlier
FCn releases had a problem with UTF-8 encoding, or is this a Firefox
problem?

4. This is a problem on both FC3 and CentOS (and other distros I have
used). My cdwriter is brought up with DMA enabled. cdrecord doesn't
handle DMA properly on 2.6 kernels; this leads to instantaneous system
lockup. I have to put hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdc in /etc/rc.d/rc.local as a
workaround. Is there a way to cure the problem so that I don't need
the workaround?

If anyone has any answers, or any comments on these distros, I would
love to hear it.

TIA,
-- 
 Collins