How to deal with instabilities in RHEL WS 4 ?

[Peter Boy <pboy barkhof uni-bremen de>]

Hello,

I just subscribed to this list (I'm more familiar with Fedora), so
excuse me if I ask a question has has been discussed here previously.
But I couldn't find an answer in the archives.

I'm in the process to test WS 4 for the purpose as a desktop system in a
corporate environment (a replacement of Windows workstations).
Unfortunately I found several problems which make WS quite unsuitable as
a desktop system.

-- open office  is not localized 

-- open office can not access the evolution adress book

-- evolution-dataserver crashes after you had added some amount of
   data into the calendar and try to use it afterwards.

-- sometimes the system itself becomes very very slow (I suppose when I
   startet samba to transfer some data from Windows workstations, but I
   couldn't track the problem down to a specific cause, yet). In such a
   case you can not use the desktop at all, you have to reboot the
   system (the shutdown needs about 40 minutes to complete
   instead of 1 or 2 minutes)

Hardware is an IBM thinkcentre, installation is standard WS.


I upgraded OpenOffice and Evolution using the version of the current
Fedora Core 3. Now I have a localized version of OO, can access the
evolution addressbook and evolution seems to be much more stable (I
could perform only limited tests yet).

But is it a reasonable solution to selectively up-/crossgrade
applications to a Fedora version? What are the alternatives to get a
stable WS system? Or is it a better solution to switch to Fedora at all,
if I have to use the Fedora version of some applications?


Thanks for advice

Peter