Goodbye Fedora and hello Centos?

[Timothy Murphy]

Dave Gutteridge wrote:

> 
>     I was unable to resolve my problems in reading DVD drives in Fedora
> 4. So, I decided to switch to another distribution. I saw on one site
> that the three distros being nominated for best distribution by user's
> vote were Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora Core. I tried Ubuntu, but the
> installer kept failing. So I went to CentOS.
>     Anyway, long story short, CentOS looks and feels just like Fedora,
> and it reads all my DVD drives normally, so I think I could be happy
> with it.
>     But...
>     When I tried to install Xine, using yum, it said it could not find
> it. And then I went looking for an RPM for Xine, and they're all for Red
> Hat or Fedora. I tried installing an RPM for Fedora anyway, reasoning
> that maybe they were the same in more than just looks, but no dice.
>     As I looked around the net, it seems that applications all seem to
> have specific builds for Red Hat, Fedora, a couple of Debian builds...
> but no CentOS. Going by the amount of available information and support,
> Fedora is the primary Linux distribution, and CentOS hardly even exists.
>     Can't I have it all? Stability, the ability to read my DVD drives,
> *and* a variety of applications?

My reaction to your problem would be rather different to the other people
who have posted responses.

First of all, I would have thought the DVD driver was a kernel module.
The kernel is really independent of the distribution.
So I might have tried running the Centos kernel under Fedora.
(You'd have to copy the appropriate initrd*.img
and the directory /lib/modules/<version>/ .)

Actually I would first see what modules the 2 distributions are using
to read the DVD, with lsmod .
If they are different, that would explain the problem.
In that case, I would try compiling a kernel.
choosing the driver/module that works.

All this stuff about Fedora being leading edge is bosh, in my opinion -
the Fedora developers are suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Fedora is just a collection of pretty standard utilities.
A particular device is no more or less likely to work under Fedora
than under any other Linux distribution.
And if something works under one distribution,
it should work under another after a certain amount of trouble.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland