[Dxspider-support] Fedora - newbie warning

[Mike McCarthy, W1NR]

Danny Pease wrote:
> I am a complete novice at both Linux and sysoping a DX node. I am 
> looking at putting a cluster on in west central Illinois. I have a 
> machine that has Fedora 9 already installed. Will DX Spider be any 
> problems using Fedora 9? I also have Redhat Linux 9 installation 
> package, if that would be any better.

Spider will run just fine under Fedora 9.  I prefer SUSE.  Others 
Ubuntu.  Just one word of caution...  The latest of these three 
distributions, Fedora 9, openSUSE 11.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 all were released 
in the past few months and all use a very recent kernel that is getting 
a constant stream of updates and may give you problems in some areas. 
Since I use Linux for mail, WEB server, time server and firewall in 
addition to Spider I prefer to wait 4-6 months for a release to 
stabilize before upgrading to the latest.  Although I must admit that I 
have tested all three and they are very stable for a new release.  The 
constant stream of patches flowing through the kernel mailing lists, 
especially AX.25 ones, are what worry me most.

> 
> I really want to learn to use Linux, but would installing under Windows 
> rather than Linux a better option for me?

Learn Linux.  I find openSUSE to have the most Windows like management 
interface (called YaST).  It's also free and, when it's matured a few 
months, far more stable.

Mike, W1NR