Adventures with Fedora in Biotech

[Hugh Caley]

I work for a biotech company in California.  I have Fedora Core 1 
running comfortably on my desktop, with sound, Xinerama, Gnome and 
Windowmaker, etc.  It all seems to work pretty well.  Now I'm running 
kernel 2.6.1 as well.

We had problems with it in a server context, however.  We had set up a 
couple of dual 2.8 mhz Xeon boxes with 4 gig of ram for running 
bioinformatic perl scripts.  The results were disappointing; in many 
cases the scripts would run at half the speed they would run on other 
slightly slower (but still Xeon 2.x) servers which were running RedHat 8 
or 9.  We tried  changing /etc/sysconfig/i18n to use C or en_US as the 
default language, and unlike RedHat 9 it didn't seem to make much of a 
difference.  Also, the servers were unstable and would lock up after a 
few days of pounding perl.  We had to put RH 9 on them and now they 
don't go down and run at full speed.  Weird.  Not really surprising, I 
guess, with the first release of Fedora. 

FYI.

Hugh

-- 
Hugh Caley | Unix Systems Administrator | CIS
AFFYMETRIX, INC. | 6550 Vallejo St. Ste 100 | Emeryville, CA 94608
Tel: 510-428-8537 | Hugh_Caley at affymetrix.com