Last Monday, I finally got around to reading the current issue of Linux Journal (thank you Stuart) which convinced me to give the development kernel a try. Compiled and installed version 2.5.68 on my home machine (still Redhat 7.2) which went smoother than I had imagined. It feels blazingly faster than the 2.4.20 kernel I normally use and folding@HOME runs much better. Once stable, the 2.5 series will become 2.6 or 3.0 depending on Linus’s decision.
Networking changes seem to have eliminated the problems I was having with the fiber connection. That is a bit strange, since the troubles were on the ISPs side and other users were still facing them. Either all of them were solved yesterday or I was just lucky. If none of those, then this really is a superior OS. And I haven’t even touched the new audio features yet which are supposedly a major improvement.
There are still a few big problems though such as X crashing (NVidia driver related) and USB keyboard not working. Modules couldn’t be loaded at first because of an older modutils package, the update of which requires glibc 2.3. The installed version was 2.2 so that is a major change to the system. After some thought and a few searches on Google, I decided to go ahead and risk the update using RedHat’s Rawhide repository which seems to have turned out ok.
I hope to solve the rest of the problems soon and will post an update later. In the meantime, I’m content to run folding@HOME on the console and GUI apps through VNC and reboot to the 2.4 kernel for anything requiring GLX.
You can get the kernel source here: http://www.kernel.org/