Fedora 11 on Hercules

I just want to share with everyone my personal experience with the
Fedora 11 disk image.  This is a winner!  Particularly if you already
run Linux as your Hercules host.  If you run Windows for your Hercules
host, the networking may be a bit challenging.

One of the tools I have wanted for some time has been a gcc compiler
that produces mainframe object on my desktop.  I was surprised to find
that gcc is not already pre-installed on the disk image.  However, 'yum
install gcc' worked out the box to download it and dependencies and
install them.  This was very slick.

There is way too much "voodoo and black magic" in cross-compiling gcc.  
I never got that to succeed.  In the past, getting Linux installed
seemed to be a real hurdle.  Just look at some of the posts with links
that explain it.  Not simple.  With other priorities, I never took the
time to get past those.  If you want a modern Linux on Hercules, this is
absolutely the simplest path to get there.

Fedora on the mainframe is no doubt not primarily about Hercules.  They
obviously are targeting the corporate users of mainframes.  However, by
including this community in the sphere of their outreach allows us to
benefit as well.  Novell never did this.  openSUSE does not include the
mainframe at all.  The only other distribution to directly include the
Hercules community was Debian many years ago.  Even Centos that used
Hercules to develop its mainframe distribution, did not provide a
pre-installed image that I recall.

The folks who developed the Hercules support deserve our thanks.  I hope
we can show it by embracing their work and providing input back to their
effort.  It is after all about community.

Harold Grovesteen