Fedora Core 5 vs Suse 10.x?

Question

My question today is about distros of linux, now I do understand int the REAL world of jobs out today (personally my forte is Computer Programming) it does help to have some (if not a good understanding) of the unix/linux structure. As for now I am unable to take a class at my local community college to learn more about linux so I have decided to go with one of the above two versions.
The first reason being that my school teaches Linux under the distro Red Hat Enterprise Version X.X (not sure about version numbers), so figured using the personal version I may benefit from (in class). Second the reason why I chose SuSe 10.x is because I have a "software" raid controler on my system and I know many versions of linux DO NOT SUPPORT software raid...

Questions...
1) Does FC5 support software raid? I am currently trying to find out now
2)What would you recommend between the two distros.

What I dont want is a reason why these distros "suck" or a recommendation to another version.

Answer 1

it may sound like it, but it isn't a "SuSE sucks" post;
in fact i'm a SuSE 10.(1) fan, have it installed on my box and use it regularly AND (!)... i get a "unsupported software RAID" warning message every time i start from the DVD to do maintenance and all.
i have a Gigabyte MoBo w/ a 2nd ATA controller (PDC20276) which is designed as a RAID controller but can be used as a normal ATA controller, giving me an additional 4 ATA ports (i have 4 HDs & 2 ODs)
UNDER WINDOWS i can't access the HDs on the 2nd ATA Ctrl.er unless i install a driver from Giga-byte, but SuSE (Linux) seems to support the PDC20276 natively, even though it warns about not supporting the SW Raid (which i don't use: the 2 HDs attached to the PDC20276 are 7 partitions, FAT32, NTFS and ext3.

i once tried to install FC (4, if Memory serves well) but wasn't able to finish the install, due to some HW conflict; not sure it was the PDC, thought. a beta of FC5 didn't even boot up properly (rest of the HW is pretty standard, 2 Athlon MPs, 2Gig of RAM);

the Linux / (root) and boot partitions are on the standard ATA port..

can't tell anything about the SW RAID config, though :-/
this seems to say it should work
http://www.coofercat.com/2004/00000087.html
(with any Soft RAID Ctrl.er, as a matter of fact).

good luck!