You "will just use the suse packages on the fedora installation"???? Muahahahahhah - No wonder your sh1+t don't work, man!!! :-) You gotta get down and dirty promiscuously up close and personal with compiling from source.

Across our workstations, but most importantly- on our development and application servers- we do minimal distro deployment (just the main stuff for the os, X11 gui, etc). And the rest from source. Screw the packages- they always do something stupid. Yum is great for little things like web browsers, image applications, whatever. Little things. But when you are talking performance - the safest thing is to go get the actual architecture independent source. And compile via the cli. It might be a litte bit of a pain sometimes, but the stuff works. Nothing like having that binary sit on your hardware like butter on bread. And your distro is practically irrelevant.

You gotta get down and dirty promiscuously up close and personal with compiling from source. I've had stuff that felt slow all of a sudden double in speed because I've had the wrong stuff.

Also, check that your yum conf actually is getting the right architecture for your system. If you run the nightly yum, it could cause trouble.