Blue screen of death

[Andrew Haley]

On 07/28/2010 12:12 AM, Alex wrote:

>>> Yes, frustrating, particularly when it's one fundamental thing after
>>> another, like ethernet detection, printing, and basic networking.
>>
>> Sure, but it works both ways: sometimes getting up-to-date software
>> from upstream fixes bugs that in a more "stable" distro you'd have to
>> wait much longer for.  For example, I used to have to install the
> 
> Yes, for the most part, I agree. However, I've set up FC13 on at least
> three desktops with varying processors, motherboards, ethernet, disks,
> etc, and have had problems that would have prevented someone with less
> experience than myself from being able to install it. On one of them,
> I had to rmmod the forcedeth and r8169 drivers, then modprobe the
> r8169 driver in order for it to properly link to the switch, all while
> the installer is running. On another, the installer would crash when
> making changes to the disk layout.
> 
> I've used Fedora since it was Red Hat, and started with before 4.1,
> probably some twelve years ago. The first install was Yggdrasil Linux
> on 60 floppy disks on my 80386. I pretty much dropped Linux on the
> desktop entirely a number of years ago because I got frustrated with
> the lack of progress.
> 
> By mentioning that I've been using Linux a really long time, I don't
> mean to imply I'm an expert, but I have quite a bit of experience, and
> don't plan on giving up on it ever. I mentioned the forcedeth example
> because the board was at least three years old, so it's not like it
> was some experimental driver where I'm the first person to use it.

OK.

> My staff uses Ubuntu on their desktop because "it just works", but I
> like RPM better, have been using Red Hat for ever, and believe that
> they have better availability to development, new applications, and
> wider support for new  technologies.
> 
> I'm sure that if I spent the time I could figure out where the problem
> is with ghostscript that is causing my printing problems, but that's
> not my job any longer. I'm just often very surprised when I see these
> "RHCE" guys that can't
>  troubleshoot these types of problems, and wonder if they're the same
> clueless ones that are testing these before RH releases it.
> 
> Thanks for listing to me rant for a bit.

The crack about "these RHCE guys" is rather out of order.

However, fair enough: everyone's experience is valuable.  But while
I'm not going to deny your problems, I just haven't had an experience
anything like that with any of my boxes.  It's inevitable that, with
improvements, some things will break with a new release, given the
huge range of PC hardware.

But I'm not being complacent.  Any installation problems like the one
you describe are serious.

Andrew.