Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
I just upgraded a laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens E2010) from RH9 to FC2. After that, I couldn't log on to Gnome, after username/password, X just hung without any error message, neither in the logs. Never mind, I did a fresh install instead & immediately after updated all the packages. Then the surprises really started:
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @ bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional! - Kernel 2.6.6-1.435 gives a "failed to bind key 255 to value..." every time you log in at a console, whereas kernel -358 doesn't. This appeared at bugzilla but was closed as "magically disappeared" - Hotplug calls the script ide, which in turn calls /sbin/ide_info. /sbin/ide_info simply doesn't exist! Had to copy it in from a FC1 install. Through this bug, you can't mount CF-Cards in a PCMCIA adapter. Just found out that bugzilla also knows about this -- since FC2 test3! - USB updfstab doesn't work. Devices get detected in the kernel, hotplug @ updfstab gets executed, but /mnt & fstab entries are not created. Trying to debug, I realized that the issue is somehow timing-related. When I do some sleep at the "right" points in the updfstab scripts, things work sometimes. Can't resolve the issue though and have to live without using my Flash-Stick & Camera reliably. - Kernel -435 sometimes segfaults when plugging USB devices in/out, whereas -358 seems reliable here. - My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there. - Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2? - How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today. - Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
A bit disappointed, HaJo
One more question:
I've installed the usual TTF fonts as follows: mkdir /usr/share/fonts/ttf cd /usr/share/fonts/ttf cp /foo/*.ttf . ttmkfdir mkfontdir chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/ttf
I can see the fonts in the apps. But Netscape 7.1, when rendering say Arial in small font sizes, looks horrible, like not anti-aliased at all. Mozilla doesn't have this problem though.
Any ideas?
HaJo On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 14:54, HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
I just upgraded a laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens E2010) from RH9 to FC2. After that, I couldn't log on to Gnome, after username/password, X just hung without any error message, neither in the logs. Never mind, I did a fresh install instead & immediately after updated all the packages. Then the surprises really started:
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
- Kernel 2.6.6-1.435 gives a "failed to bind key 255 to value..." every
time you log in at a console, whereas kernel -358 doesn't. This appeared at bugzilla but was closed as "magically disappeared"
- Hotplug calls the script ide, which in turn calls /sbin/ide_info.
/sbin/ide_info simply doesn't exist! Had to copy it in from a FC1 install. Through this bug, you can't mount CF-Cards in a PCMCIA adapter. Just found out that bugzilla also knows about this -- since FC2 test3!
- USB updfstab doesn't work. Devices get detected in the kernel, hotplug
@ updfstab gets executed, but /mnt & fstab entries are not created. Trying to debug, I realized that the issue is somehow timing-related. When I do some sleep at the "right" points in the updfstab scripts, things work sometimes. Can't resolve the issue though and have to live without using my Flash-Stick & Camera reliably.
- Kernel -435 sometimes segfaults when plugging USB devices in/out,
whereas -358 seems reliable here.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
A bit disappointed, HaJo
HaJo Schatz wrote:
One more question:
I've installed the usual TTF fonts as follows: mkdir /usr/share/fonts/ttf cd /usr/share/fonts/ttf cp /foo/*.ttf . ttmkfdir mkfontdir chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/ttf
I can see the fonts in the apps. But Netscape 7.1, when rendering say Arial in small font sizes, looks horrible, like not anti-aliased at all. Mozilla doesn't have this problem though.
Any ideas?
HaJo On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 14:54, HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
I just upgraded a laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens E2010) from RH9 to FC2. After that, I couldn't log on to Gnome, after username/password, X just hung without any error message, neither in the logs. Never mind, I did a fresh install instead & immediately after updated all the packages. Then the surprises really started:
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
- Kernel 2.6.6-1.435 gives a "failed to bind key 255 to value..." every
time you log in at a console, whereas kernel -358 doesn't. This appeared at bugzilla but was closed as "magically disappeared"
- Hotplug calls the script ide, which in turn calls /sbin/ide_info.
/sbin/ide_info simply doesn't exist! Had to copy it in from a FC1 install. Through this bug, you can't mount CF-Cards in a PCMCIA adapter. Just found out that bugzilla also knows about this -- since FC2 test3!
- USB updfstab doesn't work. Devices get detected in the kernel, hotplug
@ updfstab gets executed, but /mnt & fstab entries are not created. Trying to debug, I realized that the issue is somehow timing-related. When I do some sleep at the "right" points in the updfstab scripts, things work sometimes. Can't resolve the issue though and have to live without using my Flash-Stick & Camera reliably.
- Kernel -435 sometimes segfaults when plugging USB devices in/out,
whereas -358 seems reliable here.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
A bit disappointed, HaJo
Although your post has obtained many replies since everybody feels touched by the doubtful quality of FC2, nobody answered your question about TTF font support in Netscape. Mozilla and Netscape are GTK applications, there are two version of the GTK library: GTK1+ and GTK2+. Only GTK2+ supports antialiased fonts so to have nice antialiased font effects look for a Netscape version compiled with the GTK2+ library.
- Jose Luis
HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2. If FC1, or even RH9 works well for you, then you should continue using it unless there is compelling reason for you to use FC2.
[snip]
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works without any problems.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the archives.
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
A bit disappointed, HaJo
Again, no one's forcing you to use FC2. Obviously you have the time to format and install an entirely new system without assessing the possible issues first, so why not try SuSE? It's 9.1 Personal edition is available in ISO now. Or why not stick with RH9? Is there some very good reason (other than having fun) to use FC2? Giving up on FC2 is really your decision. Either help out, by living through bugs and reporting them, or just switch to something that works. Granted, one less person testing on their hardware is never good. Me, I use FC2 for work and for fun. I am hoping that through my and others' efforts, FC3 will be a superb release.
dex
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:51, Dexter Ang wrote:
Hi -
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
To be fair this is not the only factor: witholding the release until the nastiest known bugs are squished is as critical. This is a pure RH decision.
I thought you made a good answer Dexter, but I have seen a lot of posts lately blowing off all criticism of FC2, when there clearly have been serious troubles. Acknowledging the problems and going on in a way to avoid them next time would be the right solution.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
Only you can answer this. Despite the hassle, gaining experience with the 2.6 kernel and the latest stuff is valuable. I guess it turns on whether you see hassle has that upside or if it just hassle to you.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
Probably, but SuSE for example has its share of 2.6-related surprises too it seems.
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
The RH folks pick their own targets and will get to stuff at their own speed (this is the same everywhere of course). I had a bug with memory management in the kernel that sat there in Bugzilla for months and months, it got mentioned in the list recently [NB: with a link to the Bugzilla entry to make it easy for them], somebody from RH looked at it then and it was fixed quickly and very effectively. So I think mentioning your problem from time to time on the list with a Bugzilla link may jog memories.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
SuSE may not be the panacea you are hoping for, it certainly isn't any more community driven than Fedora. I know SuSE fanboys are using the FC2 problems to beat FC2 users up, since I had some of that myself, but have a look around on the SuSE user ml archives and you'll see a similar amount of difficulties. Some folks have recommended Debian as the next stop if Fedora is not inclusive enough. There was also some "community" distro Bruce Perens was starting up, but he picked Gnome as the single official desktop for it and that is a big turn-off for me at least.
A bit disappointed,
It could have done with a release delay by a few weeks. But it is not actually as bad in the general case as your bad experience has indicated to you.
BTW you mention USB/updfstab: something is really screwed with USB in current (RH?) kernels at the moment, leading to data loss on transfers from USB Storage devices like cameras.
- -Andy
- -- Automatic actions for USB cameras, cardreaders, memory sticks, MP3 players http://warmcat.com/usbautocam
Andy,
Tnx a lot, this is the kind of answer I've been hoping for...
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 18:51, Andy Green wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:51, Dexter Ang wrote:
Hi -
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
To be fair this is not the only factor: witholding the release until the nastiest known bugs are squished is as critical. This is a pure RH decision.
I thought you made a good answer Dexter, but I have seen a lot of posts lately blowing off all criticism of FC2, when there clearly have been serious troubles. Acknowledging the problems and going on in a way to avoid them next time would be the right solution.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
Only you can answer this. Despite the hassle, gaining experience with the 2.6 kernel and the latest stuff is valuable. I guess it turns on whether you see hassle has that upside or if it just hassle to you.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
Probably, but SuSE for example has its share of 2.6-related surprises too it seems.
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
The RH folks pick their own targets and will get to stuff at their own speed (this is the same everywhere of course). I had a bug with memory management in the kernel that sat there in Bugzilla for months and months, it got mentioned in the list recently [NB: with a link to the Bugzilla entry to make it easy for them], somebody from RH looked at it then and it was fixed quickly and very effectively. So I think mentioning your problem from time to time on the list with a Bugzilla link may jog memories.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
SuSE may not be the panacea you are hoping for, it certainly isn't any more community driven than Fedora. I know SuSE fanboys are using the FC2 problems to beat FC2 users up, since I had some of that myself, but have a look around on the SuSE user ml archives and you'll see a similar amount of difficulties. Some folks have recommended Debian as the next stop if Fedora is not inclusive enough. There was also some "community" distro Bruce Perens was starting up, but he picked Gnome as the single official desktop for it and that is a big turn-off for me at least.
A bit disappointed,
It could have done with a release delay by a few weeks. But it is not actually as bad in the general case as your bad experience has indicated to you.
BTW you mention USB/updfstab: something is really screwed with USB in current (RH?) kernels at the moment, leading to data loss on transfers from USB Storage devices like cameras.
- -Andy
Automatic actions for USB cameras, cardreaders, memory sticks, MP3 players http://warmcat.com/usbautocam -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFA2A8kjKeDCxMJCTIRAnbNAJ4lscptPz/fQU6kMkNQ3oW7gqrouwCdFRkk dkUTztmySsZB/b/0Yj61c1g= =M7CD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 11:51:16AM +0100, Andy Green wrote:
It could have done with a release delay by a few weeks. But it is not actually as bad in the general case as your bad experience has indicated to you.
Or a re-release of the ISOs, e.g. to fix the ASUS board boot issues and others. I still wonder why the updates boot.iso is still only on Arjan V.'s personal page and not officially released as a bugfix. (BTW: great work on fixing that bug!)
An similarly of course with the Windows dual-boot issue, although one could say that there is no complete fix yet, only a set of recipes to recover after the problems, or to prevent them from happening. But if there were an universal fix, it should be in the installer since that is the only place were the original partition table is available, so there it is still possible to save the C/H/S values to be restored later.
On the other hand, FC2 works fine if you just take the time to read the archives and search the internet for answers. It was never intended as a "plug & play" OS for the clueless and inexperienced.
David Jansen
David Jansen wrote:
On the other hand, FC2 works fine if you just take the time to read the archives and search the internet for answers.
This is a silly remark. All you can say is that "FC2 works fine" on the machines it is reported to work on. There are many unresolved bugs, eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
As far as I can see, FC2 was released when there were known unresolved bugs in the test releases. In my view, it should have been delayed until these were fixed. It seems to have been released because a release date had been fixed in advance. That is a silly way to organise distributions. I hope it will be changed.
It was never intended as a "plug & play" OS for the clueless and inexperienced.
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
David Jansen wrote:
On the other hand, FC2 works fine if you just take the time to read the archives and search the internet for answers.
This is a silly remark. All you can say is that "FC2 works fine" on the machines it is reported to work on. There are many unresolved bugs, eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
As far as I can see, FC2 was released when there were known unresolved bugs in the test releases. In my view, it should have been delayed until these were fixed. It seems to have been released because a release date had been fixed in advance. That is a silly way to organise distributions. I hope it will be changed.
It was never intended as a "plug & play" OS for the clueless and inexperienced
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
Timothy Murphy wrote:
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
hmmm .... nope, doesn't sound persuasive in *that* context, either.
rday
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
Timothy Murphy wrote:
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
hmmm .... nope, doesn't sound persuasive in *that* context, either.
If you went into the car lot and they gave you a car for free, why not?
rday
Patrick Boutilier wrote:
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
hmmm .... nope, doesn't sound persuasive in *that* context, either.
If you went into the car lot and they gave you a car for free, why not?
Do you realise what a dis-service you do to Fedora by suggesting that because it is free you shouldn't complain if it doesn't work?
In my (very long) experience the quality of Unix/Linux/RedHat/Fedora is very high and does not need "salesmen" telling you that you mustn't expect it to work properly.
All software has bugs. These are due to mistakes on someone's part, and should be corrected as soon as possible.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
Patrick Boutilier wrote:
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
hmmm .... nope, doesn't sound persuasive in *that* context, either.
If you went into the car lot and they gave you a car for free, why not?
Do you realise what a dis-service you do to Fedora by suggesting that because it is free you shouldn't complain if it doesn't work?
File a bug report but don't get all PO'ed if it doesn't get fixed right away. You seem to think that Fedora owes you support or something.
In my (very long) experience the quality of Unix/Linux/RedHat/Fedora is very high and does not need "salesmen" telling you that you mustn't expect it to work properly.
All software has bugs. These are due to mistakes on someone's part, and should be corrected as soon as possible.
If you can't wait until they are fixed fix them yourself or use something else. You have a choice.
On Jun 22, 2004, "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
Customer/Salesman, eh? How is the conversation about related in any way with the Fedora community?
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
On Jun 22, 2004, "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
Customer/Salesman, eh? How is the conversation about related in any way with the Fedora community?
in a general but, IMHO, relevant way. even if FC is free, red hat and the fedora community in general are still "selling" it in the sense that they want people to use it, no? the fact that people are getting it for free doesn't detract from the fact that there's definitely some salesmanship going on.
direct from the fedora "about" page, you read:
"By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community."
that's salesmanship right there, even if no money changes hands.
rday
At 06:30 AM 6/22/2004, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
This is a *users* list. No one is selling you anything in this case. One user is bitching at 4,000 others about something. Regardless of the content of his post and/or its merits if any, there is no "sales" analogy which could possibly be relevant.
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 05:30, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
Timothy Murphy wrote:
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Unhappy customer: "This car I got from you last week doesn't run well at all. Sometimes, it doesn't start and, every so often, it stalls, even on the freeway at high speed."
Salesman: "Well then fix it. You have the tools."
hmmm .... nope, doesn't sound persuasive in *that* context, either.
--- Lot's of posts but nothing anybody is going to say is going to change people's minds on this. It seems with each new kernel change/distro, this repeats itself.
It seems to me that the people that have a long time investment in Linux understand what occurs when there is a major upgrade and hold back installing it on production systems, be they server or workstation until the issues get worked out. Newer Linux users expect every new distro (without regard to kernel version upgrades) to work extremely well.
I would suggest that rather than trying to convince people to lower their expectations, it would be more beneficial to suggest that we work together to solve the problems and develop a better sense of humor (i.e. less whining) about the problems we face.
Craig
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Craig White wrote: ...
I would suggest that rather than trying to convince people to lower their expectations, it would be more beneficial to suggest that we work together to solve the problems and develop a better sense of humor (i.e. less whining) about the problems we face.
since i apparently started this barroom brawl, let me make a suggestion that might solve a lot of problems. what FC2 (and future FC releases) needs is a structured, somewhat-moderated repository of well-written and important info for new users. quite simply, it needs a moderated wiki.
why a wiki? as it stands, there's *loads* of info out there on FC2. there's fedora.redhat.com, there's the mailing list(s) and their archives, there's private websites like fedoranews.org and fedorafaq.org, and on and on and on. quite simply, there's just *too* *much* information out there, a lot of it redundant, a lot of it almost but not quite usable, a lot of it non-searchable, many people reinventing the wheel, etc.
all of those repositories have their strengths and weaknesses. the mailing list archives are a perfect example. someone asks, "how do i do X?". many respond (sometimes a bit testily), "hey, it's in the archives, go look there." so one goes to the archives and starts looking at all postings related to X, and finds:
* half of them *asking* about X * half of the remainder saying, "yeah, i had that problem, too" * half of what's left saying, "funny, *i* didn't get that problem" * still half of what's left suggesting incomplete fixes that just happen to work on *their* system, but might not work on anyone else's ... * ... and the occasional posting actually saying, "hey, *here's* why that's happening and *here's* how you fix it." (whew)
is it any wonder that lots of folks are kind of reluctant to dive into the archives? the point is that, when folks have a problem, they're not so much concerned about getting *a* solution, what they really want is *the* solution. that is, the complete explanation about why a problem exists and how to deal with it. and there don't need to be 500 different versions of this, just one, well-written, edited, and at least somewhat quality-tested version, in a well-known place.
what i imagine is a mixture of fedoranews.org and fedorafaq.org. fedornews has loads of great little articles and HOWTOs, but not in any semblance of organization and (IMHO) too much stuff that has nothing to do with fedora. fedorafaq doesn't have *near* the content, but it has a nicer layout, even if i think it could be refined even further into more subcategories.
wouldn't it be great if, at a single site, once could find articles organized as follows:
Fedora Core 2
Known issues The infamous XP dual-boot problem -- how not to screw yourself PCMCIA won't start at boot time, why the heck not? ...
Filesystems How to get NTFS support How to create encrypted filesystems What is LVM and how do I use it? ...
Multimedia How to get ALSA sound working How do I play MP3s? How to play DVDs Digital video under Linux ...
The FC desktop How do I edit my &^#^^%(* GNOME menus? How can I add additional fonts? ...
and on and on -- you get the idea.
now, the trick is that this approach would take a little extra effort. first, someone would have to occasionally restructure the top level topics, if it seems justified. and, second, one or a small group of people would be responsible for QA, to make sure that submissions are correct and complete. as an example, as an explanation of how to get NTFS support, it wouldn't be acceptable to write, "go to ntfs.sourceforge.net, get the module and load it." a bit more detail would, i think, be in order; perhaps how to build a kernel to add your own support as well, dangers involved, etc.
it wouldn't even be necessary to write totally new submissions -- it would be perfectly reasonable to link elsewhere if good explanations already exist. the important thing is to have good and organized docs in a single place so people aren't bouncing around all over the net and, just as important, to make sure this info is always kept up to date. (a rapid response wiki, so to speak.)
keith lofstrom proposed starting a new mailing list. i don't think a new mailing list would solve the problem, but a disciplined wiki would go a long way to removing a lot of the current frustration.
thoughts?
rday
On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 10:10, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Craig White wrote: ...
I would suggest that rather than trying to convince people to lower their expectations, it would be more beneficial to suggest that we work together to solve the problems and develop a better sense of humor (i.e. less whining) about the problems we face.
since i apparently started this barroom brawl, let me make a suggestion that might solve a lot of problems. what FC2 (and future FC releases) needs is a structured, somewhat-moderated repository of well-written and important info for new users. quite simply, it needs a moderated wiki.
thoughts?
rday
Good idea, go do it.
At 08:46 AM 6/23/2004, Scot L. Harris wrote:
On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 10:10, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
since i apparently started this barroom brawl, let me make a suggestion that might solve a lot of problems. what FC2 (and future FC releases) needs is a structured, somewhat-moderated repository of well-written and important info for new users. quite simply, it needs a moderated wiki.
thoughts?
Good idea, go do it.
rday, or anyone who is working on a GUI (Good and Useful Idea [tm]) to help the Fedora community, is welcome to ask for my specific support in any way and I'll do my best to help. I'm having major trouble coping with the demands of my Real World Life, and have not even had any real time to do (drastically necessary) updates to simpaticus.com, but I *will* do my best to help.
For the record, I also think the wiki thing is a good idea. Never seen a wiki yet <grin>, but the way the post was written made it sound like a good idea.
Cheers,
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 23:07:45 -0600 "Rodolfo J. Paiz" rpaiz@simpaticus.com wrote:
For the record, I also think the wiki thing is a good idea. Never seen a wiki yet <grin>, but the way the post was written made it sound like a good idea.
There is already a WIKI with some Fedora subject matter here:
It might be worth taking a look at to generate ideas about its use or how a new wiki might be organized. It looks pretty straight forward and it would be great to have a central place where people could help keep documentation current.
Cheers, Sean.
Fedora Core 2 is not reading my USB flash drive.
Is there a patch or something I need to do to get that to work?
Thanks
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Sean Estabrooks wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 23:07:45 -0600 "Rodolfo J. Paiz" rpaiz@simpaticus.com wrote:
For the record, I also think the wiki thing is a good idea. Never seen a wiki yet <grin>, but the way the post was written made it sound like a good idea.
There is already a WIKI with some Fedora subject matter here:
It might be worth taking a look at to generate ideas about its use or how a new wiki might be organized. It looks pretty straight forward and it would be great to have a central place where people could help keep documentation current.
ah, i hadn't seen that before. at first glance, it's still not what i was imagining, since it seems to have an initially confusing layout. let's say, as a newbie, i go there. i desperately need help with topic X. upon arrival, i have to choose between a couple links:
FedoraDocuments WikiHomePage
which one? they both sound tempting. so i pick the first one, at which point i get a whole lot more choices, none of which are obvious. do i want the User Documents, under which i find the HOWTO and the Users FAQ? or, wait, there's the Volunteer Documents. do i want the Volunteers FAQ? or, wait, my topic is kind of, sort of related to hardware. maybe i better check out the Hardware Info link first. argh.
but if i knew beforehand this was a wiki, i might have chosen to visit the Wiki Home Page, where i can see what a wiki is, how to use it, how to sign in, see recent changes ... etc. at which point, i kinda feel that i have the right to scream, "Where's the freakin' content!?" (yes, i'm exaggerating to make a point. so sue me. :-)
personally, the layout i've seen that i like the most is max k-a's www.fedorafaq.org. you go there and, after a short intro, you're at the content. perfect. my only issue with it is that it would be nice to have it more hierarchical and refined -- i think it's too general to have an entire section called "Problems and Their Solutions." but max clearly has the right idea -- get to the content right away, don't make readers dig their way thru introductory fluff.
as i mentioned before, it's not even necessary to have all the content at the wiki site. clearly, there's lots of good content out there, it's just scattered around. parts of the wiki can link to external pages if that's the best solution (given permission, of course).
as i see it, the two most important things to have are:
1) a nice, usable hierarchical layout 2) the ability to add new entries quickly as the need arises
this might very well involve a small group of moderators who ride herd on the content, who might need to shuffle or refine sections every so often, but for the most part, it should be world-editable, as long as contributors read a short intro describing what entries should look like.
this kind of site is not meant to take the place of the eventual, official docs. it's also not meant to replace the idea of a forum, like www.fedoraforum.org. a "forum" is where you present problems, argue back and forth about their solution and finally figure out what the heck to do about it. the wiki is where you would *publish* that final solution.
anyway, time for coffee and real, billable work. :-)
rday
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:19:31 -0400 (EDT), Robert P. J. Day rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
as i see it, the two most important things to have are:
- a nice, usable hierarchical layout
- the ability to add new entries quickly as the need arises
Faq-o-matic might also fit the bill?
http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net
Rob
personally, the layout i've seen that i like the most is max k-a's www.fedorafaq.org. you go there and, after a short intro, you're at the content. perfect. my only issue with it is that it would be nice to have it more hierarchical and refined -- i think it's too general to have an entire section called "Problems and Their Solutions." but max clearly has the right idea -- get to the content right away, don't make readers dig their way thru introductory fluff.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I actually agree with you -- the "Problems and their Solutions" section is too long.
For FC1, there were many fewer questions, so it wasn't a problem.
I think I'll consider breaking it down into more sections, probably using some of the ones you proposed in your previous email. Of course, I expect there to be fewer questions for FC3, and then maybe I can go back to the single section. We'll see. :-)
-Max
On Sun, 2004-07-04 at 02:04, Max K-A wrote:
personally, the layout i've seen that i like the most is max k-a's www.fedorafaq.org. you go there and, after a short intro, you're at the content. perfect. my only issue with it is that it would be nice to have it more hierarchical and refined -- i think it's too general to have an entire section called "Problems and Their Solutions." but max clearly has the right idea -- get to the content right away, don't make readers dig their way thru introductory fluff.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I actually agree with you -- the "Problems and their Solutions" section is too long.
For FC1, there were many fewer questions, so it wasn't a problem.
I think I'll consider breaking it down into more sections, probably using some of the ones you proposed in your previous email. Of course, I expect there to be fewer questions for FC3, and then maybe I can go back to the single section. We'll see. :-)
-Max
just my $0.02.
If you keep the separate sections you will likely see a decrease in the numbers of problems. That would indicate progress in eliminating the problems and thus tend to give newbies a better assurance that things are actually improving.
IE: FC2 had 10,000 problems but FC3 only has 1,000 : Would indicate a progress. (yes, I know I exaggerated)
-Jeff
On Sun, 4 Jul 2004, Jeff Vian wrote:
If you keep the separate sections you will likely see a decrease in the numbers of problems. That would indicate progress in eliminating the problems and thus tend to give newbies a better assurance that things are actually improving.
but who says that a FAQ would contain only problems? as FC goes from version to version, there are certainly going to be new features and new ways of doing things that deserve to be in the FAQ. even as the quality steadily improves, nothing says that a FAQ would necessarily decrease in size.
if you look at max's www.fedorafaq.org, there's a number of things in the "Problems and their Solutions" that i don't think qualify as real problems.
* how do i play MP3s? * how to i mount NTFS? * how do i get wine to work? * how do i edit menus?
i don't think any of these are "problems" -- they're just things people are going to want to know about, that's all.
rday
On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 10:10, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Craig White wrote: ...
I would suggest that rather than trying to convince people to lower their expectations, it would be more beneficial to suggest that we work together to solve the problems and develop a better sense of humor (i.e. less whining) about the problems we face.
since i apparently started this barroom brawl, let me make a suggestion that might solve a lot of problems. what FC2 (and future FC releases) needs is a structured, somewhat-moderated repository of well-written and important info for new users. quite simply, it needs a moderated wiki.
<snip>
thoughts?
rday
This is "real" community at work..... I really appreciate the shift from the proverbial whining of late.....
An excellent suggestion, and a great list of recurring issues. You also summarized where a lot of information is being kept. I find one of the greatest challenges, at the moment, is, as you point out, how to locate the information.
But my question is whether we really need yet another source.... I think a better use of our efforts might be to improve the format and volume of information at fedorafaq.org because, frankly, what you are describing sounds like a better organized (hierarchical) FAQ - and they do seem to address, to some extent, some of the more critical things in your list. Converting to more of a Wiki environment I think has merit too... Perhaps you could bring this suggestion to the folks there and see if they are interested (or need some competition :-) )....
I am also concerned that this should really be addressed by the "community" side of the Fedora Project and be better linked in with the "official" fedora.redhat.com site, though I do not think those of us on the outside are able to do this yet..... Does anyone have a sense of where/how we might be able to "open up more" some of these "support" things?
Let's keep these thoughts going.....
--Rob
Am Di, den 22.06.2004 schrieb Patrick Boutilier um 14:14:
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Excuse me, but this is one of the most idiotic postings.
Fixing a bug is - in most cases - not as easy as getting a nail into the wall - and a lot of people are not even able to do that. We depend on a cooperative process with a dedicated division of labour in place.
Peter
Patrick Boutilier wrote:
There are many unresolved bugs, eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
It was never intended as a "plug & play" OS for the clueless and inexperienced
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Perhaps you could post a list of your XFree fixes so that I can see how it should be done.
As it happens, I did look at the source, and tried to back-port the previous ATI driver. This didn't work because of changes in the libraries that are in use.
I don't set myself up as an X-Windows guru. I registered a bug with bugzilla, and hope and trust it will be seen to sooner or later.
To repeat myself - bugs are mistakes in code. They should be corrected, not excused.
People who excuse bugs on the grounds that Linux is free, or that Fedora is "experimental", do an enormous disservice to Linux.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
Patrick Boutilier wrote:
There are many unresolved bugs, eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
It was never intended as a "plug & play" OS for the clueless and inexperienced
It's amazing what idiotic excuses are made for software bugs. A bug is a bug - that's all there is to it.
Well then fix it. You have the source.
Perhaps you could post a list of your XFree fixes so that I can see how it should be done.
I didn't say I had any.
As it happens, I did look at the source, and tried to back-port the previous ATI driver. This didn't work because of changes in the libraries that are in use.
I don't set myself up as an X-Windows guru. I registered a bug with bugzilla, and hope and trust it will be seen to sooner or later.
To repeat myself - bugs are mistakes in code. They should be corrected, not excused.
Sure, but since nobody buys Fedora and doesn't get support from Fedora we can't expect everything to be fixed right away, or at all. On the other hand if you purchase another OS, or even a different Linux dist that does come with support then you should expect bugs to be fixed promptly.
People who excuse bugs on the grounds that Linux is free, or that Fedora is "experimental", do an enormous disservice to Linux.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
I've been using fc2 with a Dell Dimension 4400 with one of these cards without much trouble. The only thing was my cursor went black after testing some 3d screensavers that are in fc2. Here's my lspci output:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA/DB/EB/ER Hub interface to PCI Bridge (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 05) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801BA IDE U100 (rev 05) 00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM SMBus (rev 05) 00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 05) 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF 02:09.0 Ethernet controller: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21140 [FasterNet] (rev 22)
As far as I can see, FC2 was released when there were known unresolved bugs in the test releases. In my view, it should have been delayed until these were fixed. It seems to have been released because a release date had been fixed in advance. That is a silly way to organise distributions. I hope it will be changed.
It looks like with the fast schedule the fixes will be in the next release instead of fixing the current release. I'm just speculating though...
Mike Fedyk wrote:
eg Xorg does not work properly on machines with ATI Rage 128 video boards.
I've been using fc2 with a Dell Dimension 4400 with one of these cards without much trouble. The only thing was my cursor went black after testing some 3d screensavers that are in fc2.
Sorry, I should have said "Rage Mobility", ie ATI Rage 128 for portables.
Part at least of the problem seems to be that this card does not send back the information required by system-config-display and similar programs.
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 22:05, Timothy Murphy wrote:
As far as I can see, FC2 was released when there were known unresolved bugs in the test releases. In my view, it should have been delayed until these were fixed. It seems to have been released because a release date had been fixed in advance. That is a silly way to organise distributions. I hope it will be changed.
I hope it won't. Please keep releasing early and often. That is the only way a large and complex beast like a Linux distro can mature quickly. As soon as the developers and packagers feel that it maybe of use and value to a sizable user community they should kick it out of the door and let the real QA begin.
Linux is designed to work on a huge variety of hardware. Exposing it to as large a test group as possible is the only hope of having at least the more common of all the countless possible combinations of hardware put to test.
As for FC1 vs FC2, FC2 is special in many respects. I see FC1 as the debut release meant to introduce the project to a wider audience, but it was quite conservative, and not really that much different from RH9.
FC2 is groundbreaking: it uses a new generation kernel (as one of the first mainstream distros), a new GNOME, a new Xserver (sort of), and whatnot. You couldn't possibly wait for all known unresolved bugs in this to be fixed before you release the lot. It would never get released. It would stew in its own juices for decades (like Hurd) without getting any closer to completion. Btw, have you ever checked how many thousand known bugs every new Mozilla release carries over?
Speaking of the kernel, remember 2.4? Is wasn't really fit for mainstream consumption before 2.4.10 or thereabouts. Chances are the 2.6 kernel will mature quicker, partly to its bigger exposure by mainstream distros (assuming a lot of people actually give them a go).
I don't believe various posters on this thread are out to excuse bugs, and neither am I. We are just annoyed at the small bunch of people that grab of lot of air time bitching and ranting and scaring people away from FC2, rather than encouraging them to participate. Bring on your bug reports, preferably with bugzilla ID, and everybody who can will be glad to discuss them. But chanting the same horror tales like a broken record over and over, and questioning QA, release strategy and state of mind of those people at RedHat isn't going to help the project along.
Alright, that'll be enough soapbox for a while...
Cheers Steffen.
I for one am sticking with FC1, for now With all the posts, I am real leary of going to FC2. It's doing everything I want it to do and doing it well.
I will switch to FC2 when I feel it's bugs are for the most part "squshed"
I am using it for a server, though.This may be ok in FC2. It may be all the X related stuff that everyone is having problems with. For the most part, that is what it looks like. I am still just leary, so for now it's FC1 for me........
Don Dupy Systems Administrator Maxxrad PC Services http://www.maxxrad.net email: fedora@maxxrad.net
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Andy Green wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:51, Dexter Ang wrote:
Hi -
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
To be fair this is not the only factor: witholding the release until the nastiest known bugs are squished is as critical. This is a pure RH decision.
I thought you made a good answer Dexter, but I have seen a lot of posts lately blowing off all criticism of FC2, when there clearly have been serious troubles. Acknowledging the problems and going on in a way to avoid them next time would be the right solution.
My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted) and go back to FC1 or hang in there.
Only you can answer this. Despite the hassle, gaining experience with the 2.6 kernel and the latest stuff is valuable. I guess it turns on whether you see hassle has that upside or if it just hassle to you.
- Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
Probably, but SuSE for example has its share of 2.6-related surprises too it seems.
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix today.
The RH folks pick their own targets and will get to stuff at their own speed (this is the same everywhere of course). I had a bug with memory management in the kernel that sat there in Bugzilla for months and months, it got mentioned in the list recently [NB: with a link to the Bugzilla entry to make it easy for them], somebody from RH looked at it then and it was fixed quickly and very effectively. So I think mentioning your problem from time to time on the list with a Bugzilla link may jog memories.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
SuSE may not be the panacea you are hoping for, it certainly isn't any more community driven than Fedora. I know SuSE fanboys are using the FC2 problems to beat FC2 users up, since I had some of that myself, but have a look around on the SuSE user ml archives and you'll see a similar amount of difficulties. Some folks have recommended Debian as the next stop if Fedora is not inclusive enough. There was also some "community" distro Bruce Perens was starting up, but he picked Gnome as the single official desktop for it and that is a big turn-off for me at least.
A bit disappointed,
It could have done with a release delay by a few weeks. But it is not actually as bad in the general case as your bad experience has indicated to you.
BTW you mention USB/updfstab: something is really screwed with USB in current (RH?) kernels at the moment, leading to data loss on transfers from USB Storage devices like cameras.
- -Andy
Automatic actions for USB cameras, cardreaders, memory sticks, MP3 players http://warmcat.com/usbautocam -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
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Hi,
Am Dienstag, 22. Juni 2004 20:09 schrieb Don Dupy:
I for one am sticking with FC1, for now With all the posts, I am real leary of going to FC2. It's doing everything I want it to do and doing it well.
Just for the record: My FC 2 is running well, I had a smooth transition from FC 1 and can't complain. The transition was done in an afternoon (start update, go away to do something else, come back in the evening, finished).
I just mention this because mailing lists tend to give a very selective, biased picture. Lots of people with lots of problems, but all the millions of users who are happy have no reason to post to the list, so they are invisible. So I think when you are planning an upgrade, it would be good to look at the complete picture, and this seems to me that the likelihood of something seriously going wrong is very small.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of the user base has problems. Any data on this?
Of course it is bad if there are problems, and statistics doesn't help you if you actually are the unlucky person. So I'm not saying that one shouldn't care, or that bugs are ok. Quite the opposite. It is understandable that people are angry when things go wrong. But the developers are not necessarily the right target for this anger. Sometimes things just go wrong without anybody being responsible for it, that's how the world is. The best we can do is work together and help each other making things better.
I would like to thank all the competent people here who try to give answers even to questions that don't give much details, or that are less than friendly. It is understandable that they also get frustrated when you try to help and get an angry response. Really, you are helping many people a lot, even if you get less positive feedback than you deserve.
On the other hand I would also like to raise some awareness of some difficulties for non-experts. Please do remember that for less experienced users it may be very difficult to ask the right thing and give the correct details. Something behaves in an unexpected way, but you may not know which programs, scripts, whatever are involved.
It is of course a fair answer to say "Search the archive" if a question has been asked before. But again for many users it may be difficult to do that, because the user may not know the correct terms, or not sufficiently precise terms ("sound not working").
Sometimes a user may already have searched the archives with the wrong terms, and then the reply "Search the archive" can seem quite arrogant. Also remember that people from other (cultural) backgrounds may be more sensitive to "unpolite" answers. So perhaps often a more careful wording leads to less tension. Instead of something like: "Why haven't you searched the archive? This has been discussed so many times!!" better: "I remember that this has been asked before. Can you search the archive? Perhaps searching for 'x' and 'y' leads you to the old posts. Hope that helps." As you see, a reply like this isn't really more work, but it may be more helpful and sounds much more friendly.
I'm saying this because we will have to live with the situation that more and more unexperienced users ask for help. Although I agree that it would be good if anybody asked their questions in a friendly way with all the necessary and relevant details, realistically this won't happen. There are always new people who have to learn this, and people who are unfamiliar with the style of mailing lists. So I ask the experienced users to remain patient.
Again, thanks for all the good work, and for all the competent answers.
All the best Stephan
On Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56, Stephan Matthiesen in a soothing rage wrote:
Hi,
Am Dienstag, 22. Juni 2004 20:09 schrieb Don Dupy:
I for one am sticking with FC1, for now With all the posts, I am real leary of going to FC2. It's doing everything I want it to do and doing it well.
Just for the record: My FC 2 is running well, I had a smooth transition from FC 1 and can't complain. The transition was done in an afternoon (start update, go away to do something else, come back in the evening, finished).
This is really just a me too post. I chose to do an install over FC1 saving /home. Took about 1hr with most of that time spent choosing rpms. Took a day to compile KDE, 15 min to get the ATi drivers going and I have been happy ever since. BTW, I follow KDE from cvs so I need to compile my own. I also have W2K3 on this machine and had no problems booting it. I don't use it tho, no solitaire.
N.Emile...
thats cool. I like to hear positives about FC2 !
Don Dupy Systems Administrator Maxxrad PC Services http://www.maxxrad.net email: fedora@maxxrad.net
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, ne... wrote:
On Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56, Stephan Matthiesen in a soothing rage wrote:
Hi,
Am Dienstag, 22. Juni 2004 20:09 schrieb Don Dupy:
I for one am sticking with FC1, for now With all the posts, I am real leary of going to FC2. It's doing everything I want it to do and doing it well.
Just for the record: My FC 2 is running well, I had a smooth transition from FC 1 and can't complain. The transition was done in an afternoon (start update, go away to do something else, come back in the evening, finished).
This is really just a me too post. I chose to do an install over FC1 saving /home. Took about 1hr with most of that time spent choosing rpms. Took a day to compile KDE, 15 min to get the ATi drivers going and I have been happy ever since. BTW, I follow KDE from cvs so I need to compile my own. I also have W2K3 on this machine and had no problems booting it. I don't use it tho, no solitaire.
N.Emile...
Registered Linux User # 125653 (http://counter.li.org) Switch to: http://www.speakeasy.net/refer/190653 You two ought to be more careful--your love could drag on for years and years. 07:36:58 up 12 days, 1:10, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
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Many people have very good experience with FC2 (count me among them). It's just not common for people to post about how everything is fine.
tor 2004-06-24 klockan 13.13 skrev Don Dupy:
thats cool. I like to hear positives about FC2 !
Don Dupy Systems Administrator Maxxrad PC Services http://www.maxxrad.net email: fedora@maxxrad.net
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, ne... wrote:
On Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56, Stephan Matthiesen in a soothing rage wrote:
Hi,
Am Dienstag, 22. Juni 2004 20:09 schrieb Don Dupy:
I for one am sticking with FC1, for now With all the posts, I am real leary of going to FC2. It's doing everything I want it to do and doing it well.
Just for the record: My FC 2 is running well, I had a smooth transition from FC 1 and can't complain. The transition was done in an afternoon (start update, go away to do something else, come back in the evening, finished).
This is really just a me too post. I chose to do an install over FC1 saving /home. Took about 1hr with most of that time spent choosing rpms. Took a day to compile KDE, 15 min to get the ATi drivers going and I have been happy ever since. BTW, I follow KDE from cvs so I need to compile my own. I also have W2K3 on this machine and had no problems booting it. I don't use it tho, no solitaire.
N.Emile...
Registered Linux User # 125653 (http://counter.li.org) Switch to: http://www.speakeasy.net/refer/190653 You two ought to be more careful--your love could drag on for years and years. 07:36:58 up 12 days, 1:10, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
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On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56:29AM +0100, Stephan Matthiesen wrote:
I just mention this because mailing lists tend to give a very selective, biased picture. Lots of people with lots of problems, but all the millions of users who are happy have no reason to post to the list, so they are invisible. So I think when you are planning an upgrade, it would be good to look at the complete picture, and this seems to me that the likelihood of something seriously going wrong is very small.
So true. And some others, including myself, have run into problems that could be solved to read the FAQ and search the list archives, and maybe ask a couple of questions.
So far I have installed FC2 on 12 machines and helped a couple of friends and collegues to install it on their machines. My statistics so far: - 9x hit by the Windows dual boot issue, but easily solvable without loss of data, thanks to the info on this list (it's not entirely fair, those 9 systems are identical configurations, so this is actually just one data point in the bug statistics) - 1 machine failed to boot. Asus-board issue, solved by downloading the updated boot.iso Everything else just worked. So yes, it is somewhat more problematic than FC1 (but in many respects still better than some previous RHL versions).
Bugs are to be expected in any OS. And bugs are getting fixed, usually at a reasonable pace. Now, what can we do to make Fedora Core even better for users?
1. A real community Let's hope the point will soon be reached where there is the public CVS repository, the ability for members of the community to become maintainers of packages, the 'real" Fedora Extras and Fedora Alternatives repositories etc. That would be a great step forward (but apparently somewhat difficult from redHat's end)
2. Documentation and information, and letting the users know about it. It would be great if the release notes or the Fedora website would mention the unofficial resources available to the users, like fedoranews.org, fedora forum, the unofficial Fedora FAQ, additional software repositories etc. Not everyone likes mailinglists, but it seems the only way to find out about e.g. fedoranews is to read on the website or release notes about the mailinglist, then subscribe or search the archive and wade through the enourmous amount of mail (which is a great reasource, but it is a lot to search through!) and then finally find out such a site exists.
3. A policy about updates. Why isn't the updated boot.iso for the ASUS boards available from the official locations? That would make it easier to find, and available on the mirrors. Seems to me like a much better solution than downloading it from ArjanV's personal site. An announcement of such an update would also be useful, on fedora-announce, and on the Fedora website. That would probably have saved us a lot of questions on the list. I fear the same will happen if an universal solution to the dual-boot problems will be found, since this will probably require an update of the anaconda installer or disk druid, so that's probably an updated boot disk. Will we have to create one ourselves or wait for FC3, or will such an update be officially published? Bugs in the installer will happen again, just like bugs in any piece of software. So a mechanism to fix them is necessary. It used to be possible to just wait for a fix in the next release, but with the shorter lifetime of the FC versions, this is not always an option any more. I would find it somewhat acceptable if the Fedora project had an official policy not to release installer updates but only package updates. I wouldn't like such a policy, but at least then the situation would be clear.
Note: most of this was not relevant to me, I have used RedHat since 3.x and I knew about fedora.us int he RedHat 8 or 9 days, and I started using FC 1 at test 2 last autumn. But I'm thinking here from the perspective of a new user, who may or may not know about Linux already, and who may or may not be aware in advance of the goals of the fedora project.
David Jansen
Andy Green wrote:
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:51, Dexter Ang wrote:
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
To be fair this is not the only factor: witholding the release until the nastiest known bugs are squished is as critical. This is a pure RH decision.
I thought you made a good answer Dexter, but I have seen a lot of posts lately blowing off all criticism of FC2, when there clearly have been serious troubles. Acknowledging the problems and going on in a way to avoid them next time would be the right solution.
I see your point. Unfortunately, as far as I understand, Fedora Core is to be released on a schedule basis (dated deadlines) as opposed to "squish all bugs" schedule. As stated on the main fedora.redhat.com page:
"The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule."
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I think everyone acknowledges that there are major problems. But it seems the only way to avoid them is to have more testers, have more bugzilla reports logged in, and have fun along the way.
dex
Dexter Ang wrote:
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I'm not sure how typical I am, but I haven't run any test releases because it has been said that one cannot upgrade from a test release to a new FC release.
It would simply be too time-consuming for me to re-install FC whenever a new release comes out. Perhaps I'm not very well organised, but I would have to go through dozens of config files to see which need to be copied, and which updated.
So I would suggest to the Fedora administrators that if it were possible to upgrade from test releases there might be a lot more people willing to test.
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Dexter Ang wrote:
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I'm not sure how typical I am, but I haven't run any test releases because it has been said that one cannot upgrade from a test release to a new FC release.
for good reason -- since a test release is attempting to emulate, as closely as possible, the upcoming official release, to "upgrade" from a test release to a new FC release is, in essence, upgrading from a version to something representing that same version. logically, it really doesn't make a lot of sense -- i suspect the logistics involved would be just nightmarish.
rday
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Dexter Ang wrote:
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I'm not sure how typical I am, but I haven't run any test releases because it has been said that one cannot upgrade from a test release to a new FC release.
for good reason -- since a test release is attempting to emulate, as closely as possible, the upcoming official release, to "upgrade" from a test release to a new FC release is, in essence, upgrading from a version to something representing that same version. logically, it really doesn't make a lot of sense -- i suspect the logistics involved would be just nightmarish.
rday
Why would this be so hard? Using up2date and package names should make updating easy. Testing packages could be named with a 't' or use the 'rc' in the package name. When the final release is out, drop the 'rc' or 't' so up2date knows that these need to be updated. Heck, the package xxx.1.0-0t should be updated when xxx.1.0-1 is released, correct?
My problem for not using "testing" packages is I have to have my machines working at all times. I also require the applications to be working for work. At home my wife will kill me if I cannot explain the reason for updating from 1.1 to 1.1.1. But that is some of the fun of being married to someone that won't allow the other major OS into our house or M$ Windows.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
Dexter Ang wrote:
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I'm not sure how typical I am, but I haven't run any test releases because it has been said that one cannot upgrade from a test release to a new FC release.
Nothing is supported anyway. I have upgraded from test cycles to final releases several times. This may leave newer versions of programs on your machine that were not stable enough t be released with the final version of the distro. Hopefully, the program will become stable enough that the fonal release version will replace the not ready for release version.
I have one system that is always paced with current rawhide packages. This system is surprisingly stable. In fact, my network cards both work on this environment.
I have another version that is an install of FC1 and went through the test phase (FC1 to FC2) and is staying at current FC2 released packages. This upgraded environment has all of the multimedia related packages and is what I consider my main OS.
The third version is a fresh install of FC2 and is pretty limp in that it does not have all of the multimedia related add-ons included. This evironment works great for things like dvd burning and the sound to be set to a decent default level.
It would simply be too time-consuming for me to re-install FC whenever a new release comes out. Perhaps I'm not very well organised, but I would have to go through dozens of config files to see which need to be copied, and which updated.
If you are not running a lot of services, add-on programs and user related data seem to be the only major drawbacks. I've been held back by pre-existing config files on several occasions. I was unaware that CD burning worked on later versions of RHL. The hdx=ide-scsi addition to the boot loader from RHL 6.x series to RHL 7.x series never took place. Once I did a fresh install and found out that I no longer needed to boot into windows to burn CDs, I was happy with catching up.
So I would suggest to the Fedora administrators that if it were possible to upgrade from test releases there might be a lot more people willing to test.
The answer that you most likely will get is that this is unsupported. The good news is that other than progressively upgrading through the test cycle is not that bad. At least from my exposure to doing *the unsupported* betas to next release cycles.
Disadvantages of upgrading throughout the OS cycle. New programs added, they will not be installed. Config or default application settings changes for the better, config files might be better with a new install.
Advantages of clean installations. You will get newer packages that are included in the new version. You will get the latest configuration file defaults, which seem more sanely based.
Good luck and have fun testing. Who knows what is supported anymore on an unsupported OS. It works great though, at least for me.
Jim
Dexter Ang wrote:
Andy Green wrote:
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:51, Dexter Ang wrote:
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs. If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes. There really is so many hardware to test on, that the chances of certain configurations not working is very high.
To be fair this is not the only factor: witholding the release until the nastiest known bugs are squished is as critical. This is a pure RH decision.
I thought you made a good answer Dexter, but I have seen a lot of posts lately blowing off all criticism of FC2, when there clearly have been serious troubles. Acknowledging the problems and going on in a way to avoid them next time would be the right solution.
I see your point. Unfortunately, as far as I understand, Fedora Core is to be released on a schedule basis (dated deadlines) as opposed to "squish all bugs" schedule. As stated on the main fedora.redhat.com page:
"The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule."
So I guess developers were "pressured" to release on a deadline, hoping to fix most bugs through updates. As much as I'd personally love to help test and test until all bugs are stamped out, you can't avoid the fact that a lot of other people simply won't test until a "final" release is out.
I think everyone acknowledges that there are major problems. But it seems the only way to avoid them is to have more testers, have more bugzilla reports logged in, and have fun along the way.
dex
I have noticed a lot fewer problems with the RHL to FCL change. The major improvements seem to be from either picking up information from "distress calls" from changes to certain software that went rabid because of a seemingly mild change to one program. Also, if a problem with a program or hardware interface were broken, things were corrected when knowledge and resources were adequate to snuff the bug, either through regression or advancment to the other inflicted programs or hardware.
Since RHL moved away from supporting chancy things like mp3, ntfs or other programs with restrictive or "McDonalds hot coffee" attributes. I think that the move to release RHL into Fedora Core was a worthwhile move.
Except for the cow on the trampoline not working on FC2 with an S3 based video chip, I see way more advancements to FC2 compared to earlier RHL or other Linux distros that I've tried out.
The point, if any, RHL was in a too restrictive environment. FC is in a seemingly more progressive state and is softly linked to repositories that can provide more to what was restricted by copyright/patent related issues.
Thanks for help from both the community and to those of the community that develop the software that go into the core distribution.
Good points Dexter,
Jim
At 01:32 PM 6/23/2004, Jim Cornette wrote:
Except for the cow on the trampoline not working on FC2 with an S3 based video chip, I see way more advancements to FC2 compared to earlier RHL or other Linux distros that I've tried out.
Jim,
I have an IBM Thinkpad T23 (P3/1.2G, 512MB, 40GB, 14" 1400x1050, S3 Savage/IX w/8MB) and it picked up FC2 without even blinking. Pardon the pun. Can you be more specific about your problem, and whether it's a "problem" or if you *know* it won't work?
Cheers,
Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
At 01:32 PM 6/23/2004, Jim Cornette wrote:
Except for the cow on the trampoline not working on FC2 with an S3 based video chip, I see way more advancements to FC2 compared to earlier RHL or other Linux distros that I've tried out.
Jim,
I have an IBM Thinkpad T23 (P3/1.2G, 512MB, 40GB, 14" 1400x1050, S3 Savage/IX w/8MB) and it picked up FC2 without even blinking. Pardon the pun. Can you be more specific about your problem, and whether it's a "problem" or if you *know* it won't work?
Cheers,
I believe the card is SIS instead of S3. (630 version.)
http://www.voxtechnologies.com/SBCs/pcisa-3716e2v.htm
or on this cpu board
http://www.voxtechnologies.com/SBCs/rocky-3705ev.htm
I was thinking that I was using this board version when trying the screensaver. The error for the screensaver referenced S3. This version has an S3 Trio3D
http://www.voxtechnologies.com/SBCs/rocky-3702ev-r4v8.htm
I also had the screensaver problem with a system running the latest version of vmware, on an XP host. I first thought the problem was exclusive to vmware and vmware tools.
Just a by chance discovery. Regular programs seemed to work alright and display. With this problem, there is no preview available for the inflicted screensaver. Usually you will get error message text in yellowish writing displayed on the screen.
Jim
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Dexter Ang wrote:
HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2.
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with this annoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate concerns and obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases), and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
it's become really tedious to watch the growing trend of promoting fedora core, talking about making it just a terrific distro, how it has a dynamic user community behind it ... yadda yadda yadda ... but whenever someone posts perfectly reasonable criticism of some aspect, there's a sudden surge of, "hey, if you don't like it, don't use it, ok?" i suspect it's not the quality of FC2 that might drive people off, it's the closed-minded and dismissive attitude of its alleged supporters.
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works without any problems.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means ... what? that it doesn't qualify as a real problem? fact is, the /etc/init.d/pcmcia file has historically been a bit of a mess -- heck, i recall submitting a bug report on that file as far back as april of 2003:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88054
it's depressing that it's still broken, and in such a blatant way.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the archives.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1. i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs.
oh, man, you *so* did not want to go there. working from memory here so i hope i'm remembering correctly, i'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple folks who pointed out that they *did* put in time running the test releases, that they *did* identify and report obvious bugs way back when and yet, when FC2 hit the streets, those bugs were still there.
under the circumstances, then, it's pretty offensive to get testy with folks about how they should get involved in the testing process when many of them have done exactly that, only to see their efforts at bug identification and reporting make no difference in the final release. one might conclude that, under those circumstances, they really do have the right to wonder if it was worth the time and effort.
If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes.
see above.
Again, no one's forcing you to use FC2.
and again, this is a really childish response. one has to wonder, just what do you do for a living? i can just imagine, say, a car salesman with this kind of "don't you dare criticize me and my product" attitude:
Salesman: "Yes, sir, Mr. Smith, this van has the horsepower you need for pulling your boat, loads of cargo space and foldout seats for the kids, optional 6-way sound system since you like music."
Mr. Smith: "Yup, it's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if my current roof rack is compatible with the roof mounts ..."
Salesman: "HEY! No one's *forcing* you to buy this thing, OK? You got a problem with it?! There's lots of other dealers out there, all right?!"
Obviously you have the time to format and install an entirely new system without assessing the possible issues first, so why not try SuSE?
hey, good idea, dude. there's nothing that placates an unsatisfied user more than suggesting they take their talents elsewhere. *that'll* help the cause, fer shure.
Giving up on FC2 is really your decision. Either help out, by living through bugs and reporting them, or just switch to something that works.
once again, see above. ("... or just switch to something that works." now *there's* some great testimonial.)
I am hoping that through my and others' efforts, FC3 will be a superb release.
and if it isn't, well, those whiners can take their complaints elsewhere, can't they?
rday
I would like to congratulate the developers that made FC2.
I am using a Dell P4 3.0Ghz with 120Gig SCSI harddrive a gig of ram and a speedtouch usb modem and an ATI Radeon 9800Pro. I have loads of problems with FC1 (I couln't even start the setup in grafical mode). But FC2 is a big improvement, it took me ten minutes to install it and most of it seems to be working fine. I did have some problems with the MySQL server rpm that i installed but after changing some config parameters that too works perfectly.
Way to go FC-team!
Matt. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" fedora-list@redhat.com Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 1:35 PM Subject: Re: FC2 doubtful quality?
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Dexter Ang wrote:
HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2.
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with thisannoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate
concerns
and obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases), and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
it's become really tedious to watch the growing trend of promotingfedora core, talking about making it just a terrific distro, how it has a dynamic user community behind it ... yadda yadda yadda ... but whenever someone posts perfectly reasonable criticism of some aspect, there's a sudden surge of, "hey, if you don't like it, don't use it, ok?" i suspect it's not the quality of FC2 that might drive people off, it's the closed-minded and dismissive attitude of its alleged supporters.
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works
without
any problems.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means ...
what?
that it doesn't qualify as a real problem? fact is, the /etc/init.d/pcmcia file has historically been a bit of a mess -- heck, i recall submitting a bug report on that file as far back as april of 2003:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88054
it's depressing that it's still broken, and in such a blatant way.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the
archives.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1. i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases.
If
you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs.
oh, man, you *so* did not want to go there. working from memory here so i hope i'm remembering correctly, i'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple folks who pointed out that they *did* put in time running the test releases, that they *did* identify and report obvious bugs way back when and yet, when FC2 hit the streets, those bugs were still there.
under the circumstances, then, it's pretty offensive to get testy with folks about how they should get involved in the testing process when many of them have done exactly that, only to see their efforts at bug identification and reporting make no difference in the final release. one might conclude that, under those circumstances, they really do have the right to wonder if it was worth the time and effort.
If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes.
see above.
Again, no one's forcing you to use FC2.
and again, this is a really childish response. one has to wonder, just what do you do for a living? i can just imagine, say, a car salesman with this kind of "don't you dare criticize me and my product" attitude:
Salesman: "Yes, sir, Mr. Smith, this van has the horsepower you need for pulling your boat, loads of cargo space and foldout seats for the kids, optional 6-way sound system since you like music."
Mr. Smith: "Yup, it's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if my current roof rack is compatible with the roof mounts ..."
Salesman: "HEY! No one's *forcing* you to buy this thing, OK? You got a problem with it?! There's lots of other dealers out there, all right?!"
Obviously you have the time to format and install an entirely new system without assessing the possible issues first, so why not try SuSE?
hey, good idea, dude. there's nothing that placates an unsatisfied user more than suggesting they take their talents elsewhere. *that'll* help the cause, fer shure.
Giving up on FC2 is really your decision. Either help out, by living through bugs and reporting them, or just switch to something that works.
once again, see above. ("... or just switch to something that works." now *there's* some great testimonial.)
I am hoping that through my and others' efforts, FC3 will be a superb release.
and if it isn't, well, those whiners can take their complaints elsewhere, can't they?
rday
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 07:35, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Dexter Ang wrote:
HaJo Schatz wrote:
Hi List,
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2.
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with thisannoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate concernsand obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases), and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
it's become really tedious to watch the growing trend of promotingfedora core, talking about making it just a terrific distro, how it has a dynamic user community behind it ... yadda yadda yadda ... but whenever someone posts perfectly reasonable criticism of some aspect, there's a sudden surge of, "hey, if you don't like it, don't use it, ok?" i suspect it's not the quality of FC2 that might drive people off, it's the closed-minded and dismissive attitude of its alleged supporters.
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works without any problems.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means ... what?that it doesn't qualify as a real problem? fact is, the /etc/init.d/pcmcia file has historically been a bit of a mess -- heck, i recall submitting a bug report on that file as far back as april of 2003:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88054
it's depressing that it's still broken, and in such a blatant way.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the archives.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1. i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the more reliable system.
Realibility will depend on the number of people testing "test" releases. If you want a quality release, you should help out by testing and reporting bugs.
oh, man, you *so* did not want to go there. working from memory here so i hope i'm remembering correctly, i'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple folks who pointed out that they *did* put in time running the test releases, that they *did* identify and report obvious bugs way back when and yet, when FC2 hit the streets, those bugs were still there.
under the circumstances, then, it's pretty offensive to get testy with folks about how they should get involved in the testing process when many of them have done exactly that, only to see their efforts at bug identification and reporting make no difference in the final release. one might conclude that, under those circumstances, they really do have the right to wonder if it was worth the time and effort.
If you can't afford to use your machine for testing, your best hope is to report bugs and wait for fixes.
see above.
Again, no one's forcing you to use FC2.
and again, this is a really childish response. one has to wonder, just what do you do for a living? i can just imagine, say, a car salesman with this kind of "don't you dare criticize me and my product" attitude:
Salesman: "Yes, sir, Mr. Smith, this van has the horsepower you need for pulling your boat, loads of cargo space and foldout seats for the kids, optional 6-way sound system since you like music."
Mr. Smith: "Yup, it's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if my current roof rack is compatible with the roof mounts ..."
Salesman: "HEY! No one's *forcing* you to buy this thing, OK? You got a problem with it?! There's lots of other dealers out there, all right?!"
Obviously you have the time to format and install an entirely new system without assessing the possible issues first, so why not try SuSE?
hey, good idea, dude. there's nothing that placates an unsatisfied user more than suggesting they take their talents elsewhere. *that'll* help the cause, fer shure.
Giving up on FC2 is really your decision. Either help out, by living through bugs and reporting them, or just switch to something that works.
once again, see above. ("... or just switch to something that works." now *there's* some great testimonial.)
I am hoping that through my and others' efforts, FC3 will be a superb release.
and if it isn't, well, those whiners can take their complaints elsewhere, can't they?
rday
Excellent post! I also have been noticing the elitist, unhelpful and downright rude replies to people who have legitament questions. I just hope that people in general will lighten up and remember that manners certainly go a long way especially in perception of a forum such as this.
Phil Savoie
At 05:53 AM 6/22/2004, Phil Savoie wrote:
Excellent post! I also have been noticing the elitist, unhelpful and downright rude replies to people who have legitament questions. I just hope that people in general will lighten up and remember that manners certainly go a long way especially in perception of a forum such as this.
Phil,
In your quest for manners, *please* trim the FOUR PAGES worth of unnecessary text which you left at the top of your email. It's rude to make 4,000 read or page through that much flak just to see one paragraph. You may not like my post, but at least it was easy to read and didn't make you (or anyone else) do a lot of extra work, did it?
Cheers,
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 12:35, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with thisannoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
Well I also noted this, although to be fair Dexter wrote a good and mild reply, but I see this defensiveness coming from their not being empowered to do anything about the problem. Only RH folks can do this because of the project structure. Some people who do great work helping on the ml are threfore finding themselves becoming slightly shrill and embattled fanboys, equating acknowledging the problem they cannot do anything about with heresy against the project and the great RH people who lead it. So they will not acknowledge the problem and it is easier to talk about how FC is meant to be cutting edge, unstable, not for everyone.
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate concernsand obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases), and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
This is clearly a good point. However, to be fair there was a weekly effort to triage bugs in Bugzilla I recall, I failed to help out on this. Certainly as I noted the RH people are responsive and very effective if their attention is drawn to the need, I guess they are drowning in Bugzilla entries. Maybe if people with outstanding killers in Bugzilla were more vocal during the test time the circle can be squared.
- -Andy
- -- Automatic actions for USB cameras, cardreaders, memory sticks, MP3 players http://warmcat.com/usbautocam
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Andy Green wrote:
... Only RH folks can do this because of the project structure. Some people who do great work helping on the ml are threfore finding themselves becoming slightly shrill and embattled fanboys, equating acknowledging the problem they cannot do anything about with heresy against the project and the great RH people who lead it.
there was one other point that i thought was worth making -- it didn't really fit in the original post, but it's appropriate here, i think.
there's a constant emphasis that fedora core is *not* red hat -- that FC is a state-of-the-art, leading edge, way out there, community-based, use at your own risk distro meant partially as a proving ground for new technologies that will, someday, find their way into red hat's stable, enterprise-level offerings.
uh, yeah. and the last time i looked, 69% of americans still thought saddam hussein had something to do with 9/11.
the point being that, regardless of what you tell people and regardless of the reality, a lot of folks are going to associate fedora core with red hat, and their experiences with FC are undoubtedly going to color their perception of red hat. it may not be fair, but it's going to happen.
so the constant refrain of "if you don't like it, don't use it." is going to be interpreted by some as a sign that *red hat* is not really interested in their business or their satisfaction. and this is something that red hat might want to be just a wee bit concerned about. in this case, image really might be everything.
rday
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:11:33 -0400 (EDT) "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Andy Green wrote:
... Only RH folks can do this because of the project structure. Some people who do great work helping on the ml are threfore finding themselves becoming slightly shrill and embattled fanboys, equating acknowledging the problem they cannot do anything about with heresy against the project and the great RH people who lead it.
There is no problem reporting problems. In fact I see many people getting help and having problems resolved on this list. People who report problems and ask for help generally get it. Those who become shrill and start freaking out because things aren't perfect are given appropriate answers as well, just probably not the sympathetic RedHat bashing they were hoping for.
there was one other point that i thought was worth making -- it didn't really fit in the original post, but it's appropriate here, i think.
there's a constant emphasis that fedora core is *not* red hat -- that FC is a state-of-the-art, leading edge, way out there, community-based, use at your own risk distro meant partially as a proving ground for new technologies that will, someday, find their way into red hat's stable, enterprise-level offerings.
uh, yeah. and the last time i looked, 69% of americans still thought saddam hussein had something to do with 9/11.
the point being that, regardless of what you tell people and regardless of the reality, a lot of folks are going to associate fedora core with red hat, and their experiences with FC are undoubtedly going to color their perception of red hat. it may not be fair, but it's going to happen.
Well that is really an issue for RedHat to decide. It's nice of you to be concerned but i'm sure the folks at RedHat are smart enough to deal with this one way or another.
so the constant refrain of "if you don't like it, don't use it." is going to be interpreted by some as a sign that *red hat* is not really interested in their business or their satisfaction. and this is something that red hat might want to be just a wee bit concerned about. in this case, image really might be everything.
That is why it is appropriate to explain to people the nature of the Fedora project, its relationship to RedHat and adjust expectations so that Fedora can fill the role it was designed for. We don't need another Suse or Gentoo, or Debian. What you're describing is closer to RHL which was EOL'd for a reason. In fact it was terminated because it had bigger problems than the potential problems you point out here with Fedora.
Cheers, Sean
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 17:41, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Andy Green wrote:
there's a constant emphasis that fedora core is *not* red hat -- that FC is a state-of-the-art, leading edge, way out there, community-based, use at your own risk distro meant partially as a proving ground for new technologies that will, someday, find their way into red hat's stable, enterprise-level offerings.
Well, Red Hatś got to do a Microsoft, now that its begin to build its strategy for the big league and some of the bugs of closed source are definitely going to make their way in ;-)), like use legal MS software!!
the point being that, regardless of what you tell people and regardless of the reality, a lot of folks are going to associate fedora core with red hat, and their experiences with FC are undoubtedly going to color their perception of red hat. it may not be fair, but it's going to happen.
Its true. Iḿ no whiz sys-admin, but I can roll my own, if provided the raw materials and pointers from outside. I started using linux about four-five years ago and have never used any distro but redhat and Iḿ currently running RH9. I started a similar thread a few days ago and getting some suggestions as to alternatives.
Community support was what built Redhat but now stopping support of earlier distros and trying to get users to ES by saying fedora is bleeding edge and therefore unstable is unfair. RH could have said RH9 or other releases can upgrade to FC1 or whatever, which is stable and will be supported and FC2 etc. are experimental but again supported.
No sys-admin in any company is going to work his butt off the chair by using FC2 or even FC1 in a production environment, if his boss is telling its unsupported and heśis responsible for the upgrade if he screws up.
The issue here is not what is stable or not...issue is what the users should upgrade to, if they can or wont pay $$ to the next MS...no dis-respect to RH or MS meant ;-))
You know it feels like a child is being disowned by a parent ;-) On the other hand, here in India, where bandwidth is in short supply, many people depend upon magazine CDs for their distributions. One of the major magazines www.pcquest.com which distributs about 25000 copies (if I remember correctly), every-time a release comes and updates every months, has gone on record stating in the last issue that there may not be a RH based distro next time and their decision-makers are arguing each other about going for their favourite distro next...Suse vs Slackware etc.
Such major moves by people who virtually created Linux presence among Indian public (and I am referring to power users, not sys-admins), are changing Redhat perception here.
In fact, I met someone who sells pirated CDs here, hawking a copy of RH ES...just like MS ;-)), stating after RH9 Fedora was unstable and heśis selling lots of ES copies now ;-)
.
so the constant refrain of "if you don't like it, don't use it." is going to be interpreted by some as a sign that *red hat* is not really interested in their business or their satisfaction. and this is something that red hat might want to be just a wee bit concerned about. in this case, image really might be everything.
Not a wee bit concerned, I think...its already happening and I think if Fedora is stable...i.e. bugs are looked after properly ;-) by redhat putting more resources on Fedora, it will only build RH reputation among the enterprise segment, where it wants a share. This kind of attitude...even if the person is harassed by people like us, simply because his company is not putting enough resources into its own spin-off...will definitely put people off.
After 5 years of using RH exclusively, I am looking for alternatives simply because of this sort of situation. I have written to four IT magazines here stating that more distros should be put on CD so people could try them out. I have tried my first install of SUSE 9.1 a few days ago...I will be trying others. I don say I won´t hang on to something that´s derived from RH9 or RH ES but I am definitely looking...and I would not have been otherwise!
Well...thats all I have to say on this issue.
Sanjay.
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 20:40, Sanjay Arora wrote: ...
In fact, I met someone who sells pirated CDs here, hawking a copy of RH ES...just like MS ;-)), stating after RH9 Fedora was unstable and heśis selling lots of ES copies now ;-)
...
you can also try http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ if you feel uneasy with pirated software...
Well...thats all I have to say on this issue.
Sanjay.
Andy Green wrote:
Well I also noted this, although to be fair Dexter wrote a good and mild
reply, but I see this defensiveness coming from their not being empowered to do anything about the problem. Only RH folks can do this because of the project structure.
I've seen this topic pop up on the fedora-devel list before, and it seems to be a large source of frustration for Fedora contributors. From what I read, for the most part Fedora Core still develops under many of the same processes RedHat 9 did (user reports bugs, RedHat software developer fixes bugs, releases a new package). Users can contribute fixes via mechanisms like Bugzilla, but this is nothing new either; and ideally you want an issue resolved by a user to sit in Bugzilla for as little time as possible before being re-integrated into Fedora.
Maybe there needs to be an intermediate package repository, created and managed by users. Some place where "unstable" packages (with user-contributed fixes) can reside, before they've been reviewed by RedHat software developers and integrated into Fedora proper. This way Fedora users could fix the bugs they care about and get them posted without having to bug RedHat people.
Some people who do great work helping on the ml are threfore finding themselves becoming slightly shrill and embattled fanboys, equating acknowledging the problem they cannot do anything about with heresy against the project and the great RH people who lead it. So they will not acknowledge the problem and it is easier to talk about how FC is meant to be cutting edge, unstable, not for everyone.
It's not directly related...but I get the impression that a lot of people *are* considering using Fedora as a stable, server-oriented Linux distribution (gasp). When you can piece together a fairly decent Linux server for $400 or so, it doesn't always make sense to spend $300 on the OS to run it; especially if you're strapped for cash (small business, or not-for-profit entity, for example). I have the feeling a lot of people at one time used RedHat Personal on a lot of these systems to fill the need for a cheap, reliable Linux OS, and now these people are using Fedora because they don't have the money for RHEL.
I realize that RedHat has very little to gain by ensuring Fedora's stability for these sorts of customers (after all, they want paying customers, and you can't blame them), but it would be nice if the community could fill this gap. For example, some sort of community-driven organization that did QA of packages would be a nice step towards offering a Fedora-based, stable, server-flavored OS.
Just some thoughts.
Jeremy
Dell 600sc..............$400 Rack mount case.........$ 82 Fedora Core 1 ..........$ 0
Being able to use it as an every day server running DHCP, Sendmail, DNS, Apache, FTP, Big Brother,and without a hitch...............
priceless...............
;-)
Don Dupy Systems Administrator Maxxrad PC Services http://www.maxxrad.net email: fedora@maxxrad.net
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Jeremy Brown wrote:
Andy Green wrote:
Well I also noted this, although to be fair Dexter wrote a good and mild
reply, but I see this defensiveness coming from their not being empowered to do anything about the problem. Only RH folks can do this because of the project structure.
I've seen this topic pop up on the fedora-devel list before, and it seems to be a large source of frustration for Fedora contributors. From what I read, for the most part Fedora Core still develops under many of the same processes RedHat 9 did (user reports bugs, RedHat software developer fixes bugs, releases a new package). Users can contribute fixes via mechanisms like Bugzilla, but this is nothing new either; and ideally you want an issue resolved by a user to sit in Bugzilla for as little time as possible before being re-integrated into Fedora.
Maybe there needs to be an intermediate package repository, created and managed by users. Some place where "unstable" packages (with user-contributed fixes) can reside, before they've been reviewed by RedHat software developers and integrated into Fedora proper. This way Fedora users could fix the bugs they care about and get them posted without having to bug RedHat people.
Some people who do great work helping on the ml are threfore finding themselves becoming slightly shrill and embattled fanboys, equating acknowledging the problem they cannot do anything about with heresy against the project and the great RH people who lead it. So they will not acknowledge the problem and it is easier to talk about how FC is meant to be cutting edge, unstable, not for everyone.
It's not directly related...but I get the impression that a lot of people *are* considering using Fedora as a stable, server-oriented Linux distribution (gasp). When you can piece together a fairly decent Linux server for $400 or so, it doesn't always make sense to spend $300 on the OS to run it; especially if you're strapped for cash (small business, or not-for-profit entity, for example). I have the feeling a lot of people at one time used RedHat Personal on a lot of these systems to fill the need for a cheap, reliable Linux OS, and now these people are using Fedora because they don't have the money for RHEL.
I realize that RedHat has very little to gain by ensuring Fedora's stability for these sorts of customers (after all, they want paying customers, and you can't blame them), but it would be nice if the community could fill this gap. For example, some sort of community-driven organization that did QA of packages would be a nice step towards offering a Fedora-based, stable, server-flavored OS.
Just some thoughts.
Jeremy
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 07:37, Jeremy Brown wrote:
Maybe there needs to be an intermediate package repository, created and managed by users. Some place where "unstable" packages (with user-contributed fixes) can reside, before they've been reviewed by RedHat software developers and integrated into Fedora proper. This way Fedora users could fix the bugs they care about and get them posted without having to bug RedHat people.
Now, there's a novel idea. Independent repositories, with unstable or testing packages... I wonder why nobody's ever thought of that? ;-)
http://www.fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf
Cheers Steffen.
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with thisannoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
Some people on both side of the argument do take things all out of proportion.
Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If you don't want to answer, write nothing.
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works without any problems.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means ... what?
It's true, there are a few rough edges, but I'm delighted with FC2 and have no hardware problems. Maybe on some hardware configurations there are problems, but that's even the case with Windows XP.
For example, my webcam simply isn't supported under XP. My graphics card causes the system to lock up (unless I use the latest drivers, in which case the graphics simply aren't displayed properly). Also, I couldn't figure out how to set a static IP address, so I had to wait until I could look it up on Google at work, then try again the next evening...
So there are some problems with FC2 on some motherboards, but then some systems simply wouldn't support XP when it came out. In the latter case, people would think "XP won't support my computer, I'll have to upgrade". With Linux at least there's another option, "FC2 won't support my computer, I'll have submit a bug report / wait until someone fixes it / submit a patch."
FC2 isn't perfect by any means, but for a freely-available, community effort, we shouldn't be too harsh on it. And on some hardware configurations (such as mine) FC2 is fantastic.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the archives.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1. i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
Really? I thought the absence of a beep was a great new feature! It's annoying to have a beep every time I use tab-completion in a console, and it also means I don't have to hack my emacs config to stop it from beeping.
Maybe there could be a new system-config-beep utility to set whether the pcspkr module is loaded at boot!
Jonathan
On Jun 22, 2004, Jonathan Rawle jr36@leicester.ac.uk wrote:
Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If you don't want to answer, write nothing.
Most often you remember the answer is in the archives, but don't have a pointer handy. Are you suggesting I should have to do more effort to find the exact location of the answer, instead of just letting the person know where it is? I.e., give them the fish instead of teaching them to fish?
Alexandre Oliva wrote:
Most often you remember the answer is in the archives, but don't have a pointer handy. Are you suggesting I should have to do more effort to find the exact location of the answer, instead of just letting the person know where it is? I.e., give them the fish instead of teaching them to fish?
You have a good point there. But while your intention may be to be helpful, there are some people on the list who jump on newbies with innocent questions in a rather unpleasant manner.
Jonathan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 16:53, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
Most often you remember the answer is in the archives, but don't have a pointer handy. Are you suggesting I should have to do more effort to find the exact location of the answer, instead of just letting the person know where it is? I.e., give them the fish instead of teaching them to fish?
Fair point, but the problem is the archives become crapped up with posts containing the keywords, in the quoted post of the questioner, but zero information about the solution, just a maddening exhortation to "search the archives", which you were doing until the plague of "search the archive" hits drove you to smash your head into your LCD.
- -Andy
- -- Automatic actions for USB cameras, cardreaders, memory sticks, MP3 players http://warmcat.com/usbautocam
Alexandre
Most often you remember the answer is in the archives, but don't have a pointer handy. Are you suggesting I should have to do more effort to find the exact location of the answer, instead of just letting the person know where it is? I.e., give them the fish instead of teaching them to fish?
If you don't have anything useful to add to the list, send the message directly to the person who's asking...
-Cam
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 12:53 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
On Jun 22, 2004, Jonathan Rawle jr36@leicester.ac.uk wrote:
Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If you don't want to answer, write nothing.
Most often you remember the answer is in the archives, but don't have a pointer handy. Are you suggesting I should have to do more effort to find the exact location of the answer, instead of just letting the person know where it is? I.e., give them the fish instead of teaching them to fish?
Good point. Has anyone seen a good howto/tutorial on searching mail archives, aside from various posts in the archive with bits/pieces? It is a bit of an art, the redhat tool is brain-dead, gmane is marginally better, and google is between tricky and drinking-from-a-firehose.
Phil
Jonathan Rawle wrote:
Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If you don't want to answer, write nothing.
If this is supposed to be a community-supported distribution, and this list is one of the visible signs of community ...
... what can we do to make the archive and the other resources more visible?
I know we have the "To unsubscribe" link at the bottom, but people obviously aren't finding the archives. Would there be any mileage in those that conveniently can [1] changing their signatures for this list to point at the relevant resources? Maybe something like this?
James Wilkinson wrote:
Jonathan Rawle wrote:
Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If you don't want to answer, write nothing.
This is a very true statement. I think that unless the search the archives postings were removed from the list, the relevent hits would be lower than the actual clues, fixes or helpful data.
If this is supposed to be a community-supported distribution, and this list is one of the visible signs of community ...
.... what can we do to make the archive and the other resources more visible?
I think the link on the bottom of each messages should actually state where to find previously posted message online.
I know we have the "To unsubscribe" link at the bottom, but people obviously aren't finding the archives. Would there be any mileage in those that conveniently can [1] changing their signatures for this list to point at the relevant resources? Maybe something like this?
I'll have to search the archives for "search the archives" sometime for a test.
Jim
On Jun 22, 2004, "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Dexter Ang wrote:
HaJo Schatz wrote:
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2. Here's what happened:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2.
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with this annoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
Err... Let's make it a bit different:
- Should I have cereal or eggs this morning?
- Dunno, it's really your choice.
What's there of annoying, circle-the-wagons or defensive mentality in the advice above? Isn't it the only possible answer that doesn't try to be an `I know better than you, so I'll make choices and decisions that you should actually be making yourself'?'
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate concerns and obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases),
Documenting? The right place to document such flaws is bugzilla. And, guess what, most of them were already there (good search job, HaJo!), and those that weren't should be. Posting duplicates of what's in bugzilla to the list is pretty much just noise.
and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
Every release has its share of bugs, and it won't be perfect for everybody. It's up to every user to try the release on his/her use pattern and decide which one to stick with. You have choice. That's what Dexter's answer was all about. At least I read it like that.
whenever someone posts perfectly reasonable criticism of some aspect, there's a sudden surge of, "hey, if you don't like it, don't use it, ok?"
Agreed. The right approach would be `hey, if you don't like this one, help us make the next one better, ok?' How's that?
- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug, the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works without any problems.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means... what? that it doesn't qualify as a real problem?
You're reading too much between the lines, IMHO. It fails for me. I suspect it's timing related, but I never had time to try to figure out exactly what's going wrong. In my wife's laptop, that has this problem, if the network card is inserted in one of the two pcmcia slots, it works very reliably; if it's inserted in the other slot, it will only come up after a reboot sometimes, even though I have a work-around patch in place. Yeah, it's a pain. Yeah, there's an easily available work-around, but it's an ugly one. Should we put it in to get people to live on with the bug, or leave it broken such that more people are aware of the problem and hopefully someone with time and enough of a clue to try to fix it has more motivation to do so? For those who don't, bugzilla has an easily-available work around, and there are dozens of postings here that point to it. Maybe this is not right approach; maybe it's not even a conscious approach. But it's what is there. What are *you* doing to improve this?
heck, i recall submitting a bug report on that file as far back as april of 2003:
Wow, so you *knew* I was going to ask the question above, eh? :-) :-)
Cool, thanks for the cooperation. Hopefully the maintainer of the pcmcia package will look into this bug report and integrate your patch. Hmm, according to bugzilla, the bug was already fixed. No wonder nobody acted on it any more. If you knew it was still broken (or broken again?), the bug should have remained open. I've checked that it is indeed still broken in FC2, and reopened it.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace this...
You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the archives.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1.
You assume too much. You assume it's a bug. For some, it's a fix. Personally, I don't care too much either way, but logging into the text console and getting loud beeps for bash TAB completion before the audio mixer modules were loaded was quite annoying.
i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
Well, things change, otherwise what's the point of having a new release? Most often they change for better, but sometimes you'll find you'll disagree with some of the changes.
oh, man, you *so* did not want to go there. working from memory here so i hope i'm remembering correctly, i'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple folks who pointed out that they *did* put in time running the test releases, that they *did* identify and report obvious bugs way back when and yet, when FC2 hit the streets, those bugs were still there.
Well... It's not reasonable to expect all bugs to get fixed. Many of them are, some aren't. Spending time not only reporting the bug, but also investigating the root causes, and even posting patches, tends to increase the likelihood that a fix will make it to the release, but it's never a guarantee.
Salesman: "Yes, sir, Mr. Smith, this van has the horsepower you need for pulling your boat, loads of cargo space and foldout seats for the kids, optional 6-way sound system since you like music."
Mr. Smith: "Yup, it's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if my current roof rack is compatible with the roof mounts ..."
Salesman: "HEY! No one's *forcing* you to buy this thing, OK? You got a problem with it?! There's lots of other dealers out there, all right?!"
Here's a joke along the same lines
Flight attendant on the coach: Would you like lunch, sir?
Frequent flier, first time on that airline: What are the options?
Flight attendant: Yes or no.
You have a choice. Nobody is forcing you to have the meal. Here's another related with software I just came up with:
Begger knocks on door: I'm hungry and broke. Would you have some food to share?
Home owner: Yeah, we have some chicken soup left. Would you like some?
Begger: Fsck, I hate chicken soup. But heck, I'm hungry. Yes, please.
Home owner goes in, and returns with empty hands: I'm sorry, but a bug fell in the soup. I figured you wouldn't want it like that, so I threw it all away.
Mind you, I'm not comparing you or anyone with any of the characters in the stories above. I just found them barely related. But if the hat fits... :-) :-)
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 10:50:56AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
It is all your choice. No one is forcing you to use FC2.
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with this annoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
Err... Let's make it a bit different:
Should I have cereal or eggs this morning?
Dunno, it's really your choice.
What's there of annoying, circle-the-wagons or defensive mentality in the advice above? Isn't it the only possible answer that doesn't try to be an `I know better than you, so I'll make choices and decisions that you should actually be making yourself'?'
The "cereal or eggs" question is not really analogous here.
Let's say a cereal manufacturer provided you with some free cereal. The cereal was not satisfactory to you. You write to the cereal manufacturer saying, "Your cereal just didn't work out for me due to x, y, and z." Fill in x, y, and z as appropriate. :-)
The cereal manufacturer could say, "Well, eating our cereal is your choice. No one is forcing you to eat it."
That would be an acceptable response from them. After all, it is true; you have the ability to choose another breakfast food.
However, a better response from the manufacturer might be: "Thanks for pointing this out to us. Let's work on recifying x, y, and z. Oh, by the way, here's the recipe to our cereal, so if you have the know-how, you can help us fix it."
Even though it has been spearheaded by RedHat, Fedora Core a community effort. Let's work on making it better.
PS. In my experience, the cereal has been very tasty. :-)
On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 00:16, Lee-Win Tai wrote:
Let's say a cereal manufacturer provided you with some free cereal. The cereal was not satisfactory to you. You write to the cereal manufacturer saying, "Your cereal just didn't work out for me due to x, y, and z." Fill in x, y, and z as appropriate. :-)
Your analogy has a flaw, too: nobody in this thread is criticising people for filing too many bugzilla reports ("talking to the manufacturer"). The point of critique is people using their fellow Fedora users (this list) as a wailing wall.
The cereal manufacturer could say, "Well, eating our cereal is your choice. No one is forcing you to eat it."
That's what the wailing wall would respond.
However, a better response from the manufacturer might be: "Thanks for pointing this out to us. Let's work on recifying x, y, and z. Oh, by the way, here's the recipe to our cereal, so if you have the know-how, you can help us fix it."
That's the response you would get by filing a proper bug report. It's just a matter of time, sometimes :)
Cheers Steffen.
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:35:30 -0400 (EDT) "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@mindspring.com wrote:
to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with thisannoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow up.
Nice advice, now try to use it yourself.
when someone takes the time to document a number of legitimate concernsand obvious flaws in an *official* release (after three, count 'em, *three* test releases), and also legitimately asks whether he should be concerned about its quality, he deserves a better and more mature answer than "No one is forcing you to use FC2."
Nobody ever criticized anyone for listing legitimate concerns.
it's become really tedious to watch the growing trend of promotingfedora core, talking about making it just a terrific distro, how it has a dynamic user community behind it ... yadda yadda yadda ... but whenever
Typical straw-man arguments. Instead of addressing specific issues when they happen you group everything together later so you don't have to argue in context. Lets stick to the current post ok?
someone posts perfectly reasonable criticism of some aspect, there's a sudden surge of, "hey, if you don't like it, don't use it, ok?" i suspect it's not the quality of FC2 that might drive people off, it's the closed-minded and dismissive attitude of its alleged supporters.
Personally haven't seen anybody respond to reasonable criticism that way, only to excessive hand wringing, or lack of responsibility or gross misunderstanding. But would be easier if we were discussing this in context.
If someone makes a criticism, then its fair to help them understand the context in which they're complaining. There seem to be a lot of chicken littles out there running around freaking out because the sky is falling... Pretty sure we're doing the right thing by telling them everything is going to be okay and temper the shrill complaints.
well, good for you. and the fact that it works for you means ... what?that it doesn't qualify as a real problem? fact is, the /etc/init.d/pcmcia file has historically been a bit of a mess -- heck, i recall submitting a bug report on that file as far back as april of 2003:
Nobody said it wasn't a problem. Why did you jump on the respondent because he tried to set the problem in context demonstrating the scope of the problem to the OP. Yes there is a problem, but the developers don't have every piece of hardware out there. There are only so many developer-hours in each day and lots of bugs to be solved. If your pet bug doesn't happen to be a priority for one of the developers you'll have to wait a while.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88054
it's depressing that it's still broken, and in such a blatant way.
Take a pill, see a shrink, hell you could even try to help solve the problem, but this is no defense for list-spew.
which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1. i don't think it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1 suddenly stopped working in FC2.
Take it to slashdot. Griping doesn't help anything. File a bug report, and/or help fix things. Open source works because people who care about a problem take the time to go fix it. Until someone cares enough to go fix it.. it will stay broken.
oh, man, you *so* did not want to go there. working from memory here so i hope i'm remembering correctly, i'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple folks who pointed out that they *did* put in time running the test releases, that they *did* identify and report obvious bugs way back when and yet, when FC2 hit the streets, those bugs were still there.
Nobody said every bug would be handled before the release. It is after all a time based release methodology. The implications of which you had better understand before you choose Fedora for your system. However, the testing work is still useful and will help with ongoing releases. Most post-release bugs with FC2 have been solved by helpful people who have supplied work-arounds.
<snip>
and again, this is a really childish response. one has to wonder, just what do you do for a living? i can just imagine, say, a car salesman with this kind of "don't you dare criticize me and my product" attitude:
Salesman: "Yes, sir, Mr. Smith, this van has the horsepower you need for pulling your boat, loads of cargo space and foldout seats for the kids, optional 6-way sound system since you like music."
Mr. Smith: "Yup, it's almost perfect, but I'm not sure if my current roof rack is compatible with the roof mounts ..."
Salesman: "HEY! No one's *forcing* you to buy this thing, OK? You got a problem with it?! There's lots of other dealers out there, all right?!"
That's exactly right. Buyer beware. If you buy a tractor, you better not come complaining when it won't do 160 on the highway. You had better understand what you're "buying" when you choose Fedora. It's not that a tractor is inferior, its just that it has a different intent and isn't meant for everyone. RedHat has the integrity to make it perfectly clear, so nobody should be fooled. On top of all that, we're not talking about a product where any money has changed hands.. so the analogy is a bit of stretch anyway.
hey, good idea, dude. there's nothing that placates an unsatisfied user more than suggesting they take their talents elsewhere. *that'll* help the cause, fer shure.
From what I read, the respondent was trying to help the OP understand
the Fedora project and give honest direction to stay with FC1/RH9 or pick another distribution if FC2 wasn't an appropriate choice. This seems like useful help instead of sticking yer head in the sand and pretending Fedora is for everyone. In fact, it looks like a direct answer to a direct question. (Even though the original question looked more like a thinly veiled troll)
Does this mean anybody wants bugs and is happy about it? NO. Just leave the whining, misunderstanding and sense of entitlement on slashdot where it belongs.
once again, see above. ("... or just switch to something that works." now *there's* some great testimonial.)
Don't buy a steam shovel if you need a crane. It's about helping people understand the nature, intent, philosophy, intended audience and release methodology of Fedora. FC2 was a huge leap forward and therefore there are going to be additional teething problem. Perhaps the testing phase should have been a bit longer, but there is a price to pay for that decision too.
and if it isn't, well, those whiners can take their complaints elsewhere, can't they?
So, your argument comes down to.. "whining is a good thing"? There are already enough forums out there for the whiners. Lets use this one to help people make the best choice for themselves and solve problems for those who choose Fedora.
Cheers, Sean
Am Di, den 22.06.2004 schrieb HaJo Schatz um 08:54:
Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2.
According to my *impression*, FC2, although a little bit less mature and less stable as FC1, is not specifically unstable or of substandard quality. There were some big differences to the previous release, esp. kernel 2.6 and x.org. If I remember correctly even in former Red Hat Linux releases there was an increased instability level in a comparable situation.
I for myself decided to stay with FC1 on my laptop which is my main working machine and must not be compromised. I use FC2 on my desktop where the situation is a bit less critical.
If you have some problems with FC2 on your machine, use FC1 and install FC2 in parallel (perhaps using the same /home and other data). So you can contribute bug reports, check the progress in stability and you may switch, when the situtation fits to your needs.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another packager, say Suse?
Switching to another distro, SuSE, Mandrake or whatever, might not be the solution you will enjoy in the long term. Each distro, although basically beeing compiled from the same software basis, has its own characteristics, is own weaknesses, its own strong features, ... SuSE, for example, if they make a kernel update, they automatically delete your current, running kernel and its configuration. If you have problems booting the updated kernel of if you depend on additional kernel modules (nvidia as an example) you will have a hard time.
If you enjoy the long term characteristics of Red Hat / Fedora, stay with it, help to fix the problems (bugzilla! Even comments to existing reports might be helpful). FC2 and its specific problems are a *temporary* inconvenience.
Peter
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