F8 kernel-2.6.24.3-12.fc8

David Boles dgboles at gmail.com
Sun Mar 9 23:07:44 UTC 2008


Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 17:41 -0400, David Boles wrote:
>> I don't think that "Aunt Tillie" should be using a bleeding edge Linux
>> distribution such as Fedora provides. And if "Nephew Johnie" installs
>> it
>> for her and she has problems with it that she can not deal with
>> herself I
>> think it is "Nephew Johny's" fault for installing it for her. What do
>> you
>> think?
> 
> I think you missed the point that this is just as painful for Joe Fedora
> Developer and CS Major as it is Aunt Tillie.


"just as painful?" Do you mean the error or that "Joe Fedora Developer"
does not know enough to press a key and select the other kernel to boot? I
have often wondered why Fedora chooses to hide the other kernel. Maybe
"Aunt Tillie", with a little help, could see that 'kernel A' does not
work. Hmm... so maybe I should try 'kernel B'.


> User friendly for Aunt Tillie, if done properly, translates to quick and
> painless for me. Bip, done, and I can get on with my life. Yes, I am
> able to type arcane command lines and edit obscure config files. That
> doesn't mean I want to. My first Linux was Slackware 3.2 in 1997. I
> spent a week just trying to get PPP to work. Took months to get XFree86
> to work. I've had enough of doing it the hard way for one lifetime,
> thank you. This is the exact reason I *use* Fedora, instead of Slackware
> or Gentoo or even Debian. Because it does the best job of Just Working
> out of every distribution I've ever tried. But it could be better.
> 
> There's two issues here:
> 
> 1) Preventing bugs.
> 
> 2) Recovering from bugs.
> 
> The first one gets plenty of coverage. Everyone's trying to fix bugs.
> But bugs are inevitable. So when a serious kernel regression shows up,
> how do you recover from it? If you ask me, very little thought is being
> put in to making system recovery user friendly.
> 
> It's easy to say "Just boot the previous kernel!", it's much harder to
> actually do it. And make it stick. Each new kernel insists on making
> itself default. And yes, I've tried setting UPDATEDEFAULT=no
> in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, it doesn't seem to work reliably, and it's
> definitely not user friendly, and it's not easy to change the default
> kernel back once's its been changed. (Now you have to
> edit /boot/grub/grub.conf...) I know what you're going to say, just
> remove the broken kernel. But then, the next time you update, it just
> gets installed again.
> 
> Direct manipulation. I, and Aunt Tillie, should be able to set the
> default kernel right there in the GRUB menu, with one keypress. Click,
> done, move on to something more productive. Such as filing a bug...
> 
> Even better, work out a way to detect a failed kernel boot and
> automagically drop back to the last known working kernel. I seem to
> remember a thread about this a while back. This would work for total
> boot failures, but wouldn't really help driver regressions.
> 

As I said in another post. Fedora is more cutting edge. There are already
many, perhaps too many, "Aunt Tillie" distributions. User friendly and
loaded down with eye-candy.

Me? I like Fedora the way that it is. Let the other distributions imitate
Windows.
-- 


   David




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