Linux examined: Fedora 9

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Thu May 15 14:13:34 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 23:52 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We have to review the complaints here and address them. If anyone wants 
> to take a closer look, please do.
> 
> http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA48755E1A1AB
> 
> "On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux distribution that will probably 
> serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can rightly claim extensive 
> experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it practically invented the 
> market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure an extensive 
> repository of prebuilt software. The hardware support is right up there 
> with any other user-friendly distribution.
> 
> But my experiences with trying a multiboot install make me leery of 
> recommending it to anyone who wants to use it in a dual-boot 
> environment. The distribution may be robust, but the installer needs to 
> learn to play better with others. It's also a little too intimidating 
> for nongeek users, so if you're going to get any less-experienced 
> friends on Fedora, you might want to schedule an afternoon to help them 
> out."

I'm confused by the article's premise.  The author claims to be testing
on the basis of whether a "newbie" could install Fedora, but he tests it
on a system that is completely unrelated to that use case -- a
previously multi-boot system with what sounds like several existing (or
previously existing) Linux distributions.  

Some of the errors he encounters are certainly bugs, and I've already
seen some of these reported in other places.  An example is the Anaconda
error loop, which the author reports but did not file, although he filed
another bug, so bravo there.

I think something our QA folks (Will et al.) should think about is a way
to expose more details about the test configurations they use for
banging on the installer.  These could be exposed to the media for our
Alpha or Beta test release, as well as our larger user base, to make
sure that people are expanding on those configurations, rather than
duplicating them endlessly to the exclusion of others.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/attachments/20080515/d97235c2/attachment.bin 


More information about the marketing mailing list